Unit Content
Often, students may find that speaking the truth is hard. But reading someone else’s truth can allow them to say what is on their mind without any fear of judgment. Poetry has a way of speaking to our soul and helping us to connect on a personal level that gives us solidarity and relief. A great poem can expose students to parts of the world that they didn’t know existed. It can transport them to another reality and open their eyes, reminding them that the world is a big, interesting place full of opportunities and adventures. Sometimes life can be overwhelming, and students have trouble finding the words to explain what they are feeling. They may struggle with stress, frustration, anxiety, depression, or intense love and passion, and if they cannot communicate those feelings they can torment them from within. Poetry can help students not only to release those emotions, but also make sense of them in a way that others can appreciate and relate to.
This practical approach to reading and understanding is written with the reluctant or beginning reader of poetry in mind. As outlined before, there are many reasons why people shy away from poetry. One of those reasons is likely because, after a cold read, they are left unmoved by the poem even if on a literal level they can make sense of it. It is important for students to know that reading, understanding and interpreting poetry takes practice and becomes easier only after repeated, undeterred attempts at comprehension and making meaningful connections to the poem. And even then, the reader may remain unmoved or unfulfilled by the poem. To be fair to poetry, I find it necessary to begin with the suggestion that poetry is not supposed to change your life. While it can certainly move you to more insight, truth and illumination, reading poetry is not going to change your life, not at first anyway, as that is not really its primary function. It can however get you to think about life differently and with more introspection by connecting you more deeply with yourself and more deeply with the world around you. I think it benefits readers to have this awareness of what poetry can and cannot do. Poetry can guide you to certain truths and can be instructive and suggestive but rarely is it firmly decisive (Hirsch xi). That said, it is prudent to present poetry as a kind of adventure in renewal, creativity, rebirth and wonder with the reader acting as the pilgrim and setting forth on a journey of discovery. While this way of putting it may seem flowery and melodramatic, I think it actually dispels any myths that give it supernatural powers. In its proper place, poetry can bestow upon us the gift of intimacy, privacy and participation; it is up to the reader to decide what to do with these gifts. Speaking of the reader, it can be to their benefit to see themselves as having a role in the poem; not in the narrative or exposition of the poem but as a connective piece that can bring her or his experiences to the poem and perhaps give it more meaning or relevance. When students encounter a poem, they should be prepared to do a close reading of the poem irrespective of the length, for it is through this close reading that the world of the poem begins to take shape. As an aside, it is important that readers refrain from trying to make the poem fit exactly into their lives. They should let it be what it is and, again, let the poem’s meaning gradually unfurl through a series of readings.
During the first read of the poem, it is fine for students to read the poem silently or at the very least in a hushed tone as a sort of independent pre-reading for the purpose of meeting the poem on their own terms. Next, students should read the poem aloud. This can be done in many meaningful ways that foster collaboration and engagement, such as a teacher led reading, a class wide or group choral read, or a partner read. Poems are aural compositions which were part of the oral tradition of storytelling, poems having been originally used as instructive memory aids. In the service of their primary function, which was to pass along information, stories, cultural beliefs and ideas, they were meant to be heard. Moreover, in order to better understand poetry, a reader needs to know what it sounds like, especially since the ear sometimes picks up more than the head allows (JSTOR, 151). It is important to note also that reading poetry aloud helps readers to practice appropriate punctuation which is crucial to making meaning. Poetry has units of meaning. These units are represented by sentences, lines, clauses, and stanzas. Even though a line stops, the meaning of that line does not stop. The line has to be read as a line, yet also read through to the next punctuation mark. Readers must learn to obey punctuation, taking care to pause at commas and stop at periods. This punctuation practice is imperative to unlocking the meaning of the poem and is best learned through oral reading. The third read of the poem should concern itself with annotations. By annotating a poem, readers break it down into individual components that makes it more digestible and easier to comprehend. Students should begin their annotations by identifying who the speaker is, observing the form of the poem (a word on poem structure later), and circling any unknown words. It is wise to read poetry with a dictionary within arm’s reach for easy reference. Other needful annotations include (a comprehensive list can be found in the appendix) rhyme and meter, line breaks and figurative language. Ultimately, annotations help you to observe the tone and mood of the poem which support the message or theme and hopefully point toward an illumination or insight to one of life’s truths the rationale, again for reading and understanding poetry.
