American Voices: Listening to Fiction, Poetry, and Prose

Background

In this unit, students will be charged with three tasks: interpreting, writing and performing poetry. Because of the differences in how students in urban settings speak the prescribed language, it is often an arduous task for them to interpret meaning, make inferences, and, in some cases, simply read. For students who already have problems with learning "proper English," it may be appropriate for teachers to use materials designed for English language learners to provide assistance with comprehending poetry.

Analyzing Written Language vs. Spoken Language

• "Literature…is viewed as part of the continuous growth of linguistic activity; as a
• means of deepening and reinforcing the learning of various aspects of language.
• That includes the three components of language: phonology, syntax and semantics
• plus other aspects of language in use."
• Mabel Osakwe. Poetrymate ²

The closer a person's spoken language is to the language he is reading, the easier it will be to learn to read. The ease of learning does not ensure success; nor does the difficulty promise failure. All people learning to read English actually encounter language structures that differ somewhat from their spoken language. How then do students know when to draw the line between these differences? At what point does the learner go so far from the standard as to move fully into a dialect? Because this line is imaginary, there are some aspects of dialect differences that may impact the reading process for students and the instruction process of those who teach dialect-speaking students.

General knowledge about the nature of language diversity is required. Without understanding the systematic and patterned nature of differences, it is difficult for teachers to appreciate dialects for what they are—natural subgroupings in a language. Teachers also need to have knowledge of particular structures in the dialects spoken by their students, whether they are standard or vernacular. They need to examine assumptions about children's background knowledge and compare them with the experiences that students actually bring to the text. Understanding the role that reading and writing play or do not play in students' homes and communities can help a teacher to make reading experiences more congruent with students' expectations and thus more meaningful. Anything taught out of context tends not to generalize very well.

To begin with interpreting in this unit, students will be asked to read and respond to a free verse poem that is easily interpreted. The poem, which is included in our eighth grade literature book, "Introduction to Poetry" by Billy Collins, is his definition of poetry.

• I ask them to take a poem
• and hold it up to the light
• like a color slide
• or press its ear against it's hive.
• I say drop a mouse into a poem
• and watch him probe his way out,
• or walk inside the poem's room
• and feel the walls for a light switch.
• I want them to waterski
• across the surface of a poem
• waving at the author's name at the shore.
• But all they want to do
• is tie the poem to a chair with rope
• and torture a confession out of it.
• They begin beating it with a hose
• to find out what it really means. ³

This poem, while it is simple, has several examples of figurative language and other poetic devices that may be complex upon a student's first read. Poetry in its simplest form is language at its best. The first questions for the students might be Whose voice do you hear? What are some examples of figurative language? What is being compared to what? What does the speaker want? The author's voice is most audible here because it's written in first person point of view. Students often confuse the author and the speaker. So their answer regarding voice will most likely be "Billy Collins." This answer leads to the questions, What do you think Billy Collins is like as a person? What is he like in the poem? These are leading questions that send us to the author's biography in the "Meet the Writers" section of the anthology. The examples of figurative language present are simile, metaphor and personification. The poem itself is being compared to many things here: a color slide, a maze, a house, an ocean or body of water and a hostage. The students may not have first hand experience with everything being compared, but they should recognize them all. They may have trouble with identifying all of the comparisons, though. But taken line by line, the poem is easily understood. The speaker in this poem wants nothing more than for the poem to be read and enjoyed rather than interpreted to death as readers tend to do.

Beginning with a straightforward poem that reads fairly linearly offers some assurance to students that poetry doesn't necessarily have to be out of reach. With every poem introduced throughout the unit, students will work in pairs or in groups for analysis. Later in the unit we'll compare more complex works by two poets, Whitman and Hughes, with contrasting lives and styles, but with similar topics—their America. These poems, when they are interpreted, enable students to analyze the America in which they live.

Voice

• "Plenty of influential critics and sociologists say that the 'self' is nothing but a
• collection of roles."
• Peter Elbow, ed. Landmark Essays on Voice and Writing ⁴

In teaching students to read and write poetry, the most difficult task could by asking them to use poetry with the purpose of finding voice. But what exactly does it mean to find your voice? Everyone who can speak has a voice. So once a word is spoken the voice has been found, right? The answer to this question is yes and no. In the introduction to his book Landmark Essays on Voice and Writing, editor Peter Elbow examines the five meanings of voice and describes their meanings. His five categorizes are as follows: audible voice or intonation, dramatic voice, recognizable or distinctive voice, voice with authority, and voice as resonance or presence.

