What's The Point Of Studying Poetry And Then Writing Essays?

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We spent a month reading poetry from the Harlem Renaissance in our English class. Then Mr. Ward—that’s our teacher—asked us to write an essay about it. Make sense to you? Me neither. I mean, what’s the point of studying poetry and then writing essays?

When I was at the NCTE Convention this past November, I attended this one session where a woman talked about an after school literacy club she began for fourth and fifth grade girls.  All the books have female authors and protagonists.  I wrote down her entire reading list and bought every single book for Elsa for her eighth birthday in January.  The book I was most eager to read myself was Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, which was a National Book Award Finalist in 2014.  I finished it yesterday.  It was awesome.

Brown Girl Dreaming, in short, is an autobiography told in a series of poetic vignettes, divided into five sections, covering Woodson’s birth in Ohio, her childhood in South Carolina, and her adolescence in New York.  I especially enjoyed the middle sections that take place in South Carolina where Woodson and her siblings were raised by their maternal grandparents as their mother strove to re-make her life in New York.

The book made me think of Nikki Grimes’ Bronx Masquerade (2002).  Although Grimes’ book is fiction, it tells the biography of a school in the Bronx, and is told in a series of vignettes that are both in prose and poetry.  Both works also use Langston Hughes poems as framing devices for their narratives.  Brown Girl Dreaming uses “Dreams” while Bronx Masquerade uses “Harlem,” which is often referred to as “A Dream Deferred.”

The epigraph I used for this column comes from Tyrone, the protagonist—or at least the focalizing character—of Bronx Masquerade.  I thought of this statement Tyrone makes early in the novel because I wondered the same thing.  When I read Bronx Masquerade, I wondered how often teachers allow students to attempt to write poetry, or more provocative yet, to write something in a mixed genre like the novel itself.

For two decades I have said that one of the oddest things we do in the field of English is ask students to read, venerate, and study fiction, poetry, and drama, but then we rarely allow them to write in these genres, but only to write essays about them.

And yet there is such a rich tradition, not just of the principal genres, of course, but of mixed genre books.  Staying just within the realm of African-American writers, I immediately think of Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, in 1950, after the publication of Annie Allen in 1949.  Annie Allen, like Grimes’ or Woodson’s books, tells a biography but in a series of poetic vignettes.  In 1953, Brooks published a similar work, titled Maud Martha, which again tells the biography of an African-American woman in a series of vignettes, but this time the vignettes are in lyrical prose rather than in verse.  I discovered them about a decade ago and couldn’t believe I had never heard of them before.

Then there’s Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), which tells the story of a community in poems, prose, and drama, and sometimes a mix of two or all three in a single section.

Of course these sorts of literary experiments aren’t the sole provenance of African-American writers.  I’ve always loved Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology (1915), which tells the story of a community in a series of poems, each authored by a deceased member of the community.  Masters’ work influenced both Sherwood Anderson’s experimental novel Winesburg, Ohio (1919), which is a series of vignettes that tells the story of a town through the focalizing lens of a single protagonist, as well as Thornton Wilder’s experimental play Our Town (1938), which also tells the story of a town and uses the dead as narrating characters—as well as a somewhat supernatural narrator.

So, at the risk of belaboring my point, I wonder why we don’t allow our students to experiment likewise.  I know many will say that the students need to learn the rules before they can break the rules.  I kind of get that.  But I don’t think we need be quite so tight on the reins.  It’s a topic for a different day, but in Write Beside Them, Penny Kittle shares some great ideas about multigenre projects that her students compose as end of semester assessments.  I think it’s a worthy idea.

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