Content Objectives
The opening lines of Allen Tate’s 1937 poem, “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” suggest the function of a political poem: “Row after row with strict impunity / The headstones yield their names to the element.” The speaker is meditating on a cemetery, this one dedicated to those who fell in battle. Realistically speaking, people walk by cemeteries’ seemingly sacred ground often without even noticing their existence (so long as one isn’t in the way of course). If a person does notice it, they don’t often think about the mechanisms that created these rows of buried corpses. Even a person entering the cemetery is concerned with their own mourned dead, walking by and not noticing countless other headstones on the way to their destination. Now, a poem draws attention to something otherwise not noticed, mourned, or celebrated. A poem about a cemetery or about the dead will make the reader think about the headstones in a new way. This is not a normal poem, however, but a political poem, and as such Tate not only draws our attention to the headstones, but he brings judgment to them. This poem takes something unnoticed and unjudged, standing with “strict impunity” and brings it to our consciousness for consideration and judgment. That is the maneuver of political poetry: it forces our attention on something we don’t otherwise see or perhaps don’t want to look at. The poem seems urgently to say, “Don’t turn away even if you don’t want to see this – even if you find your own guilt in the headstones, you need to see it.” This call, this claim the poem makes on the reader’s attention, is the backbone around which everything else is built.
There are three objectives for this unit. The first, more traditional, and overall aim of the unit is to give students a sensitivity to the value of political poetry and an understanding of how it works and can work for them. After participating in this unit, students should be able to recognize when a poem is addressing a political issue or situation, how it deals with that issue, and what different forms and conventions the poem uses to achieve its rhetorical goals. This is essentially conventional poetic analysis applied to a specific genre of poetry except that it is grounded very much in the situation of the poem as well as the poem as a work in itself. Instead of treating the poems as purely aesthetic objects, students should see the political poem as both something beautiful and something timely, with universal appeal and localized, specific importance. Students will ask and answer questions like, “Why would this poet write this poem?” or “What in this poet’s life and circumstances led to this poem?” They should have an eye to look for latent energies in the poet and their society that sparked the creation of a poem, and a curiosity to discover how brightly it burned once circulated (and whom the poem burned the most).
In the midst of these analytical practices, the unit also seeks to create a learning environment that fosters meaningful experiences reading and writing poetry. Real, authentic – even emotional – engagement with the poetry in the political discourse is just as important as the concrete academic skills the students learn to apply. This second objective demands that students read poetry that deals with political issues in which they have some stake. Consequently, the unit will need time to present a thorough variety of poems so that every single student can at least once see something of themselves in a poem. That connection, that recognition of “That’s me! That’s my life!” is absolutely crucial or else this becomes only an academic exercise. This may sound as familiar as it is idealistic: of course we always want students to relate to poetry, don’t we? We tend, however, to ask students to relate to the poem by identifying with some universal principle or idea of beauty that a poem represents. This unit asks that the connections be more concrete. For instance, to teach Audre Lorde’s “Hanging Fire,” without a sense that at least one student will see themselves on the other side of the door when “momma’s in the bedroom / with the door closed,” or at least one student might feel that “my skin has betrayed me” in some immediate sense is counterproductive to this unit’s objectives. The poems selected must make students feel like they and the poet are participating in a community of insiders, rather than in the sadly more customary reading experience of being an outsider looking in.
In the same way, this unit asks students to participate in this discourse by writing poetry that addresses and communicates their own political circumstances or events. The experience here is important too. The students must feel the struggle to put a complicated political situation into words that captures something of the experience in the writing. By asking them to write aesthetically, this unit engages students with the creation of beauty (“beauty” meaning here something not necessarily pleasing, but powerfully and authentically human) where they are accustomed to creating thesis statements and logical arguments. They will have to write with the logic of beauty and experience, and struggle to make it come out right. Then they must experience communicating it in an authentic way. Handing in the political poem to the teacher for a grade turns their struggle into a transaction; instead students must communicate the poem to listeners who are important to them. Students have to think, “Who needs to hear this?” and use whatever channels they have available to them to get it out there.
This leads to the final objective of the unit: overcoming the mythology of “making it.” Students have an idea of literary success that is tied to space and time. If they create a poem, it can only be successful if thousands (or ideally millions, if it goes “platinum”) of people hear it. Such success is magnified by how long the poem remains in the public imagination. In this “bigger is better” way of thinking, the poet takes the role of shaping the public consciousness, making a difference by giving voice and inspiration to others inside and outside their political communities. Of course it’s impossible to argue that this isn’t success, but I think there is something in the literary nature of poetry that this model of success overlooks. A poem, especially a political poem, wrestles with the most powerful and significant but complex factors in a writer’s way of life and captures them through scratches on a piece of paper or pixels on a screen. Through a poem the writer can open a person’s eyes to a way of life they didn’t even recognize, let alone understand, and then give them a sense of what it’s like to live it. It’s a transfer of lived experience, essentially. It’s hard to believe at all that poetry is capable of doing this! The fact that so much poetry is written, and so much of it has this effect so often on so many people has seemed to make it commonplace, but really it is of profound importance in every circumstance. What if a poem is heard by only one person – maybe read to somebody in the seat next to you while riding the bus – and the poem lasts only as long as the poet’s voice hovers in the air, but it opens that someone’s eyes to something they’ve never seen before, and they consequently never see their world in the same way again? Can’t this too be called an unqualified success? This unit hopes to create experiences where students share poetry in these kinds of micro-transactions to create a sense that they can circulate poetry immediately with powerful, meaningful results.
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