Audible voice is what literally comes out of the body. Metaphorically, audible voice can be easily heard in writing, if the reader is familiar with the language and syntax. When a writer uses language that is easy to understand, not necessarily elementary, and sentences that are structurally sound, his voice comes from the page effortlessly. This is especially evident in creative writing. But my students have been culturally programmed to keep the human voice out of writing. They've been told not to write essays in first person and to remember their audience so they don't begin to use speech that they'd use with a friend or slang. For this reason, poetry is a perfect vehicle to find or express voice. Poetry, too, has rules depending upon the type, but as a genre it gives the writer license to be creative.

The fact that every text has an author implies that it also has dramatic voice because voice and identity are one in the same. But they don't always have to be the same. Using parentheticals can sometimes help distinguish between dramatic voice and audible voice. Dramatic voice can also be described as the speaker's alter ego. Although writing allows an author to take on another persona(s), many beginning writers, as I've experienced in my classes, still find it difficult to fully let go of themselves on the written page. In some cases, dramatic voice is the equivalent to the writer saying, "I have a friend who….," when they're actually talking about themselves. Using dramatic voice allows the writer to write as someone they are not, or even pretend to do so.

The recognizable or distinctive voice is akin to a signature. But just as writing analysts have the ability to see things about an individual through that signature, a writer's signature or style is nothing more than that—a style. It's very possible that the voice that comes through in writing can change as the author's mood changes. While students are attempting to find their voices, they may discover nothing more than a comfort level in expressing themselves that they didn't have before their search.

Writing in a voice with authority essentially makes the author "own" his writing. Others can neither take credit nor be held responsible for the writing except the author. This speaks to the author's expertise in his subject matter. That subject matter can be scholarly or something more personal like the "type" of people that a particular geographical area breeds.

The resonant voice or presence means that the author's self is getting behind the words. This, the most arguable of those listed, requires the reader to "make inferences about the relation between the present text and the absent writer," ⁵ but doesn't necessarily speak to identity or self. The other four definitions of voice are less problematic in that they're more easily identifiable. For a text to resonate with a reader, a level of trust needs to be established. Sometimes the reader doesn't trust the author's sincerity which can be due to one or more factors: the writer's inexperience, for example, or experimentation or game playing with the reader. Resonance is difficult to decipher because it deals mostly with the relationship between the reader and the writer. What resonates with one reader can potentially have no effect on another.

It's plausible that students will write using more than one of the above examples of voice at one time. We will have a discussion about the different types and develop simpler working definitions for the students. However, students will be responsible for identifying the type of voice present in poems they read as well as what they write.

Poetry

Before the poetry unit begins and the students hear that we'll be reading their work, as well as that of published authors, aloud in class, they immediately close their minds and withdraw from the learning process because poetry, as they know it, is something that takes creativity and talent; it's hard. They also think it has to rhyme. But as we write more and they begin to see themselves in their writing, they realize that hearing what they've written only improves their writing and boosts their confidence. They also see that new discoveries are made in second and third readings of the same poem, especially with different readers. The same words spoken with different inflection, speed and/or intonation can have different meanings. During seminar, we performed an exercise where either sets of readers or an individual reader read a group of lines taken from a Robert Frost letter to John T. Bartlett and were asked to identify the voice(s).

• You mean to tell me you can't read?
• I said no such thing.
• Well read then.
• You're not my teacher.
• On-two-three—go!
• No good! Come back—come back.
• Haslam go down there and make those kids get out of the track. ⁶

In this exercise, the audible and dramatic voices varied so, few fellows could agree upon the number of voices present or even when one ended and another began. In the second group of lines, some fellows identified one speaker. Some saw two speakers, alternating lines. Some saw three speakers, each with one line. The disparity came, not only in how the lines were spoken, but also in each fellow's prior knowledge on the subject of track and racing. I'll use a similar exercise for the eighth grade students because it is so flexible. These lines prove that poetry can be real or imagined. To read or write poetry, one must grasp the actual words and devices that are being used; however, the experience does not have to be real. That goes for reading and writing poetry. It allows the writer, reader and/or performer to go outside themselves and the real world.

Questions I will pose to students regarding voice include: How do you speak what you read? How do you write what you hear? Who is speaking (in written as well as read poems)? What is the speaker's identity? Does identity change the speaker's perception of himself in relation to the others? We will try many writing exercises, which will become conversation starters for the written page. One of my favorite writing exercises is a poem template called "Where I'm From" by George Ella Lyon. It's an assignment that I've done myself every year that I've had my own classroom and it changes every year. I take this to mean that my voice changes every year, slightly. Most of the lines in the template begin the same way—I am from—and the writer fills in the blanks with the specific text in parentheses, which varies from adjectives to family traditions to location of family mementos. No two students in my classes have ever created the same poem and rarely do they have similar lines.

