Teaching Ferguson and Failing

I didn’t do a good job teaching my poetry students about Ferguson.

I know a lot of people are doing a good job. You should listen to them and follow their example. But I’m going to tell you about how I did a mediocre job, because I think (I’m not sure) that it’s better to do a mediocre job than not to address it at all; because I think we should be talking about what we tried to do, even if we didn’t do it right.

Last Monday night, the night the grand jury’s verdict was announced, I realized I was teaching the next afternoon:  an introductory undergrad course on reading and writing about poetry. I posted on Facebook that I was looking for poems and/or lesson plans that might help me and my students talk about what was happening in Ferguson, and my friends had great ideas. They posted links to the Atlantic’s version of the Ferguson Syllabus; Jennée Desmond-Harris’s list of Do’s and Don’ts for teaching about Ferguson; the NAACP petition urging the Department of Justice to complete its investigation of Michael Brown’s shooting; qz.com’s advice for white antiracist allies. They posted poems by Claude McKay, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, and Danez Smith (see a full list of poems at the bottom of this post.)

I guess I could have done a lot of different things. I still could—the semester’s not quite over. In The Chronicle of Higher Education, David M. Perry suggests doing a close reading of Darren Wilson’s testimony, which is a brilliant idea for an exercise in any humanities course: “I’m interested in language and power,” Perry writes, pointing out the dehumanizing/”superhumanizing” language Wilson used to describe Michael Brown. But I was teaching a poetry class, and it seemed right to talk about poetry. In particular, I wanted my students to engage with poems that people were writing now, poems that poets and activists I knew were sharing on Facebook and Twitter.  I made a PDF packet with Smith’s “not an elegy for Mike Brown” and Morgan Parker’s “I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background: An Elegy,” both of which either directly address or were published in response to Brown’s death this summer. I added Brooks’s “Boy Breaking Glass” to remind us that the discourse of “looting” and “rioting” that we kept hearing has a history, and that there was already language for critiquing that discourse.

I had read that list of Do’s and Don’ts, and I thought they were helpful, and yet I forgot to follow some of them.

The list said “Don’t be afraid to toss your existing lesson plan.” I sort of tossed it. I tossed half of it. A student was giving a presentation and I didn’t want to make him do it another day. And I was planning to give them a quiz on “Contemporary Poetry Packet 1,” the reading I’d posted on the course website weeks ago. I thought maybe doing a little free-writing on those poems before we talked about the new ones would help widen my students’ perspective on these poems as contemporary poetry. But I think those ten minutes would have been better spent talking about the Ferguson poems. I wish I’d scrapped the quiz.

My student’s presentation was on Billy Collins’s “Litany,”which seemed like the worst possible text to read that day. The most irrelevant.  It felt weird to be sitting there talking about why Collins’s tone—talky, wry, kind of irritated—was a contemporary tone, talking about how part of the point of the poem is that all metaphors—”You are the bread and the knife,/The crystal goblet and the wine”—have been exhausted, how “the plentiful imagery of the world” is in fact this barrel of dead metaphors to be divided up between an “I” and a “you.” Is that the only thing love or poetry can be in our postmodern, postlapsarian world: a power struggle over dead metaphors?

By the end of that discussion, the students had basically decided that poetry was worn out, that the plentiful imagery of the world had been used up.

The list said, Don’t try to make it colorblind.

Over the years I’ve found that my students tend to be most comfortable talking about oppression and atrocities that are over and done with: the racism that used to exist in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or during the Holocaust, or during “Civil Rights,” maybe even in the 80s or 90s, right before they were born. In this particular course, we’d already read plenty of contemporary poems, several of which addressed institutional racism, but even as I’d emphasized that these poems had been written recently, about the world we live in now, my students had kept returning to the ways in which these poems invoked, were really about, the past. They resisted the possibility that oppression could be here among us—this white teacher, this pretty diverse group of college students—as we sat together in class comfortably talking about the bad old days. I sound sanctimonious now, but I don’t mean to be. Who can blame them, for wanting to finish their growing up in a world that is already OK? Who can blame them, when I’m uncomfortable too? And then again, some of them must know, from experience, that we’re not post-race, but they don’t want to talk about it in this weird school space, or they don’t want to think about it, or they don’t feel safe. I’m trying to make it feel safer, or at least less hostile, but.

The list said, Do ask students what they want to know.

