Introduction

Even though the poetry of Elizabeth Jennings appears to be simple both in diction and in form, it proves to be rich and complex in content, and it certainly invites the reader to distill meaning in a careful and detailed interpretation.

At Barker College (Lomas de Zamora, Buenos Aires, Argentina), we are reading a selection of Elizabeth Jennings’ poems with students in their last year of Secondary Education. Our challenge is to explore the poems in class, construct our own collective interpretations of them, and publish them in this blog in the hope that they may be interesting to other people reading the same texts.

We believe in the principles of reader-response criticism, according to which, readers reconstruct the meaning of a text by interpreting textual clues in the process of reading. However, as we are planning to work as a group, we will have to get to a common interpretation of the poems with the contributions of all the group members. Once we agree on one,  we will take it in turns to write each post.

Our analyses are our own unique way of understanding the poems, but we aim to construct clear and coherent interpretations, which may be thought-provoking and may trigger new readings and interpretations in other readers.

María Monserrat Pose.