Ekphrasis is a Greek word composed of the words ek (out) and phrasein (to tell or speak) which combined are understood to mean description. An ekphrastic poem is a vivid and imaginative description of a work of art including painting, sculpture and other things viewed aesthetically. Through musings, narrations and reflections on the action represented in a work of art, the poet aims to amplify or expand upon its meaning. Ephrastic poetry has deep artistic roots with a long history; it has been enjoying a critical and creative vogue in recent years (Cheeke 19). The unlikeness between poetry and painting is clear, yet there is always some basis for comparison. U pictura poesis does not fully answer the question of what poetry does better than painting and vice versa. Part of the purpose of ekphrasis is finding an answer to this question. All ekphrastic poems can be considered commentaries upon the nature of the encounter between the verbal and the visual, or as broad allegories of this relationship, with modern ekphrastic poems generally shrugging off antiquity’s tendency toward elaborate description in favor of attempts at interpreting, inhabiting, confronting and speaking to their subjects. (Cheeke 13).
While it is certainly an interesting and arresting type of poetry, getting students to read and write ekphrastic poetry, on the face of it, may present a challenge. It is important for me to secure my student readers’ attention when introducing new content and I have generally found success in doing this by giving them a rationale for our course of study. In this case, ekphrasis has a back story that I think will resonate with readers. In the 19th century, there was a national debate sparked by the publication of an ekphrastic poem. Inspired by the French artist Jean Francois Millet’s painting Man With a Hoe,the American poet Edwin Markham wrote a poem about the burdensome work of manual laborers in America which was aptly represented by the drooping man in Millet’s painting. The San Francisco Examiner published the poem in 1889 which led to it being reprinted in thousands of periodicals across the country. The poem’s publication ushered in raging debate about labor rights in the press, in social circles and in classrooms. The symbol of The Man With the Hoe appeared in speeches by union members and the clergy. The vivid and life-like descriptions of the man in Millet’s painting were fused with pointed questions that acted as an indictment of society’s role in the working conditions of agricultural laborers. Both the poem and the painting were powerful examples of the impact that literary and visual art can have on society (Getty 2015). Ekphrastic poetry’s ability to implicate and call on the carpet society’s injustices and misdeeds a power that, if harnessed conscientiously, can bring about awareness and eventual change. This is reason enough to study it.
The poems to be used in this curriculum unit are: Monet’s Water Lilies by Robert Hayden, The Little Black Boy by William Blake and from Bellocq’s Ophelia Letters from Storyville 1911.
Robert Hayden was an American poet, essayist and educator who was the first African-American Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a role known today as United States Poet Laureate. Hayden was born Asa Bundy Sheffey in Detroit, Michigan in August of 1913. He was taken in and fostered by a neighboring family because his own family could not afford to care for him. Growing up in a Detroit ghetto nicknamed Paradise Valley, he endured a particularly brutal childhood largely because of the contentious marriage of his foster parents. In the home, Hayden was subjected to traumatic events that included witnessing spousal abuse and suffering beatings at the hands of his foster father. His childhood experiences were fraught with chronic anger and enmity, the effects of which dogged him throughout his life. His own physical ailments, he was severely nearsighted added to his misery as his health prevented him from participating in sports activities and made him a target of ostracization by his peers. These childhood traumas resulted in debilitating bouts of depression which plagued his life. Despite these circumstances, he wrote extensively and is considered by many to be one of the greatest American poets. In fact, in 2012 the U.S. Postal Service issued a panel of stamps featuring great 20th century American poets and included him.
