Poetry and Public Life

Introduction and Context

Often times we teachers are inspired to create a unit of instruction because we see something important and we want to bring this thing into our classrooms and share it with our students. This unit began with the opposite impulse: I was inspired to explore political poetry in the classroom because of something important I did not see. As people explore their own political views and engage in new political conversations both in person and across social media, poetry seems strangely to be missing from commonplace discourse. This is particularly strange because social media seem to be particularly suited for the short and dense forms poetry takes. I’m curious to find out whether it’s possible to validate poetry for the students as a viable means of personal political expression. Can students have authentic experiences engaging with their political world by reading, writing, and sharing poetry? What are legitimate ways –social media or otherwise – for a high school student to engage with and participate in poetry with their community? This unit aims to create an environment where these experiences can happen, and ideally set students up to continue to see poetry as a form of political expression in the future.

From a practical perspective, the students will study poems written and circulated in the traditional way (e.g., books, periodicals, anthologies), but then we will also challenge the mythologies around what makes a poem or poet successful. Is a poem like W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” successful because it was recorded, published, and passed on for decades into thousands of English classrooms? Or might that poem also participate in failure because there are almost certainly thousands of students who read it with a response resembling, “This is dumb. I hate poetry,” or some other invective? This sounds silly, but it’s really meant to set up this question: If canonized poems can be unsuccessful, does that open the door for uncanonized poems to be successful in a different way? I believe it does, and I would like to show the students how a poem with a circulation of one and a lifetime of a moment can still be a profound success, and I would like the students to experience this success for themselves.

These students participating in the political poetry unit attend 11^th grade in a New Haven STEM magnet school focusing on engineering and robotics. The course is called “English 3,” and it’s the only other English class for 11^th grade apart from the Advanced Placement classes. This being a general course, the students have a wide range of academic abilities and dispositions to reading and writing, but generally the students in this English class are not always the most passionate readers and writers. In my experience I’ve found that students at this grade and level tend to be reluctant readers of extended narratives but thoughtful readers of shorter works. In the same way, they often tend to resist writing extended essays but do well with informal reflective or analytical pieces. Because of this, poetry has the potential to be something the students engage with easily in the classroom and write about (informally) without difficulty. In fact, the school is a little unusual in that it has many students already who read and write poetry for fun, and it’s not uncommon to see students sitting in clusters in the hall to share their poetry or rap with each other. There is a Poetry Club dedicated to creating a space to write and share poems, and some students even have school-wide recognition as poets – something they have earned through successfully competing in poetry slam competitions. So given this setting, this unit seeks both to create engagement with poetry in the general population of 11^th grade students and to tap into and direct a ready enthusiasm for poetry active outside the classroom.

Regarding time and the overall curriculum, this unit will take place at the beginning of the year. Because it concerns itself with poetry that students will easily make personal connections with and it concerns itself with creative writing and work-shopping, this is a unit that can create a high level of personal engagement for the students. It has a high potential to hook them on literature and create a significant positive momentum that further units will build on. The duration of the unit is flexible: it can run anywhere from four weeks to an entire nine-week marking period, with more time allowing for greater scope, depth, and pacing for the students’ writing.

As a side note, teaching this unit at the beginning of the year allows for a continual awareness of and engagement with political poetry. I don’t imagine students will stop writing poetry after the unit finishes, and room can always be made for a student to share on any given day something they wrote and feel to be important. Likewise, we don’t teach in a bubble, so we certainly will remain concerned with political issues as they arise over the course of the year, and when something significant happens it will be natural either to allow the students to write about it or to pull in poetry from outside sources that might interest the class. I think it would be a great benefit to the students to keep a degree of flexibility with which, even if in the midst of reading a novel for another unit, we are able to take a break to make time to pay attention to our politics and poetry.