English 347 Poetry off the Page is an intimate, engaging undergraduate English course at the University of Auckland that weaves together three related areas of inquiry – live performance, digital poetics and the poetry archive – to provide an authentic learning experience for literature students exploring the role of poetry beyond the printed page. Our essay offers an unconventional case study filtered through the retrospective gaze of former students who responded to a detailed questionnaire. Structured as a series of non-sequential ‘learning spaces’, the paper concludes with an account of the authentic learning lessons that we, the teachers, have drawn from our former students’ experiences in and beyond the course.

Keywords: authentic learning, student-centered learning, experiential learning, student experience