This post is an adaptation of a talk I gave at last weekend’s Imagining America National Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The medium of poetry is language—not some alternate language to that which we are immersed in every day, but the same language—the same letters and sounds composing the same words—that we use in advertising, politics, business, education. But though the means are the same in poetry, the ends de-familiarize those means. Therein lies its potential power to startle, unsettle, provoke, and question. When poetry uses our everyday, familiar means of communication in ways that ask us to reckon differently, we might wonder what other status quos could be unsettled, what other paradigms we take as “the way things are” could be re-seen and re-worked into “the way things could be,” what perspectives and complications we have overlooked or ignored. And unlike, say, the language of advertising, the goal of poetry isn’t to sell or even convince, necessarily, but to make its audience think and feel more deeply, to wrestle with, in the words of John Keats as he described what he called “negative capability,” the ability to be “in mysteries, uncertainties, doubts.” Not to run from these, or gloss them over, or immediately try to explain them, but to practice the capability of being in them. The work of poetry is, thus, connected to the work of engagement.
It is in this work of engagement, that I think that maintaining poetry as a touchstone can be especially valuable. As much as we might want to resist neo-liberal ideologies, or capitalist ideologies, or any ideologies that value abstracted “growth” and “progress” on paper without considering how those values manifest in the lived lives of individuals and communities, most of us are in some way beholden to and thus complicit in institutions and structures larger than ourselves—in my case, a university. I don’t want to paint this as entirely negative. I am deeply grateful to have a job in the field I love and trained for, in a department of colleagues I admire and respect and with whom I get along. It is moving to be at a university at a crossroads, as so many are—a university trying to figure out what engagement in its community actually means.
My institution, Johns Hopkins University, is the largest employer in the Baltimore area, and it is a major research institution. In many ways, those factors have defined its perspective on its relationship with Baltimore for years—the employer and the employed (or unemployed, or underemployed), the builder or landlord and the tenants (or the displaced), the researcher and the subjects, the knowers and the known (or unknown). Of course, this perspective is just that—a perspective, assuming that Hopkins’s “side” of each of these relationships is an inherent good and “the way things are.” It doesn’t take into account the impact of an ongoing imbalance in power and voice, and it doesn’t illuminate or complicate or question best practices, even if one assumes that, say, employment and research are, indeed, inherent goods. A mismanaged “good” can still do harm in its execution.
Focusing on unpacking and complicating our language, in particular, is one small way to start to unpack our assumptions and complicate our thinking. While universities are supposed to be places of questioning, they are far from immune to wielding corporate abstractions (and appropriations of scholarly jargon) with assumed values and unexamined implications and consequences. In what ways are words like university “leadership” and “innovation” becoming unexamined buzzwords that might actually negate or undermine potential for empowering communities, or allow us to overlook alternate hierarchies of knowledge (say, community elders)? In what ways do they (we) value newness and growth at the expense of investing in existing communities and culture, respecting and sustaining existing communities, and focusing on individual wellbeing and worth over abstracted goals? In what way can poetry change the terms of conversations, introduce luminous specificity and individuality, and create language paradigms in which even words with “known” meanings have to be listened to and re-explored on the terms of their particular context? Poetry tills the soil of our lexicon, turning it over to see the light of day.
In a local Baltimore article published last week, called “Baltimore Anchor Institutions Work Together on Blight,” we have numerous positive buzzwords: “partners,” “collaborators,” “developments,” “revitalization.” I don’t think anyone would argue that vacant properties and lack of economic opportunity aren’t worthy issues for institutions to address, but–partnership and collaboration with whom? Where are the voices of individuals in these “blighted” communities in the conversation (yes, there’s one positive quote from a business owner in the article), and how are the nuances of their lives represented in this “progress,” whether this is a question of actual input and collaboration in the development process, or simply process-ING these changes enacted on their neighborhoods and city. What does a focus on “anchors” oversimplify in the diversity and life of the sea itself, so to speak?
In the university’s new “Roadmap on Diversity and Inclusion,” the 45-page document never uses the word “racism,” never says “anti-racist.” While this forward-looking work of diversity and inclusion is deeply valuable, in what ways is the language bubble-wrapping itself to protect white fragility at the expense of acknowledging the individual and systemic realities of faculty, students, and staff of color?
While it’s incredibly important to continue the work of pushing our institutions to critique and improve their own language, introducing unapologetically other modes of language into those spaces has its own power. Poetry writing (and creative making in general) is an odd duck in academia. How does one consider creative work on the terms of research? When I came to Hopkins, the university magazine published a photo of all of the new faculty members—and under each of our photos, our name, department, previous institutions, and research focus. Under my photo: Dora Malech, The Writing Seminars, University of Iowa, and…BLANK. Not writing, poetry writing, poetry, arts engagement—nothing. Rather than adapt their notion of research, the powers that be (which I admit was probably one editor, not a vast conspiracy) had simply negated the work that had gotten me hired to their institution.
Within academia, when I AM invited to discuss the work of community engagement through poetry, I try whenever possible to signal boost voices often unheard in conversations within higher education—in my case, these are usually high school students (or even college students themselves) living in communities influenced by university practices. I invite young voices and an alternate mode of communicating into rooms accustomed to clear hierarchies of knowledge-production and agreed-upon modes of discourse. The poet Linda Gregerson has said that the function of parables isn’t to teach us a lesson, but rather to remind us of how much we don’t know and understand. This is helpful for me in thinking about poetry as well. Intimacy, knowledge, and emotional and sensory accessibility are cornerstones of poetry, but they aren’t packaged “for” immediate easy understanding of all references by an audience that doesn’t have that same intimacy and knowledge. It encourages its audience to question internally, to absorb without immediately trying to explain, and to reckon with how much they don’t know.
Poetry can be a pedagogical tool to build empathy and community, to acknowledge and value personal and communal modes of knowing outside the corporate, the institutional, and the academic. It enables us to access the spectrum of what child psychiatrist Robert Coles and conflict transformation peacebuilding mediator and scholar John Paul Lederach call the “moral imagination.” It encourages cultural humility and cultivates the positive ambivalence, ambivalence as strength, detailed in the work of analytic thinker Melanie Klein. In a culture obsessed with leadership, modes of communication that ask us to follow into uncertainty can provide a valuable balance to current and aspiring “leaders,” particularly those doing the work of engagement.
Of course, like any methodology of engagement, sharing viewpoints through poetry can have its challenges and missteps—in having one individual share their experience through poetry, it can tokenize “diversity” without meaningful reckoning. In a workshop in which multiple participants are doing the writing, it can create either an echo chamber of like-mindedness or fallacies of false equivalence between opinions. It can frame issues as purely personal identity-based, without grappling with systemic and institutional forces. This is where introductory and reflective frameworks, explicit acknowledgement of these pitfalls, become invaluable. There is also the issue of this kind of poetry-as-engagement methodology not corresponding entirely with mainstream creative writing pedagogy, in which a “workshop” model of group criticism can often have a chilling effect. Again, framing the endeavor is part of the work.
I asked: In what way can poetry change the terms of conversations, introduce luminous specificity and individuality, and create language paradigms in which even words with “known” meanings have to be listened to and re-explored on the terms of their particular context? It can “give pause”—a small and imperfect gift, but a gift nonetheless.