On May 16, 2019, 25 teachers and community
leaders met at William Paterson University in New Jersey to plan how to
incorporate into classes and programs the 2020 centenary celebration of women’s
suffrage in the United States. The
conference organizers, presenters, and participants were mostly history
professors and teachers, with a few exceptions: next to me was the program
director for The Girl Scouts. A museum curator for the Vineland Historical and
Antiquarian Society and the Communications Officer for the NJ Historical Commission
told us about their resources. Across the room was the other English teacher. After
Lucia McMahon offered us illuminating slides and historical perspectives on “The
Movement is a Sort of Mosaic: A History of Women’s Suffrage,” we formed small
groups to create “Lessons and Activities.” This first paragraph is written as a
traditional historian would report on an event—numbers, dates, places, actions,
ideas, temporal sequences, causal links.
Aside from my mentioning where The Girl Scouts director sat, there is little
sense of the felt experience of being there or why it mattered.
What is missing in my
report is the human element—that the only person of African descent ate his
lunch alone, while the youngest woman, blond hair streaming down her back, sat
with three male admirers; that although the room was cold, the horseshoe arrangement
of the tables invited a sense of inclusion; that the Skyped conversation with
Margaret Crocco from Michigan State University so angled and enlarged her face
that I felt both intimidated and cared for.
This paragraph is written more from a poet’s perspective—images, immediacy,
feelings, emotions, paradox. This is
something discussed in such blog posts as Left Brain/Right Brain and Landingthe Helicopter.
Significant differences
between a History and an English class became apparent to me when I met with my
small group—three high school History teachers, one English professor. We agreed that it would be inspiring for
students to consider the question of what factors should determine who should
vote. To contextualize, we would ask the
question of whether 16-year-olds should be given the vote. This would provide perspective
on and a debate prompt for what the purported reasons were for denying women
the vote. But many of their students were
from non-documented families, often impoverished, with English as a Second
Language.
And, as often happens
when teachers meet for the first time, the conversation drifted toward the constraints
of contemporary educational institutions—their classes were only 40 minutes
long; their lesson plans had to have clear parameters and digitalized assessment
outcomes; students were apathetic and there were behavioral problems; classes were
overloaded at 30-35. I asked my group about student demographics, to see if we
could reach students through what I realized was an English teacher’s strategy.
Why not, for example, have students
discuss what it means to be non-documented—and put it in the hypothetical for anonymity’s
sake—what it might mean to have no
say in what affects their lives. In my
classes, I would further analogize to the politics of classroom dynamics: “How
much of a vote do you have in university policies?”
No. No. No. All the
constraints. Can’t do that. They won’t
learn the historical facts. There’s no
time in the curriculum. They won’t open
up. There was little time for us to pursue
this conversation, but I was very grateful for our time together. I appreciated the astute historical questions
they raised, the perspectives, the focus and precision with which they pursued historical
documents and causal connections. If I
had had time, I would have convinced them of the importance of a poetic,
English teacher’s perspective in studying history.
Facts and
experience. Ideas and emotions. Mind and body. I write historical poetry—a genre both akin
to and significantly different from historical fiction. In my series and one-woman performance of ashes, ashes: A Poet Responds to the
Holocaust, I present poems from the points of view of 15 different persons
in response to the historical events. I
link these poems with reflections on how poetry matters to the study of history:
(1)
As John F.
Kennedy said on the inauguration of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst
College, “When politics corrupts, poetry cleanses.” How?
(2)
Poetry
shows us that the political IS
personal. Instead of the broad sweeps of
events during a war, let’s consider what it felt like to have to strip naked in
front of hostile strangers in a death camp.
Because
(3)
poetry is a lyrical
script for the body. Our ethnic, racial,
gender, age, physical, and other differences are superficial. What we all
experience—such as thirst, hunger, desire, fear—is in the human body. Poetry is, at its core, bodily images. Instead of
reports of how many days a prisoner was on hunger
strike, embody, in words, the
burn of bile and acid as the tube is pulled back
through a nostril. And so,
(4) poetry brings us back, literally, to our senses. It
wakes us up! Humans only vote for themselves
(and reflections, thereof). I imagine a student slunk in a back row fingering
his phone. Then she hears something that
touches her Wait! What! That’s like me. I’ve got her attention;
(5)
poetry asserts the
experience of the individual, which, paradoxically, affirms the universal. Yes, there are atrocious skinheads rampaging
in the United States. Let’s listen,
through poetry, to the vitriol of his sounds and rhythms as he speaks.
(6)
Poetry offers us an
antidote to what William Blake calls “mathematical things.”
Our speaker, a brilliant historian and teacher, couldn’t
remember some dates of events. And no one cared. It is a cliché of history classes that
students are bored with dates, and find that remembering them for tests is a
punishment. None of us
wants to be reduced to an ID #. Here’s the experience, through poetry, of how
a woman feels washing her arm where the Nazis tattooed numbers, numb-ers.
(7)
Poetry teaches us
imagination, and this, in itself, is important if we are to avoid repeating the
mistakes of our past. Graham Greene said, “Hatred is a failure of imagination.”
(8)
Poetry asks question: How
would You feel if?
(9)
Poetry speaks the
unspeakable. Poetry tells the truth. Poetry keeps us from going numb to defend
against horrors, because
(10)
Poetry provides a
structure, a space, a container for difficult experiences so that we don’t numb
out, so that we remain awake… It offers
the beauty of form, the music of words, the predictability of form—it is brief
and compressed enough so we can abide.
At its core, history is a process of preservation—of the past, the present, and the future. History gives us a sense of belonging
and hope. We study history in order to build and evolve. We study history, in Elie Weisel’s words:
“Lest we forget.” Tyrants burn
books. They assassinate poets before sculptors. In Afghanistan, today, if a young woman is
discovered writing poetry, her family murders her—an honor killing. In our English classes, let us promote
precise study of historical documents, artifacts, and ideas. In our History classes, let us promote feeling,
personal engagement, embodied experience, and the empathy that poetry uniquely inspires. In both, let how we teach model what we
most passionately want for our
students.
My
greatest proof that poetry matters to history is that audience members often
come up to me after my performance of ashes,
ashes to tell me that although they have studied the Holocaust, some
extensively, hearing the poetry they finally get it.
Works Cited
Cover Art: https://www.facebook.com/poetrymattersproject/
Supporting Blog Posts
Landing the Helicopter
Left Brain/Right Brain