I did ask, sort of. Before we read the poems, I asked what they already knew—this is called Activating Prior Knowledge. A few of them knew about the verdict; a couple of Criminal Justice students told us how a grand jury works, told us that it was unusual to give so much evidence to a grand jury. But I talked a lot. I always talk a lot. As a teacher, I need to learn to listen more. I could have asked them what they wanted to know, what they had seen in their Facebook feeds, or on Twitter, or however eighteen-year-old college students communicate these days.

And then we were reading these poems about Ferguson that were contemporary and real, that were both earnest and clever, that were beautiful and ugly and angry. I asked a volunteer to read each poem out loud; we read them all in a row.

When we were done reading them, my students kept asking me, “Where did you find these poems?” I told them: people shared them on Facebook; they were in online literary journals; you can Google them. I actually know Morgan Parker (look out for Morgan’s next WEIRD SISTER post coming very soon!). They seemed genuinely surprised that people were actually writing poems about Ferguson, and that anybody who wanted to could just find them. I guess not everybody can find them; you need to know where to look.

We had said maybe all the imagery of the world was used up, but then we read the end of Morgan’s “I Am Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background: An Elegy”:

My ears leak violet petals.
I sharpen them. I sharpen them again.

This image is so strange and startling, so beautiful and gross and scary and powerful. We talked about it a little. We talked about what happens to the word “colored” in Morgan’s poem, how it takes on different meanings. My students read “I am/the color green because/green is the color of power” as unambiguously positive, and I’m not sure I do; but they saw power, and color, moving around in the poem, turning from something a person can be or feel into something that can be done to you, into “black type-/face in a headline with no name.” They saw how difference becomes violence: “I feel most colored when I am/thrown” against not only the metaphorical “sharp white background” but the literally concrete “sidewalk.” I asked them what it means for your ears to leak violet petals in the context of the often aestheticized violence against Black bodies the poem exposes:

I feel most colored
when I am thrown against a mattress,
my tits my waist my ankles buried
in veiny White. Everyone claps.

I asked them what it means to sharpen your ears when your body is already continually described not as a human body but as a dangerous weapon: are those sharp ears a weapon you can use? Is listening a kind of power? Can listening change things? I think we would have needed more time for them to make something of those last two lines, but at least they saw metaphors that were alive, even if they were partly about death.

In Morgan’s elegy and in Danez Smith’s “not an elegy for Mike Brown” (what an opportunity to talk about elegy as a genre) they also saw poets thinking about what poetry can do, whether it can make anything happen. Smith’s poem is as exhausted as Collins’s: it begins,

I am sick of writing this poem
but bring the boy. his new name

his same old body.

But the poem—this version, at least—also registers the possibility that poetry can do something: “I demand a war to bring the dead boy back,” Smith writes, but immediately revises that demand, first tentatively (“I at least demand a song”) then more assertively, or perhaps just with more resignation (“a song will do just fine”). In both elegies, the suggestion that poetry has real power—that it can produce something beautiful, redemptive, revolutionary—coexists with the possibility that poetry makes nothing happen, that you just wait, sharpening your ears, watching the smoke, waiting for the next body.

The list said, Don’t attempt to explain it to students before you explain it to yourself.

This is the thing I felt most guilty about when I left class. I came to class not knowing what I thought about violence and resistance, about the ways in which violence is raced in America—only what I felt. So when I talked with my students about the anger in the poems we were reading—Danez Smith “demand[ing] a war to bring the dead boy back,” pointing “above Missouri” to the “sweet smoke”; Gwendolyn Brooks calling the boy’s broken window “a hymn, a snare, and an exceeding sun”—and the fact that the attitudes expressed in the poems didn’t map perfectly onto the ideal of completely passive resistance that so many white commentators seem to think was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ideal, I hadn’t explained it to myself yet. I still haven’t explained it to myself. I knew that I felt angry when I read about St. Louis preparing for “rioting” and “looting” before the verdict was announced, as if everybody knew that the verdict would be unjust enough to incite widespread destruction of property, but didn’t care about avoiding the injustice, only about protecting the property. I knew that I felt angry when reporters predicted rioting and looting before the verdict, and focused their coverage on rioting and looting afterward. I knew that I felt angry when friends and strangers posted condescending, hand-wringing pleas on social media invoking MLK’s legacy of nonviolence. But when I tried to explain this to my students I was pretty inarticulate.

