Resources
The following poems for use in the unit come from a variety of sources. Some come from colleagues or students, others from classes or seminars, and still others from personal reading and research. While these poems are good and useful for instruction, the priority should be given to poems that speak to any teacher’s students’ personal and political lived experiences. The Poetry Foundation (poetryfoundation.org) and the Academy of American Poets (poets.org) are reliable sources for quality poetry and a resource students can use to find poems they connect with. They should be encouraged to bring these poems into the class for study, just as they should read them for their poetry project. For students who want to study rap or song lyrics, Genius (genius.com) is an interesting place where lyrics are collected, formatted appropriately (e.g., not center-justified) and commented upon by listeners and sometimes the artists themselves.
Beyond the internet, community libraries are excellent starting points to discover local poets and poetry. In my New Haven community, I discovered a Poetry Institute in one of the many libraries, and while I didn’t find published political poets from the student’s neighborhoods as I had hoped, I did find books of student poetry – something even more immediate to their experience than I had envisioned, some by students in my own school. The library even hosts monthly poetry nights with an “open mic” to read poetry and time to talk to poets about their work, providing the potential for a field-trip or for me to convince a guest speaker to attend the class.
Outside of libraries, I met in New Haven a woman selling books of creative writing by the city’s homeless, called the Elm City Echo. This is a magazine I never encountered in my research because I never thought to look for it. Internet searches of “New Haven poetry” miss the magazine entirely, and even “New Haven homeless poetry” does not produce a result. This is likely not the only homeless magazine to include creative writing, and looking for any and all homeless magazines in the students’ communities can unearth some surprising and powerful resources to give the students to study.
This list, then, is a starting point – a place to find useful texts to study and possibly include in a greater collection tailored to the students’ political situations and interests. They are listed loosely in thematic order.
Tate, Allen. “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” Poets.org. May 10, 2017. Accessed August 04, 2017. https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/ode-confederate-dead.
Tate’s poem is an excellent starting point for this unit. The poem is dense but accessible, clear but sophisticated enough to require a slow, deliberate read. Most importantly the poem introduces ideas about what political poetry is and how it functions in the greater social discourse. Students can study Tate’s meditation on the war dead and see how through his poem he forces people to notice and acknowledge something they’re otherwise disposed to overlook.
Vuong, Ocean. “Toy Boat.” Poetry Foundation. April 2016. Accessed August 04, 2017. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/88733/toy-boat.
The students will understand this poem best if they are shown the official 9-minute video of the Tamir Rice shooting. The poem captures the innocence and isolation of the child through some brilliant but complicated metaphors, and it highlights these against the brutality of the police action.
Betts, Reginald Dwayne. “When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving.” Poetry Foundation. April 2016. Accessed August 04, 2017. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/88739/when-i-think-of-tamir-rice-while-driving.
Betts’s poem is a natural complement to Vuong’s, looking at the shooting from a father’s perspective. A longer, more direct, and more accessible poem, and a great illustration of how two poets can use different forms to address the same topic.
Lowell, Robert. “The Restoration.” Robert Lowell: Collected Poems. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June, 2003.
A poem examining the aftermath of the Columbia student protests of 1968. Instead of a protest poem, this poem examines the protest, and it shows the point of view of the establishment through the president as he confronts the protester’s way of life.
Scott-Heron, Gil “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Genius. 1974. Accessed August 04, 2017. https://genius.com/Gil-scott-heron-introduction-the-revolution-will-not-be-televised-annotated.
A very powerful work of poetry, this should be listened to as well as read closely. Gil Scott-Heron’s tone is remarkable aggressive, staking a claim for a revolution that will not be mediated through white channels, or mediated at all. This poem is an immediate address to a 70’s audience so there are many references students will need to look up, but it’s well worth the effort. Even a poem arising from its specific political circumstances can be timeless.
Lorde, Audre. “Power.” Poetry Foundation. 1978. Accessed August 04, 2017. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53918/power-56d233adafeb3.
Lorde deals with the destructive nature of power on the communities it oppresses, exploring white police action and its injustices on the African American community. This is a poem that passionately combines the personal emotional responses of the poet to the political forces that gave them life.
Lorde, Audre. “Hanging Fire.” Poetry Foundation. 1997. Accessed August 04, 2017. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42580/hanging-fire.
This is both a personal and political poem, and students will have many questions after reading it that will lead to discussions of social issues. Of particular interest is what is happening behind the closed door, and how the students answer this question reveals as much about their own lived experiences as it does about the poem’s meaning.
Pai, Shin Yu. “Burning Monk.” Poetry Foundation. 2010. Accessed August 04, 2017. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/141975/burning-monk.
Students will benefit from seeing the picture of Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation protesting the Vietnam War in 1963 before reading this poem. Students will want to focus on “How can someone do this to themselves?” but the poem’s question is an interesting complement: what does it mean, “his heart refusing to burn”? How was this a protest? Why does this poem commemorate him? How does this poem commemorate him, and in what sense was this a protest? Why does this poem commemorate him? How does this poem commemorate him, and why in 2010 (the Obama years, now so fondly looked back on) did Shin Yu Pai bring this to our attention? There is a lot of potential for discussion in this little poem.
