Yesterday afternoon, I hit “Publish” on a blog post reflecting on widely anthologized and widely taught poems. My intention was not to criticize those poems (there are many good reasons they’re taught and anthologized), but to draw attention to alternative poems by the anthologized authors that also richly deserve “air time” in the classroom. I mentioned Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” as a (lovely and moving) poem that appears again and again on syllabi and in writing workshops, but I suggested Hayden’s “The Ballad of Nat Turner” and “Night, Death, Mississippi” as poems that, while perhaps more challenging, have the capacity to provoke intense and important conversations on levels of craft, content, and context. I was planning on writing more about those two poems today. I was also planning to perhaps introduce another “anthology swap,” considering the widely anthologized Langston Hughes poem “Mother to Son,” and suggesting that educators might consider the challenge of Hughes’s “Birmingham Sunday (September 15, 1963)” as well.
Later that night, the news of the terrorist, white supremacist murder of nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina broke. I stayed up glued to the same Twitter feed that you may have been glued to; I spent this morning and afternoon reading the same articles that you have probably read. I can’t continue to discuss “The Ballad of Nat Turner,” “Night, Death, Mississippi,” or “Birmingham Sunday (September 15, 1963)” without discussing last night’s horror, a legacy of hate and white supremacy, systemic racism, white privilege, violence, and resistance. That is not a reason to avoid these poems, it a reason to teach them and teach them and teach them. To avoid them enables just that: a void. Poetry is not written in a void, it is written out of minds and bodies and lives and struggles.
I said that I was not going to criticize the anthologized and widely taught “Those Winter Sundays” and “Mother to Son,” and I still don’t want to do so. But I woke to a fairly obvious realization: those two poems present individual challenges occurring in a kind of void. Both poems are written by African-American authors, but neither poem directly specifies the race of its characters (though the speaker in “Mother to Son” does use a version of Black Vernacular English). Both poems present a strong parental figure persevering. But beyond the inspiration of individual perseverance—what? A void.
No, I don’t think that every poem needs to remind readers of discriminatory housing, lending, and employment practices. No, I don’t think that every poem needs to explicitly address social, political, and economic inequalities. But I do think that in teaching some poems at the expense of others, we may be foregrounding the poems by black authors that present individuals “lifting themselves up” with no acknowledgement of why they might be “down” in the first place or who and what might be keeping them there. I don’t think that Hayden, Hughes (or any of us) has a responsibility to include every facet of every reality in every single poem. But I do think that we, as readers and educators, have a responsibility to make sure that our reading selections are not reinforcing assumptions, closing down points of view, or propping up the status quo. If we think that poems that are “universal” and “uncontroversial” (and “good” and “accessible” and “teachable”) are only those that occur in some kind of lyric void, we are not doing our jobs. Teaching only “Mother to Son” and “Those Winter Sundays” does nothing to complicate the pernicious, moralizing mythology that individual hard work is the answer to all our societal ills. “The Ballad of Nat Turner,” “Night, Death, Mississippi,” and “Birmingham Sunday (September 15, 1963)” complicate our mythologies of self and society.
We don’t have to perpetuate failures of imagination and empathy; we don’t have to sell ourselves (and poetry) short. Let’s teach “The Ballad of Nat Turner,” and let’s talk about Nat Turner. Let’s talk about Denmark Vesey too, a leader of the early Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, who planned a slave rebellion for July 14, 1822, but was betrayed, captured, and executed, as were 34 others. When we talk about Denmark Vesey and his Church, let’s mention last night’s massacre. Let’s talk about white supremacy and hate, and then let’s read “Night, Death, Mississippi.” Let’s talk about the voices of white supremacy and hate in that poem, and let’s think about the terrorist’s former classmate saying, “he had that kind of Southern pride, I guess some would say. Strong conservative beliefs . . . He made a lot of racist jokes, but you don’t really take them seriously like that. You don’t really think of it like that.” Then let’s read “Birmingham Sunday (September 15, 1963)”:
BIRMINGHAM SUNDAY (September 15, 1963)
Four little girls
Who went to Sunday School that day
And never came back home at all–
But left instead
Their blood upon the wall
With spattered flesh
And bloodied Sunday dresses
Scorched by dynamite that
China made aeons ago
Did not know what China made
Before China was ever Red at all
Would ever redden with their blood
This Birmingham-on-Sunday wall.
Four tiny little girls
Who left their blood upon that wall,
In little graves today await:
The dynamite that might ignite
The ancient fuse of Dragon Kings
Whose tomorrow sings a hymn
The missionaries never taught
In Christian Sunday School
To implement the Golden Rule.
Four little girls
Might be awakened someday soon
By songs upon the breeze
As yet unfelt among
Magnolia trees.
Then let’s talk about our shared history, (again and again) and let’s share poetry, not in a void, but together, together, together.