Later the Internet remembered that MLK quote: “a riot is the language of the unheard.” Later I read Mia McKenzie of Black Girl Dangerous explaining that you can’t call looting violence “because violence against property isn’t a thing.” If I’d had that language on Tuesday, I might have done a better job. Instead, I think (hope) (fear) I said something about understanding “riots” as “revolution.” “Listen,” I said in response to my student’s puzzled looks, “these poems aren’t advocating violence. No one is advocating violence. These poems are saying that our response to tragedy and injustice, and the language we use to talk about tragedy and injustice, is inadequate.” Or I said something like that, but less articulate. My students had already remarked upon and been moved by the irony of Smith’s juxtaposition of the abduction of Helen of Troy, which started the Trojan War, with the loss of a boy named Troy who

got shot
& that was Tuesday. are we not worthy

of a city of ash?

I worried that all I had added to the conversation was a sense, not that the narrative of “rioting and looting” was a false, racist narrative, but that you can either be for rioting and looting or against it, and that I, and all these poets, were all on the side of rioting and looting.

But if I’d waited until I had explained all of this to myself, I would be waiting a long time. And, as a senior faculty member told me in the hallway of the English building, where I weirdly accosted her and a friend of mine, another grad student, and kind of blurted, “I just tried to talk to my students about Ferguson, but I think I just made them think I was pro-riot,” maybe this is the kind of thing that will sink into their brains and wait there, and then someday something will draw it out and give it context and make it make sense to them. Maybe.

Maybe it meant something just to acknowledge that this was real, that this was worth paying attention to in school, that this was something a white person could care about and should care about, that Black lives matter to me, their teacher, that justice matters to me, their teacher, that I’m not just a grading machine spitting out midterms, an attendance enforcer, a cog in this perpetual-motion engine that moves them towards graduation, keeps them from graduating. When they asked “Where did you find these poems?” I was reminded that for many students, the classroom is its own dimension, with its own logic and rules. You do and say what you think your instructor expects of you, whatever you think you have to do and say in order to get an A, or pass the course. You don’t do and say what you really believe. You don’t think your instructor cares what you really believe, or what’s actually true. You live this classroom life, in which every paragraph has a topic sentence and poems are arranged into iambs and racism is an interesting theme from the Harlem Renaissance, and then parallel to it there’s your real life, with its frustrations and oppression and anger and fear.

As class was ending there was a clamor outside the window. Students—mostly Black students—came marching down the sidewalk, holding signs, ringing bells, clapping. My students looked out in surprise; they didn’t seem to have heard about this demonstration. Neither had I; I didn’t join in; I had to drive to Brooklyn and pick up my toddler. I was hoping to make it to Union Square at 7. I wish I had led my students out into the street. I also wish I had listened more and talked less. But at least they saw, out the window, on their desks, that the classroom is not (always) impermeable.

How do I know how much I am failing? Maybe more than I think, maybe less than I know. I could add another Don’t:

Don’t think of what happens in this class as your own failure or your own success.

I wrote to a student who was worrying about failing that I wanted her to pass the class, too. I didn’t want to fail her. Sometimes I don’t give my students what they need; sometimes they don’t meet me in the middle, or can’t, and I have to fail them. But my job is to keep on trying not to fail them, to keep on letting us try again.

POEMS

Black Poets Speak Out

Claude McKay, “If We Must Die”

Audre Lorde, “Power”

Gwendolyn Brooks, “Boy Breaking Glass”

Gwendolyn Brooks, “Riot”

Danez Smith, “not an elegy for Mike Brown” (video of Smith performing the poem, with different words)

Danez Smith, “Alternate Names for Black Boys”

Morgan Parker, “I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background: An Elegy”

Other poems from Apogee‘s “Stand With Ferguson” series

Natalie Eilbert, “What You Don’t Name”

Other poems from Entropy‘s “Bearing Witness to Ferguson” series

EDIT: More poems, suggested by readers!

Lyyne Thompson, “Sonnet Consisting of One Law”

Jason McCall, “Roll Call for Michael Brown”

Poems for Ferguson by Vanessa Huang and Aya de Leon

Dudley Randall, “Ballad of Birmingham” (suggested by Annie Finch as a model for alternatives to the Paris Review‘s “The Ballad of Ferguson, Missouri”)

Mahogany L. Browne, “a work in progress”

Latoya Jordan, “Rules for My Future Son Should I Have One”

Evie Shockley, “Improper(ty) Behavior”