My curriculum offers several ideas for getting students to create poetry. One of Kenneth Koch's ideas from his book I Never Told Anybody is to introduce a new exercise every day, which I will do for one week of the unit. An exercise similar to something I've already done is to include a color in every line of a poem. Many eighth grade students have a favorite color and that color symbolizes something different for each of them. What the students have probably never done is to think of colors as ways to represent their thoughts and feelings.

Another suggestion that I received from a parent is to play music while the students write. One of her daughter's teachers uses classical music to inspire the students' pens to keep moving. My plan is to use classical music because there are no words to distract from the writing process.

We will also listen to authors reciting poetry, performances and readings. Our anthology contains a set of CD recordings of some of the poems and other short stories in the book. The works are sometimes, but not always read by the author. Many are good and induce the feelings that the author intended. I also have recordings of local poetry events that could possibly spark interest or provide fodder for the assigned rehearsed reading.

Poetic Devices and Figurative Language

Without practice, analyzing a poem can be a conversation that sticks in the writer's throat or stays jumbled in one's brain. Having a clear shared vocabulary with which to begin the discourse serves a major purpose.

Alliteration: a repetition of initial consonant sounds in nearby words (as in "to jiggle and jump for joy").

Allusion: an indirect reference to another literary work or to a famous person, place or event.

Assonance: repetition of vowels without repetition of consonants (as in stony and holy) used as an alternative to rhyme in verse.

Free verse: Poetry that is based on the irregular rhythmic cadence or the recurrence, with variations, of phrases, images, and syntactical patterns rather than the conventional use of meter.

Hyperbole: a figure of speech in which the truth is exaggerated for emphasis or for humorous effect.

Metaphor: a direct comparison with no signal word (such as "Jealousy is a green-eyed monster").

Meter: a repeated rhythmic pattern.

• Mary had a little lamb
• whose fleece was white as snow
• and everywhere that Mary went
• the lamb was sure to go.

Onomatopoeia: the use of words—like snort, clank, and whir—that sound like what they refer to.

Personification: a type of figurative language in which animals, inanimate objects, or ideas are given human qualities (as in "The teakettle ordered us back to the kitchen").

Rhyme: like of sounds at the ends of words (as in suite, heat, and complete).

Rhythm: the pattern of sound created by the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line.

Simile: a comparison using like or as (such as "My life is like an open book").

Poetry in Performance

• "Our lives are ceaselessly intertwined with narrative, with the stories that we tell
• and hear told, those we dream or imagine or would like to tell, all of which are
• reworked in that story of our own lives that we narrate to ourselves in an episodic,
• sometimes semiconscious, but virtually uninterrupted monologue."
• Anthony Paul Kerby, Narrative and the Self

The most challenging aspect of this unit will be to get the students to want to volunteer to perform their own poetry in front of a group outside the comfort of our safe haven. Once taken out of their comfort zones, many students have trouble communicating with the rest of the world and they shut down completely. For instance, when I was growing up, I was a very outgoing, athletic child. I grew up in a close knit urban community where I had the confidence to accomplish anything. My family moved from my "home" when I was 12 years old and that was the end of my athletic and academic perseverance. I lost my voice. From then on, I coasted through school unscathed and used my journals as a way to express myself, but only in private.

Voiceless students in the traditional classroom often resort to alternate means of articulation for themselves through other creative outlets. A good idea for an icebreaker before writing the performance piece is to have the students give themselves a descriptive, alliterative name that boosts confidence and also transforms them into a character. William's new name would be Wonderful William, Amazing Andrew, Breathtaking Bridgette, etc.

Instead of the performance piece being merely a poetry reading, I want it to be more of a rehearsed reading or poetry monologue. As students are composing and developing monologues, we will hold workshop-like sessions where they can do read alouds and receive feedback from their peers. During these workshops, peers' likes and dislikes are irrelevant. All feedback should begin with positive comments and then move on to helpful hints or what could make the piece better. That way, writers will be less defensive. The content of the monologue will also have a focus—what the character wants. If done correctly, the audience's analysis of the monologue will make sense of the message being conveyed: who the character is, who the character is speaking to, what the character wants from the audience/another character, and how the character will get what they want.

Due to their lack of acting experience and my lack of knowledge of teaching the art of acting, I share tips with them on how to improve their speaking skills. (See Poetry in Performance in Appendix.) The teaching artists and technology experts at MCG will provide assistance with the aesthetics, so the performances will be pleasing to the untrained eye.