Poem Analysis
This American sonnet by Robert Hayden is both contemplative and transcendent. Using an innovative sonnet form (two quatrains with a sestet in between), Hayden seeks refuge from the horrors of current news in the beauty of Monet’s painting. He laments that the news only tells of sadness and strife. In the passage, “today as the news from Selma and Saigon /poisons the air like fallout, “he references the turbulent time of the Civil Rights Movement and the famed march on Selma, Alabama. It is a time of open racial conflict and tension along with struggles for equality. Hayden, in his real life, may have covertly championed this cause, but never took a public stance against black oppression during the movement, much to the chagrin of his fellow black writers. Hayden also speaks of Saigon and the Vietnam War, also a divisive subject in America. He uses simile to refer to these current events as poisonous and pervasive, choking the life out of its citizens. For him, the only escape is into the art space where he can view the painting. The next unit reads “I come again to see/ the serene, great picture that I love.” Here, Hayden reminds the reader that he visits this picture often as it offers him solace and comfort in this tumultuous world. Perhaps because in real life Hayden was beleaguered by depressive bouts, he is signaling that he uses art as his therapy. In any case, the reader is well aware that Hayden has beaten a well-worn path to this museum’s door. The poem continues with the line, “here space and time exist in light/ the eye like the eye of faith believes.” This passage speaks of the suspension of space and time in light while the speaker is with his beloved painting. The painting in essence and through the skill of the painter, transcends all space and time. He compares the physical eye with the eye of faith, which I believe to be his Baha’i faith with its emphasis on a unifying vision. The next passage, “the seen, the known/ dissolve in iridescence”, indicates that what we see and what we think we know are not really real, and perhaps it is our fears and insecurities that create these feelings or rather shades of these feelings.
It is there in the museum with the painting that life’s travails are forgotten and melded with the unconcerned serenity of art “the illusive flesh of light/ that was not, was, forever is”. Outside the confines of this art space lies human suffering, depravity, moral repugnancy but here with the painting all of those things are suspended and put on a spectrum of light that is Pandora’s box before it was opened. The last quatrain continues to speak reverently about the light that emanates from the painting through the artist’s adroitness and depth. Here again, “o light beheld as through refracting tears,/ here is the aura of that world/each of us has lost”. This passage could be speaking to the trauma of Hayden’s childhood that nevertheless glows with “aura” in memory. And although the painting gives him great comfort and joy, he remembers those tears even in the presence of the painting but he is impervious to them because he is immersed in the light of art.
William Blake is considered by many to be a seminal figure in the romantic age of literature, a major poet and an original thinker. His massive body of work went unappreciated during his time but has since been cast in the upper echelons of literature. Perhaps because of his unconventionality or his artistic flights of fancy, Blake’s early critics placed more emphasis on his personal idiosyncracies than on his brilliance as a poet and artist, undervaluing his artistic accomplishments. At a very young age, he claimed to have seen holy visions of angels and of God. These visions formed the basis for many of his poems. Amongst his contemporaries, he was considered insane and was largely ignored. A visionary, poet and expert engraver, Blake is now widely recognized as one of the greatest contributors to English literature and art. His poem, The Little Black Boy is part of an illustrated collection of poems from his work titled, Songs of Innocence and of Experience. These poems were printed and illuminated by Blake himself. Two plates are included in The Little Black Boy. On one plate, an African mother and child are sitting and the child is pointing to the sun while the second plate has the poem written on it and an image of Christ seated with two children, who presumably are the little black boy and his white friend. In this collection, Blake presents the idea that childhood is a state of protected innocence but it is not immune to the fallen world and its institutions, including the realities of poverty and slavery. The Little Black Boy may cause great discomfiture today until it is understood.
Poem Analysis
The poem begins with the speaker, a little black child discussing his origins in “the southern wild” and explaining that although he is black his soul is white; just like that of the privileged English child. He goes on to say that the loss of whiteness is a kind of bereavement. Immediately, the reader gets the sense that the little black boy has learned at a very young age that to be black is something to be reviled and that he must seek whiteness to be accepted as decent and good. Of course, it is apparent to the reader that this self-condemnation is a learned behavior. The speaker in his innocence that he must denounce his blackness in order to be accepted, listened to and regarded as tender and equal to the white child. The mother in the poem has obviously been subjected to the same white generated rhetoric as has her son and feels the need to give him coping skills essential to moving about and knowing his place in the world. Even though we may suppose her to have been mistreated, she has not lost her softness or patience and takes time to explain their lot in life and how to remain hopeful and steadfast in the idea that they are doing a service to humankind with their blackness.
