Canadian Poetry and the Brazilian Students: What Are the Challenges?

This article focuses on a Canadian poetry course that was offered in the undergraduate English language course at Universidade Federal de Goiás, pointing out the factors that were taken into consideration to formulate the course program. In the second part of the article, a reading produced by the students of a poem by the Modernist poet Margaret Avison (Avison, 2005) is presented and discussed showing the strong points and the difficulties they had in its construction. The students’ opinions are analyzed using Gadamer’s (2000) philosophical hermeneutics in terms of the cultural horizon in which the poem was written and the cultural horizon of the students reading the poem focusing on the familiar and the strange. The contrast between referential texts and representational texts suggested by Widdowson (1992) is also focused on.