Carolyn L. Streets
Traditionally, poetry is often used as a teaching tool for language development and supporting literacy skills,7 but can also be considered as a “medium for exploring experience.”8 This speaks to how pedagogical models that incorporate social justice education benefit learning because students gain a broader understanding of power systems and dynamics, gain exposure to cultures other than their own, develop wider social awareness and perspectives, and can be motivated to become agents of change within their own communities. Consider poet Meena Alexander’s perspective that poetry, “reconcile[s] us to the world – not to accept it at face value or to assent to things that are wrong, but to reconcile one in a larger sense, to return us in love, the province of the imagination, to the scope of our mortal lives.”9 For this unit, learning outcomes intend to situate blackout poetry as a method for literary analysis. Blackout poetry, as an instructional method, leverages teaching tools that can help students analyze texts in deeper, more meaningful ways, and supports the Four Approaches to Social Justice Education because it facilitates depth and breadth of literary analysis as students take a deep dive into the explicit and implicit meanings(s) of the selected works.
It is helpful to recognize that blackout poetry is often conflated with erasure and protest poetry. The function of blackout poetry is explored in This Ocean of Texts: The History of Blackout Poetry, which seeks to answer the question-what is blackout poetry? The conversation notes, “Erasure poems depend on subtraction, whereas blackout poems depend on addition. This difference in methodology leads to an aesthetically different final product from erasure.”10 Protest poetry is historically understood as having both political and activist viewpoints and is thematically similar to blackout poetry calling into view issues about equality and social justice. Its primary objective is to “find fault with some existing current event or circumstance, often focusing on the misdeeds performed by a government upon its people, and it can also be a reaction to an overriding societal ill like war or racism.”11 For example, Browne’s poetic work “Litany,”12 is a prime example of protest poetry. Here, we see the poet’s commentary on her lived experiences as an African American woman. The reader also sees how Browne puts into conversation Nina Simone’s recording, “I Wish I Knew How It Felt To Be Free,” with her reflection that she is “still wishing for a certain type of freedom:”
I wish I knew how
It would feel to be free
I wish I could break
All the chains holding me
—Nina Simone
today, i am a black woman in a body of coal
i am always burning and no one knows my name
i am a nameless fury, i am a blues scratched from
the throat of ms. nina—i am always angry
i am always a bumble hive of hello
i love like this too loudly, my neighbors
think i am an unforgiving bitter
sometimes, i think my neighbors are right
most times i think my neighbors are nosey
Blackout poetry uses poetry as a source text in which the poet selects and leaves a handful of the original text exposed to form a poem. There is flexibility in which the poet creates blackout poems with some painting, collage, pen and pencil scribble, and crayon over selected pages of newspaper, books, and other forms of printed media. Despite its creative variations, blackout poems obscure the original source text, never removing its original wording, but instead rewording to create new, powerful meanings. In this style, consider again, Browne’s work as a blackout poetic piece:
today, i am a black woman in a body of coal
i am always burning and no one knows my name
i am a nameless fury, i am a blues scratched from
the throat of ms. nina—i am always angry
i am always a bumble hive of hello
i love like this too loudly, my neighbors
think i am an unforgiving bitter
sometimes, i think my neighbors are right
most times i think my neighbors are nosey
From this piece, the reader must consider the word choices- both visible and blacked out, and what those choices convey. Although there is a connection to protest poetry, this unit will utilize blackout poetry to help students synthesize texts, and it will introduce instructional moves for how teachers can use primary and secondary sources to create blackout poetry to help students learn about historically marginalized voices. This approach is a great opportunity for any English Language Arts or History course that requires students to engage in meaningful, authentic learning experiences with text to promote critical thinking. Poet Audre Lorde states, “Poetry lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before,” and through this unit, I seek to facilitate an educational environment that embraces critical reflection and conversation for students to build social justice perspectives. Unit objectives intend to: 1. Facilitate an educational environment that embraces critical reflection and conversation on critical social issues, and 2. Build social justice perspectives including the Black Lives Matter Movement (BLM) and stretching back to pre and post-Civil Rights Movement(s).
In alignment with state reading standards for literature expressed in the New Haven Public School English Language Arts curriculum, this unit intends to help students 1. Read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poems, at the high end of grades 6–8 text complexity band independently and proficiently, and 2. Analyze multiple interpretations of a story, drama, or poem (e.g., recorded or live production of a play or recorded novel or poetry), evaluating how each version interprets the source text. To support student learning, selected works of poetry from African American women scholarship may include the works of notable forces such as Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, and June Jordan.
This unit also folds seamlessly between Women's History Month in March and Poetry Month in April. As many schools recognize Women’s History Month and Poetry Month nationally and several resources exist to celebrate these months, teachers can find many online resources to support the learning objectives of this unit. Recommended sites are https://poets.org, https://poetryfoundation.org, and https://womenshistorymonth.gov. This unit draws inspiration from all of these resources including the Black Women’s Oral History Project and the Women, Gender, and Society archives accessible online at the Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute at https://www.radcliffe.hardvard.edu, and the archival records of female poets at the Beinecke Library at https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/. The target audience for this unit is upper middle school as the subject matter of the cited work is developmentally appropriate for this age level. It is also important to note that blackout poetry as an art or literary form can be applied to several subjects. For example, the social justice focus of this unit may complement history or social studies courses.
