Building off of my posts from June 17 and June 18, today I’m thinking about why I love teaching Robert Hayden’s “The Ballad of Nat Turner” and “Night, Death, Mississippi” so much. For students of writing, these are two poems that can present both a challenge and a kind of permission simultaneously. They can open up conversations about writing poetry that engages with particular historical contexts, and that engages with our own historical, political, cultural, and social contexts and moments as well.
I am excited to have the opportunity to teach a “Poetry & Social Justice” course in Spring 2016 at The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, as an inaugural Engaged Faculty Fellow through the JHU Center for Social Concern. For this community-based learning course, I’ll be partnering with the organization Writers in Baltimore Schools (which I’ve written a bit about in an earlier blog post); I’m sure that I’ll include these two poems somewhere on the syllabus, and I’m looking forward to the challenge of focusing explicitly on “political” poetry, “poetry of witness,” “civic” poetry, “public” poetry, “socially engaged” poetry, “protest” poetry, and so on. That said, I think that it is sometimes even more valuable to include poetry that raises questions about social justice outside the parameters of a course specifically designed to address those questions. These should not be topics that we “self select” to address as teachers and students of writing, and I don’t want to perpetuate marginalization of some voices and perspectives by only teaching them in particular pedagogical contexts. These two Hayden poems “work” wonderfully in lessons designed around topics of craft and poetic process as well.
If you try out any of the ideas below in your own teaching of craft or process, I recommend taking time to simply ask your students how these poems make them feel. The answer is often: uncomfortable. The “what” and the “why” raised by this discomfort can open discourse rather than shutting it down, weaving conversations of craft into conversations of context, linking the specific urgencies that lead us to read and write poetry with the specific “moves” that poets use to keep that urgency alive on the page.
Most recently, I taught “The Ballad of Nat Turner” in a course I called “Sound Effects,” which was an undergraduate intermediate poetry course in The Writing Seminars at JHU. I included it on the syllabus in the second half of the semester, as a bridge between a week’s unit called “Poetry & Song” and a week’s unit called “Spectrum of Rhyme.” The writing assignment for “Poetry & Song” was to “write a poem influenced by the ballad, the hymn, or another musical form. Consider that, while the ballad and the hymn are similar in terms of prosody, their poetic impulses are quite different. Your poem should include a ‘character’; in other words, include some human or entity other than yourself. Do not include the first-person-singular ‘I’ (unless that ‘I’ is a character explicitly other than yourself), though you can write from the first-person-plural ‘we’ viewpoint or simply write from a third-person point of view.” The writing assignment for “Spectrum of Rhyme” was to “write a poem that incorporates as much variety as possible in terms of rhyming effects (internal rhyme, end rhyme, slant rhyme, etc.). Thematically, focus on a particular sensory experience, and incorporate a sensory detail and/or concrete image in each line as well.”
Alongside “The Ballad of Nat Turner,” the week’s required poems for “Poetry & Song” were ballads (and the ballad-like) “Barbara Allen” (Anonymous), “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (John Keats), “The Song of Wandering Aengus” (W. B. Yeats), “The Hunting of the Snark” (Lewis Carroll), “The Orange Bottle” (Joshua Mehigan), and the hymns (and the hymn-like) “Our God, Our Help” (Isaac Watts), “Hymn” (Kazim Ali), and Emily Dickinson’s 314, 340, 479. I also assigned some background on the ballad from poets.org and poetryfoundation.org, and some background on Watts, Dickinson, and the hymn from poets.org. (As far as other ballad resources, I find the entire chapter in Eavan Boland and Mark Strand’s anthology The Making of a Poem to be very helpful.)
The next week, the required poems for “Spectrum of Rhyme” were “The Windhover” (Gerard Manley Hopkins), “The Darker Sooner” (Catherine Wing), two excerpts from Muse & Drudge (Harryette Mullen), “A Tapestry for Bayeux” (George Starbuck), “Horse Latitudes” (Paul Muldoon) with a bit of commentary on the poem excerpted from James Fenton’s review in The Guardian, “black herman’s last asrah levitation at magic city, Atlanta 2010” with some summarized background information and “the originator” with audio (LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs). I also assigned some background on rhyme, with the entry on rhyme from Edward Hirsch’s A Poet’s Glossary as required reading, and background from the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics, the Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere as reference materials.
In the first writing assignment, I wanted to explore the phenomenon (electrifyingly explored by Emily Dickinson) that a similar or shared prosody (like the ballad and the hymn, or the “traditional” hymn and Emily Dickinson’s singular and subversive hymnal measure) can be used to channel vastly different poetic impulses, through differences in other poetic techniques (narrative, diction, voice, tone, etc.). I also wanted to explore the roots of song as not only private expression, but public expression and even collective utterance. In the second writing assignment, I wanted to encourage students to explore the possibilities of sound association, without losing their grip on the other senses.
I’ll pick back up tomorrow to talk about how “The Ballad of Nat Turner” bridged and addressed both weeks’ lessons and exercises, and I’ll also reflect on teaching “Night, Death, Mississippi” through the lens of craft and poetic process.