Santos Perez, Craig. “Halloween in the Anthropocene, 2015.” Poetry. 2010. Accessed August 04, 2017. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/141975/burning-monk.
An environmentalist poem, it explores the impact of man upon the earth. This is a humanist poem too, in a sense, since it deals with issues of dehumanization as people corrupt the world.
Lamar, Kendrick. “Sherane A.K.A. Master Splinters Daughter.” Genius. October, 2012. Accessed August 04, 2017. https://genius.com/Kendrick-lamar-sherane-aka-master-splinters-daughter-lyrics.
The way of life of a teenager growing up in Compton, California. This is a rap, so it should certainly be heard, but students will find that when they slow down and read what they just heard there is a lot more to this rap than they may have thought. Lamar conveys enormous detail about his way of life with great economy and cleverness.
Lamar, Kendrick. “Wesley’s Theory.” Genius. March, 2015. Accessed August 04, 2017. https://genius.com/Kendrick-lamar-wesleys-theory-lyrics.
The dream for young poets and rappers is to be discovered, published, and made famous. Here, however, Lamar deals with issues of high circulation and what happens when an artist “makes it,” paying special attention to why being famous is problematic for the artist. He uses sex as a metaphor here: the vulgar sexual relationship denotes the despicable relationship between Lamar and his label.
Lamar, Kendrick. “King Kunta.” Genius. March, 2015. Accessed August 04, 2017. https://genius.com/Kendrick-lamar-king-kunta-lyrics.
In a meditation on the various forms of power and how they interact with artists, Lamar raps about his return home after finding success. Students may need some background in the story of Kunta Kinte from Alex Hayley’s Roots to understand the central metaphor, but it’s an interesting comparison. The song has triumphant lyrics about coming back to Compton as a powerful man, but he refers to Kinte’s crippling as his own too. It’s also curious that Lamar raps about returning home as “King Kunta” when Kunta Kinte was neither a king nor able to return to his home in Gambia.
Brooks, Gwendolyn. “Riot.” Poetry Foundation. 1969. Accessed August 04, 2017. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51835/riot.
The opening quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is enough to begin a strong discussion, and this poem explores white perceptions of African American protests – what white people think the protests ought to look like and how they actually appear. A good poem to expose and discuss prejudices, especially in light of responses to Black Lives Matter protests.
Horton, Randall. “Before the Beauty .Or. How Could U Forget?” Poetry Foundation. June, 2017. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/141956/before-the-beauty-or-how-could-u-forget.
This poem provides fragments of stories and images of life in a neighborhood, showing what one encounters there. Vibrant but dark, it gives clues that students will have to work to put together in order to create a sense of life there as a whole.
Smith, Maggie “Good Bones.” Poetry Foundation. 2016. Accessed August 04, 2016. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/89897/good-bones.
Rader, Dean. “When (And Why) A Poem Goes Viral.” Ploughshares. 2017. Accessed August 04, 2017. http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/when-and-why-a-poem-goes-viral/.
This poem and the accompanying article about it by Dean Rader address the issue of circulation. Maggie Smith wrote a poem that became an immediate internet success. Millions of people read and shared her poem across social media and internet publications, but a careful analysis of the poem makes it difficult to say exactly why. Not to say this isn’t a good poem, but instead it’s just difficult to discover in the poem something that sets it apart from its contemporaries making it appeal to such a broad audience of readers in so short a period of time. The poem’s circulation story illustrates how poetry exists in a moment, in a context, and it has limitations and power in this way.
- “Per Diem Friends.” Elm City Echo. Issue 12. Spring, 2017.
One of the poems in the New Haven magazine that publishes homeless poetry, this shows students a perspective on the homeless way of life.
Rich, Adrienne. What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2003.
This incredible book gives insights into how poetry engages political life. Each chapter has its own theme, dealing either with people, events, poems, her own work, or her own thoughts on how life works. It’s a patchwork of thoughts from a mature and brilliantly perceptive political mind. I found it best read slowly, with thoughtful attention given to each new perspective.
Rankine, Claudia. Citizen. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press. 2014.
Students may respond to Rankine’s form in this book. Rankine writes her observations of what it is like to be an African American in contemporary America in a blend of prose and poetry – it’s prose with a great deal of attention paid to how it looks and sounds. Rankine not only writes of ways of life, but of perceptions of ways of life, and how those perceptions can be dangerous and harmful without people realizing it.
Danticat, Edwige “Poetry in a Time of Protest.” The New Yorker. January 31, 2017. Accessed August 04, 2017. http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/poetry-in-a-time-of-protest.
This interesting article insists that numbers alone do not make for an effective protest. She argues for the necessity of poetry to give powerful voice to political opposition.
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