Poets on Revue
We returned to the carousel strategy this past week in my American literature class. Both because I wanted to break from the pattern of prompted group work and because I thought the individual poems and poets we were examining might benefit better by this approach, I divided each of the five glass board spaces into four areas for responses to these four simple questions: What generally did you like about the poem, what did you dislike, what seems to be the mood of the persona and of the reader, and what do you think the poem might be saying? Yes these are broad and apparently simple questions, though not less relevant for that. Keep in mind that this is a sophomore-level survey course fulfilling a graduation requirement and so most of the students are not literature majors or minors.
We looked at three different poets and some of their representative poems on both Tuesday and Thursday. We had done close readings of some poems earlier in the semester (and will return to this method again) and I was trusting the students to apply that same kind of attention as they worked together this time. On both days, I chose five different poems by that day’s three poets to assign to each of the five spaces with the four questions, and then we began by having each group record their responses under the questions. After fifteen minutes of group discussion and writing, each group was asked to rotate to the next board area and read the responses left by the previous group. They were instructed to mark with a star any responses they agreed with and to add their own remarks. More responses and stars were added with each rotation as we continued this new pattern, and, therefore, less time was needed for each succeeding round until all five groups had each responded to the five chosen poems.
But what I most wanted to determine was whether this exercise would produce satisfactory academic insight. In the next phase, I visited each of the five areas of record and commented on the more pertinent remarks, a fairly easy task because almost invariably those were the points marked with one, two, or three stars. We looked at the work of Georgia Douglas Johnson, Amy Lowell, and Carl Sandburg on Tuesday and the work of Jun Fujita, T.S. Eliot, and Claude McKay on Thursday, and on both days there was student consensus on the vividness of the imagery and the frequent lack of rhyme schemes, which opened up occasions to discuss Imagism and free verse. Most important to me, however, was that the students recognize something beyond form and euphony. They did. Whether Lowell's sensual metaphors, Fujita's implied critque of the empty pursuit of capitalism, or Sandburg's homage to Walt Whitman, they noted many relevancies. As another case in point, the students also picked up themes of marginalization, feminism, and democracy. On Tuesday, for example, we were able to take Johnson’s image of the cage to indicate restriction in “The Heart of a Woman” and connect it to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s use of the image in his poem “Sympathy,” a poem we visited earlier in the semester, and on Thursday to connect that thematically to Claude McKay’s “The Harlem Dancer” with its sense of an implied cage of performance and expectation. As these brief samples may show, I was satisfied with the results, and with a few minor amendments to the procedure, I will be glad to use this approach again.
