Week 5, 6, 7, 8

Week 5 no one brought in their stuff to workshop, which was really disappointing. Instead we read "Franchise" and considered basic elements of setting- Aidan did the who what when where why + how equation. This was followed by a disinterested discussion of the ways in which these forms work. But things got a little bit interesting when our kids questioned the order of these tenets (and how many are needed in a successful beginning. It was hard to say, but we thought we should tell them that they needed to focus a lot on one of these details of setting, but to make sure to include the other details (it was hard not to suggest to just let them come, but we thought it better to insist on including them explicitly).

Week 6 we read "Franchise" aloud. I also got a fair number of poems from each class, which I looked over and gave comments on. Interestingly here, I found it problematic giving comments on the slam poems that the kids had done in another class (but which I accepted to look over, still). The slam poems were very emotionally charged, and I was careful to make practical suggestions, mostly thinking about how best to form the emotions of the poems and best deliver the knockout punch that slam poetry wants. But the form is troublesome for me- I've never been taught formally about slam poetry, though I've heard it before. The form itself seems to deny a straightforward way of reading it. Likewise, the form seems to thrive on a reckless abandon of formality, careful architecture, and like a beat poem, strive to deliver the experience fast and hard.

Some of the other corrections I made were easier because the poems were either free verse (not slam) or in the sonnet form. Free verse is difficult to correct in the way that slam poetry denies a form, though explaining the 'form' of free verse is extremely difficult (because there is a form, certainly). Instinctively, I tried to correct rhythmic problems, grammar, or course, and ways in which ideas ought to be connected and punctuated. Free verse is not the total chaos, though it can thrive in abstraction.

Week 7 we read "A Good Man is Hard to Come By." Aidan didn't touch on the question of racist language, which arose in the stories we read both in Week 7 and Week 8. We were extremely proud of our students for handling these stories in such a mature manner. But in both Flannery O'connor's story and Hemmingway's "The Killers," racist language can be telling of both the setting and the condition of the characters. In the event that the students confronted us about the offensive words in O'connor's story, we were prepared to justify the language's use by talking about the character's fate, and the ultimate redemption of good taste (and non-racist language). But in "The Killers," both of the killers go back and forth calling the cook of the lunch counter by his name and his common slur. The killers are more base characters than O'connor's grandmother, and their language reflects their class. It also somewhat reflects the common tongue of the time. There is no redemption for the killer's offenses at the end of the story, but besides the smear, the character Sam is treated no differently than the other prisoners. Obviously these words are inexcusable, but creative writing also offers a place for the most base of base human emotions. Racism is a tricky issue, but like I said, our students handled these powerful stories responsibly.

Week 4

Losing two consecutive weeks of teaching, the first due to the 8th grade's slam poet guest speaker and this last week due to our Fall break, we lost a lot of our curriculum. We had planned to workshop the last assignment (writing a metered quatrain with a rhyme scheme) and then to assign a sonnet to synthesize our metrical teaching. However, we had to adapt to time, so today we work-shopped the quatrains as planned and moved directly into free verse. Our last week of teaching poetry is next week, and we assigned twenty lines of free verse OR the sonnet, having briefly taught the structures and ideas of this form. We are also allowing those twenty lines of free verse to be broken essentially into as many poems as the students decide. Our hope is that they will create as many works as they can with this assignment, and maybe even feel as though they could write more.

Today we taught five poems to each class. "A Mayan Astronomer in Hell's Kitchen" by Martin Espada, "Thin Ice" by Gary Snider, "perfect white teeth" by Charles Bukowski, and "Sure Signs" and "A Summer Night" by Ted Kooser. While we talked a lot about the freedom of free verse, I think we did our best to impart the idea that free verse poems usually have a structure of meaning, although they don't adhere to any strict form. Our first class did a good job work-shopping each other's work, though we only got through several poems before we went into free verse. Both classes did a good job of analyzing the poems we taught, though things were smoother in the first class. In the second class, instead of work-shopping, some of the students read poems they had written in other classes after hearing our guest speaker two weeks ago. These poems were very good; one of the obstacles I found in work-shop was critiquing these poems because they were so emotionally loaded. Several of the students were moved to tears reading them and reading to each other. Aidan and I gave as much structural input as we thought was appropriate, but being slam poems and being extremely close to the students, we withheld a lot of the teaching here, and I think for the better because the accomplishment the students felt at writing something moving inspired them, I think, to work harder for the rest of the class.

Week 3

This week class was canceled because of an grade-wide assembly, which I was lucky enough to catch. The 8th grade principle introduced the speaker saying Ms. Gloria, a slam poet from Baltimore, helped her, three years ago, to overcome her son's sudden death through poetry. The principle had started to write following her 30 year old son's shooting, from point blank range outside of a nightclub in downtown Baltimore, and after being paralyzed with grief for nearly a year, she was able, with help, to return to her duties at school.

Ms. Gloria's poetry I think inspired the kids better than our classes have been doing. There was something about the way she was engaging them- she didn't try to teach, and slam poetry relies on performance and not form, sounding out more like hip hop lyrics with alliteration and style than with the meter in which it is delivered. I think the performance aspect- the fact that she was a show was important.

Ms. Gloria was also a story. She was black, mid 40's, medium build, pregnant. She described her first marriage and her drug addict husband in detail, recalling tearfully the night when she left him after he attacked her, junked out, while she was holding her two week old daughter. I think the kids, some of whom I've begun to talk with and who have stories of their own, were taken by her honesty and the fact that she's created something of her woes, something valuable and something that others can identify with. It's nice to see poetry put to use this way. And after crying, the kids were hysterical as Ms. Gloria moonwalked across the stage and described how different she was from Michael Jackson. She said, let me count the ways.

Week 2

Aidan summed things up pretty well in his entry. I just wanted to add a few of my own observations.

It's a shame that when we met the kids from our second class, they thought someone had made a mistake and didn't understand why they were there. I think that for these kids to be shocked by the fact that we were pulling them out of their normal classes and to even go so far as to view it as punishment (not that our teaching is punishment, I hope it's a step up at least, but that they thought they had done something wrong to deserve special treatment) says a lot about the way that remedial education goes (does it have to? really, I don't know).

The kids in our first class are all really interested in fantasy, which I guess is hard for me to identify with now, but at that age, I remember eating up Brian Jaques' books or the Foundation series.

It was hilarious what the kids chose to write about for their Haiku. Aidan and I were trying to teach the classes about traditional Haiku subjects like the season, loneliness, meditation and contemplation, etc. Some of the things we got, though, were rad skateboarding Haiku about Bam Margera and Tony Hawk or just shredding more generally on skates. We got poems about seasons- which let us know that we were getting through a little bit. But it was also cool, because the Haiku is such a minimalist snapshot form, to see just a glimpse into the heads of our kids. Soccer, pizza- what else is on their minds?