Sandra K. Friday
To stay in their comfort zone a while longer, we will read aloud several free verse "po-hop" poems by the poet Poetri who appeared on Broadway in Russell Simmons' 2003 Tony Award winning
Def Poetry Jam
production. The poems we will read may all be found in the publication
Russell Simmons Def Jam Poetry on Broadway
. Poetri also has produced "Poetri: the beginning of Po-hop," a CD of several of his very popular poems, available at his website. Aptly classified as "po-hop," Poetri's free verse poems are a popular combination of poetry and hip-hop. Here too, students will have the opportunity to listen to the poems performed by Poetri, himself, and to try their own voices out on the funny and poignant poems in the book: "Urges," "Dating Myself," "Money," "Sometimes I pretend I'm Michael Jackson," and "Poet Rock Star."
Again, the underlying question for each of these poems is, "What is the relationship between how the speaker feels and how he sounds? How does the voice in the poem convey his feelings and attitude? How does the voice change during the course of the poem?" And, of course, the students will practice the skill of finding evidence to support their observations. Students need a lot of practice at finding evidence to support observations, not only for the CAPT but as a life skill. For that matter, my students need a lot of practice making observations.
The poem "Urges" is a litany of every kind of urge: from jumping over the counter at McDonalds where they never get his order right, and the urge to start yelling in the library because they're are always Shhhhshing him, the urge to go rob a bank on broke days, to the urge to cry in public. He explores what urges are, what kinds of situations prompt them, and why he doesn't follow through on most of them. This poem is a natural for my students to try writing about the kinds of urges
they
have. Illustrating their poems on "Urges" should be a lot of fun for visually creative students.
In "Dating Myself" the young man whose voice we hear is trying to find a way to cope with the rejection he feels that no one seems to want to date him and be his girl. He comes up with the brilliant idea that he will date himself because as he says,
. . . you know how women are
once they see you with someone
all of a sudden now they want to get with you! (Simmons, 65)
While he puts on a brave front, and sounds as if he really has found the answer to his dilemma, underneath his humor and cleverness, it seems obvious that he is trying to make the best of his pain. But, from the students' point of view, they might speculate on whether they think the voice is trying to mask the pain that flows just beneath the surface or whether he really is satisfied with his rather unusual solution to the problem. Students will demonstrate how they think he feels by reading aloud and showing how they think he sounds. To answer the question, "How are attitudes and feelings expressed through the speaker's voice?" students will need to track the speaker's feelings and attitudes through the seven stanzas of this poem, finding evidence for their observations. In many of the poems we will read, the voice expresses a progression of feelings and attitudes, sometimes easy to discern and sometimes very complex. One of my lesson plans focuses on this activity.
Because students will be creating their own representations of many pieces they are reading and
acting,
if you will, it seems most effective to separate the works by genre, progressing from poetry, to short, short stories, and concluding with autobiographical excerpts, in each case observing who feels trapped, with no way out, who feels trapped but is strategizing a way to get himself or herself out, and finally, who has managed to liberate himself or herself entirely. These observations are critical if students are to develop an awareness of how attitudes and feelings are the force behind the voice in the literature and the force behind their own voices; and it makes the goal of liberation clear, i.e., helps the students see it as a matter of stages. As I expressed earlier, students will reflect on the text we discuss, make observations, and find evidence for their observations for both the literature we read and their own pieces of writing.