Poetry Matters to History

           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