“Look on the rising sun, there God does live,/ And gives his light, and gives his heat away”. Here the sun is used as a metaphor for God, stoking the claim that darkness made by the sun is close to godliness. “And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive/ Comfort in morning joy in the noonday”; the power of the sun is omni-present and all of those who dwell in the land of the living benefit from its power and generosity. In the third stanza, “ And we are put on earth a little space, /That we may learn to bear the beams of love,/ And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face/ Is but a cloud”, further asserts that humans are here on earth for a short time and they must learn to accept and receive the sun’s love (metaphor for God), otherwise they have no hope of mercy or redemption as the people with dark skin and burnt faces do. There is a distinct air of innocence on the part of the little black boy and his mother. They have a gentle but unreflectingly simple view of life, their position and how to mitigate their second-class citizenship. The next line speaks of a cloud that I can only liken to a state of transition. Perhaps the cloud is the grave and, as the next passage states “For when our souls have learn’d the heat to bear,/ The cloud will vanish we shall hear his voice/Saying come out from the grove my love and care/ And round my golden tent like lamb’s rejoice, “this signals resurrection and an opportunity to bear the heat because now the English boy is innocent too, just like the little black boy. The poem further discusses the ideal lives that both the little black boy and the English child will lead once the “cloud” has been moved. They will be on equal footing and have no need for barriers of color as they sit around the tent of God. The innocent and wise little black boy knows that the English child cannot bear the heat of the sun, but instead of rejoicing in his pain or discomfort, he will shield the English child from the harshness of the sun until he is able (having been purged) to bear the sun on his own and by that time they will both be equal. All told, it is not the little black boy who will change to become white, it is the English child who will become pure by becoming black.
Natasha Tretheway
Natasha Tretheway, the daughter of a mixed raced marriage, writes poetry that is both personal and historical. Her first collection of poems, Domestic Work (2000), explored the lives of black working-class men and women in the South. Her second collection, Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002), focuses on the prostitutes photographed by E. J. Belocq in New Orleans in the early 20th century. In preparation for the book, Tretheway researched the lives of mixed race women in New Orleans’ red-light district. This book project combined details of Tretheway’s own mix-raced experience in the deep South with facts about the real womens’ lives. The accompanying images in the collection are arresting in their unvarnished reality but somehow still evoke a sense of innocence, loss and naivete. It is almost as if some of the women are playing dress up and pretending to be in control of their lives and sexuality while silently yearning for rescue. Natasha Tretheway has earned a great many awards and recognitions, including having been appointed Poet Laureate of the state of Mississippi in 2012 and Poet Laureate of the United States, a position she held until 2014.
Poem analysis
Letters from Storyville 1911
If ever a text echoed the pain, disillusionment and colorism pathology of a mixed-race woman in early 20th century America, this one is it. The poem opens with the speaker despairing over her lot in life and lamenting the fact that she is but “a spectacle and fetish”. She soon remembers that she was groomed through childhood to live in this suspended state of existence. It was her mother who, “taught me to curtsy and be still/ so that I might please a white man, my father”. One’s initial response to the mother training her black girl child up to be on display to white men, the child’s father included, is one of scorn and disdain. While it is easy to blame the mother for not offering her girl child protection and security, her actions may be attributed to her own self-hate and an inferiority complex which reinforces a white is right pathology. The speaker may have been subjected to cruel taunts because of her own complexion or may have even been mixed-race herself and groomed by her mother in the same fashion and for the same purpose; to please men, white men in particular. For what other reason would the speaker declare that “I took arsenic-tablets I swallowed/ to keep me fair, bleached white as stone.” Arsenic was as dangerous then as it is now but its dangers were ignored because of its powers; to keep one white and fair and by extension offering entrance and acceptance to the white world, even if only as an idee fixe . The speaker, now devoid of emotion or self-possession after having been fetishized all her life, can easily transport her mind from her ignoble state of being, proclaiming that “It seems I can sit for hours, /suffer the distant eye he trains on me, /lose myself in reverie where I think most of you”. It is during this silent reverie that the speaker appears to look fondly upon a person from her past who coddled and molded her into a woman whose future would be free of hard work such as “laundry, flat irons and damp sheets…..or picking time, hunchbacked in the field” but limited to objectification and non-identify as she waits day in and day out “for the photograph to show me who I am”. This poem, like many of Natasha Tretheway’s other poems, highlights the identity crisis and resulting denigration suffered by many mixed-race individuals. Its tones of depersonalization, internal strife and longing to belong are as relevant today as they were in 1911.
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