Things do seem to be coming together.  I've got well over a hundred students, from around the world, and more and more names, each day, appear in my inbox (when a person enrolls, I get an email).  Yesterday I recorded my third lecture, Distinguishing Between Good and Bad Poetry.  (You can enroll in the series - it's free - by going here and scrolling down to Poetry.) 

My techie sister comes over to my place every Saturday at around eleven.  We have brunch at Black Market Bistro, down the street from my house, and then we set up a shot in front of my baby grand.  The room has lots of windows.  Yesterday was overcast, but plenty of light came through.  Roughly once per lecture you can hear a train.  Local color.

Sometimes many registrants appear all at once in my mail, and I wonder if some teacher in Tunisia has told her class to enroll or something.  I'm very conscious, when I lecture, of my foreign audience, and I make an effort to speak pretty slowly, and to enunciate.  I want people to hear good English.  The Brits have no monopoly on this.  You can sound good in American, too.

Tim, at Udemy, has been terrific - responding to my emails right away, and helping me with technical glitches.  But there haven't been that many.  Filming and uploading one's own lectures turns out not to be that difficult - although my sister is still working on inserting material into my lectures (links, clips, etc.).  We're getting there. 

Meanwhile, links to the poems and essays I talk about are in each lecture's written description, visible just below the film.

I'm having a blast.  I like spending the week collecting material, and my thoughts, for the next lecture.  I like the way a MOOC allows me to distill my responses to poetry in a new way, with a new freedom.  As the lectures take shape, I see my understandings of poetry form a comprehensive argument about the genre that I'd never before pulled together. 

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