Poetry and Public Life

Teaching Situation and Rationale

I teach at a magnet school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It has a diverse student body, ranging from those students who take second jobs to support themselves and their families to those who are extremely wealthy. Specifically speaking, at Booker T. Washington High School, our current student body is comprised of 35% African American, 36% Caucasian, 3% Asian, 13% Hispanic, 9% Multi-Race, and 4% American Indian with 38% free and reduced lunch. My classroom reflects this diversity. Also, the class I teach, AP Language and Composition (focus on American Literature), has students with ranging abilities, so it is important that I differentiate and scaffold my instruction, as well as build in some flexibility for those students who need it. This unit is for my AP Language and Composition class, but the texts or pacing could be easily adapted for other grade levels.

One important factor to note is that most of my students hate studying poetry (99.9% to be exact). There is a distinct fear that appears in their eyes when I say, “Today, we are going to read a poem.” Knowing this upfront, I want this unit to be very accessible to my students and to show them that understanding poetry is almost like putting together a puzzle. In Mary McVee et al.’s  “Using Digital Media to Interpret Poetry: Spiderman Meets Walt Whitman,” the writers note the importance of approaching “poems not as static texts that must be mined for correct meaning, but as texts with rich potential for multiple interpretations.”³ This frames how I approach the teaching of poetry. I do not want to lead with “What does this poem mean?” but with “What do you believe the poet wants you to think, feel, and/or believe from these words?”⁴ McVee et al. also writes about how rarely students connect their own passions and interests to poetry that they (are forced to) read. This reminder is something that I intend to heed in this unit through the culminating activity.

Much of my AP Language and Composition class focuses on how American people are driven by or swallowed up by the idea of the American Dream - something that is idealized, envisioned, and recreated in songs, poems, plays, novels, movies, etc. We discuss how this notion of “America” is almost embedded, or seems to be, in our genetic code as we read essays and novels that implicitly or explicitly deal with the notion of the American Dream and what America ultimately stands for. Because there are so many differing visions and versions of our country, what makes it great or not so great, and because America and its values are so much of what we discuss when reading novels like The Great Gatsby or Of Mice and Men, plays like The Death of a Salesman, and essays or speeches like “I Have a Dream,” “Paradox and Dreams,” and “Self-Reliance,” this conversation about what makes America “America” is something that naturally becomes a focal point in our classroom dialogue. In order to make this dialogue more dynamic, it is important to have students examine works that unveil visions of America’s future, as well as expose versions of the present state of our country.  This idea of looking at different visions and versions of America is also relevant to my classroom because of the divisive times we live in -- where the world looks very black and white, the issues seem to be very black and white -- but it is in the gray areas where my students need to find themselves, looking at all points of view and considering ideas that might be uncomfortable for them. This is a skill that I know my students will find valuable and useful for the rest of their lives.

Poetry is often ignored in an AP Language and Composition classroom because of its heavy focus on non-fiction. However, I would like to argue that poetry is a factor that can not only help students’ close reading skills, skills needed to pass the AP exam, but it will also help them in all forms of writing. In defense of teaching poetry, Georgia Popoff and Quraysh Lansana write, “It is not necessary for each student to become an accomplished poet, but he will learn lessons that may inform future writing tasks in school and beyond.  We also hope to create new audiences. Reading poetry and, even more, attempting to write a poem expands command of language, or at least it expands students’ vocabularies.”⁵ With this in mind, poetry is the perfect vehicle to study language and bring exciting enrichment to the AP Language and Composition classroom. Additionally, the study of poetry “leads to an aptitude for creative problem-solving and effective communication, as well as improved skill in drawing inference from content”⁶-- again all skills that align with AP objectives and state standards.

Bringing more poetry to my AP Lang class will also help contribute to our conversation about America and the American Dream. I foresee this focus on poetry in my AP classroom to not only be beneficial in helping us piece together our own ideas about our country, but also in allowing my students to make greater, more complex connections among all of the essays, stories, speeches, and novels that they read.

As my students are trying to navigate their America — their version of America — it is more important than ever to have them look at other people’s visions and versions, expanding and challenging their views of their present and their future. By examining various poems across different time periods, my students will look at how specific poets use language and figurative devices to convey their visions for or criticism of our country,  and simultaneously, they can start constructing their own version of what America is for themselves and their generation.