Poetry and Student Learning

CHAPTER 5 Poetry and Student Learning

Angela Hooks

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography. Robert Penn Warren, “Poetry is a kind of unconscious autobiography,” New York Times ⸪

Identity, social and personal, is a motif that threads through my first-year college writing course. I use poetry and films to help student write about identity and how they affect and are affected by social, political and ethical matters. For first-year writing students, understanding identity in a social context based on culture, ethnicity, race, family, and faith illustrates they are not in isolation and that “good writing means telling the truth” (Lamott, 1994: 3) and that truth should “provoke and disturb” (Brown, 2014: 324) their audience. However, first-year writing students cringe when it comes to writing, and some have a disdain for poetry. I have discovered it’s not the writing that causes students to cringe; it’s the topic. Accustomed to teachers telling them what to write, they complain about boring topics, and uninteresting subjects. In an effort to curb that type of student attitude, I let students decide their subject and topic—a specific issue about a subject—whether the assignment is the autobiographical narrative, poetry collection, or the I-search paper. This method has become my standard agenda when teaching introductory composition courses at Dutchess Community College for Introduction to Composition, at The Culinary Institute of America for College Writing and at St. John’s University for First Year Writing: Introduction to Composition. In addition to a scholarly, academic approach to writing, I encourage students to write about their passion, something they will enjoy thinking, writing, read- ing, and researching for several weeks, and to explore the topic from multiple perspectives and rhetorical contexts. When students have a personal connection to the topic, they become active participants in the narrative and the research in which the topic becomes a specific issue about a subject. For example, a student

© koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2018 | DOI:10.1163/9789004380677_005 72 Hooks chose the psychology of grief as a topic. He focused on personal and emotional problems and difficulties people faced with grief. He explored the effect grief had on identity. Thus, each writing assignments connected to the student’s topic. For example, the student’s poetry collection was about how he dealt with the grief of losing his father to cancer, and several classmates to suicide. His I-Search paper focused on how different people handled grief. During our fourteen-week semester the student had a personal connection with his topic. Therefore, the student became an active participant in the narrative and in the research imag- ining a scene “composed of people engaged in culturally recognizable activities with which the ideas being talked about have meaning” (Tannen, 2017: 361). Thus the topic for that student was not boring. Many first-year writing students also cringe when it comes to writing poetry. However, I use poetry to show students poetry is a narrative, another way to tell a story. Sometimes parts of their poems become part of their autobiographical essay or even their I-Search paper. Other times writing a poem helps the student see their topic from a new perspective. The technique used is imitative poetry. During the poetry workshop unit, each student deals with the same poetry form, structure, and subject matter, which makes the students more attentive and interactive in class. Poet Mary Oliver concurs, claiming “each writer becomes interested in and learns from the work of the other members” (Oliver, 1994: 4). This chapter discusses three poetry-writing assignments and three films used to teach first-year writing students how to use poetry as narrative and as autobiographical writing. Imitative poetry allows students to imitate the style and theme of a poem or directly talk back to the poet. Imitating is an exercise in mimicking the rhythm, language, style or subject of another poem. Mimicry and plagiarism are not the same. When a poet mimics, another poet has influenced her work; when a poet plagiarizes, she has stolen someone’s style claiming it as her own without citing or giving credit (Dierking, 2002: 7–10). The purpose of mimicking allows the student to consider elements such as a narrator, imagery, structure—beginning, middle, and end—figurative language, conflict, tone and sound all combined to create a noteworthy narrative. Done often enough, the student might be able to incorporate a specific trait admired by a poet. Moreover, a beginning student would learn very little if they were not allowed to imitate. Thus, transcendentalist Walt Whitman (1819–1892) influenced Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) and Langston Hughes (1902–1967). Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) influenced Terence Hayes. Robert Lowell (1917–1977) influenced Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) and Anne Sexton (1928–1974). Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) influenced Maya Angelou. In class, we look at Ginsberg’s poem Howl influenced by Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” and Hayes’ “Golden Shovel” influenced by Brooks’ “We Real Cool.” Written one hundred years apart