The author had been assigned two sections of Contemporary Literature, a semester-long senior elective, and he wanted to do something new with poetry. He planned to teach Arthur Sze's "Quipu." Sze's poetry is nonlinear, adopting principles from science, anthropology, and history into a multilayered poetic texture--text unlike anything students typically encounter in high school. For him, this addressed key instructional goals: expanding students' concept of what literature is, pushing them into strange territory, and helping them manage the metaphorical and structural phenomenon "Quipu" presents. Although the author planned and tried a variety of approaches, what seemed to help students most was collaborating on imitations of Sze's style. Based on this work, he suggests opening up the literature curriculum to more stylistically challenging texts, and implementing a more sustained use of creative writing techniques to support and extend that reading. The implications of this approach are curricular and instructional as well as ethical.