Just as I can’t ride the subway without finding iambic pentameter and social commentary in even a foot pain ad, poetry and sociopolitical issues have made their often awkward, yet also deeply affecting appearance, in every class I have ever taught.
I find that students work best when you make the lesson feel personal and applicable to their lives. Even if it needs to be ferreted out of them, I try to get them to see the potential in poetry and sociopolitical discussion. To achieve these goals, I use a multimedia approach: students create poetry and social justice blogs, analyze the strengths and weaknesses of digital verse, write their own hypertext poetry, tweet haiku, and write poetry versions of their Facebook profiles.
In one introductory writing class assignment cycle, I ask the students if they like music after they tell me they’re not fans of poetry, and then invite them to see the connections through close readings of different tracks of Beyoncé’s Lemonade. They reflect on this as they read Ishmael Reed’s knockout poetry anthology, From Totems to Hip-Hop 1900-2002 and watch John Singleton’s film Poetic Justice (1993), which features Janet Jackson as a poet-cosmetologist spouting Maya Angelou poems in South Central L.A.
Next, we read Terrance Hayes’s “The Blue Terrance,” which starts, “I come from a long line hollowed out on a dry night,” and I have them write a list poem that begins, “I come from” and can include anything from the concrete “I come from the Bronx” to the abstract “I come from sideways glances.” Finally, they write essays on the connections between these different exhibits, followed by a field trip to the Nuyorican Poets Café for a poetry slam. In the case of one very special class, we had a poetry slam of our own.
This assignment cycle inevitably leads to crucial discussions about not only poetry but also deeply important sociopolitical issues, which I find hard to come by in a mandatory class that frequently meets at 8:30 on a Friday morning. Ultimately, I do not consider it to be a successful set of assignments unless at least one student approaches me after class to confess that s/he may not only be a musician but also a poet.