For me, the \u201creward\u201d of poetry in the classroom is seeing how paying attention to and concentrating on what\u2019s \u201con the page\u201d can lead students to glimmers of incredible reflection. The paradoxes and complexities of their lives\u2014navigating personal love, family grief, and desire\u2014are ballooned, brought to their front door, by the elevated phrasings, diction, and sounds of a poem. This often means that students must confront their own personal histories, come to understand themselves within a larger social context, and see their lives reflected in a deep engagement with words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, how to get students to pay attention? In the lesson that follows, I outline how to teach close reading skills to students who have no formal experience with poetry by emphasizing the importance of looking for patterns of repetition in Robert Hayden\u2019s “Those Winter Sundays<\/a>” and Drake\u2019s “Nice for What<\/a>.” When I first mentioned this lesson plan to some of my colleagues, they were excited, I think, by the possibility of pairing Hayden with Drake. The idea of pairing former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hayden with Canadian international rap icon Drake might not be obvious, but I wanted a way of getting my students\u2019 attention. At the time, many of them were re-listening to and discussing Drake’s album Scorpion<\/em> (2018) outside of class. I knew I wanted to discuss the importance of repeating sounds and literary devices that feature repetition in poetry, and introducing an old canonical poet, however moving, often leads to drowsiness in the eyes of my students, who rarely read poetry outside of my classes. That’s when I decided to tie in Drake. Hayden\u2019s lines, \u201cWhat did I know, what did I know \/ of love\u2019s austere and lonely offices,” reminded me of Drake’s song, Nice for What: <\/em>\u201ccare for me, care for me, you said you\u2019d care for me.\u201d Both Hayden and Drake use repetition to discover and define the love they have for the people in their lives, and tracking the repetition of sounds and word patterns provided me and my students a map to reflect on that love\u2014both personally and in the context of Hayden and Drake\u2019s lyricism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Both Hayden and Drake use repetition to discover and define the love they have for the people in their lives, and tracking the repetition of sounds and word patterns provided me and my students a map to reflect on that love<\/strong> . . .<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n Repetition forms the building blocks of rhythm and of the larger fabric of associations that make up a poem\u2019s spirit and architecture. It\u2019s a pattern-building, mnemonic process which instinctively informs the movement from attention to pleasure and is the joy of both reading closely and thinking about daily habits beyond language. Making my students aware of how daily experiences touch in us certain patterns and rhythms is important to setting the tone for our conversation about Hayden and Drake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I begin the lesson by discussing with students how repetition informs our everyday lives\u2014walking through the front door of our homes, waking up in order to get to work on time, the evening sunset. I ask them to write\u2014in list form\u2014for 7-10 minutes about the kinds of objects, people, and activities they return to on a regular basis. As most of my students are aspiring nurses already working in hospitals, we spend a lot of the time discussing how caring for people in clinical settings often means returning to them: managing prescriptions, performing tests, adhering to feeding schedules, etc. The discussion also returns to picking up children from school, which, for parents who are also students, often means managing time effectively. The larger theme which emerges out of our discussion is that repetition builds a sense of security into our daily lives: the comfort of healthy patients, the welfare of a child\u2019s safety. Although they might seem mundane, the commonplace acts of repetition we inhabit regularly have about them a metrical quality. They ensure the completion of tasks and build and relieve worthwhile tensions. They compel a kind of lyric attention, of memory and inspiration, and ask us to return to people and to things, giving us a larger sense of connectedness. This is what poems do, I tell my students. They ask us, quite literally and line by line, to return with our attention to words, to people, and to things. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I then hand out to students a one-sheet called \u201cClose Reading and Interpretive Claims\u201d or The Method<\/em>: a step-by-step approach to breaking down texts, objects, and images. The Method<\/a>, taken from David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen\u2019s book, Writing Analytically,<\/em> is a list-making procedure and writing exercise meant to give students a hands-on approach to close, active reading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The lesson on Hayden\u2019s \u201cThose Winter Sunday\u201d and Drake\u2019s \u201cNice for What\u201d focuses only on step 1 of the Method: locate and list exact repetitions<\/em>. Hayden\u2019s \u201cThose Winter Sundays\u201d and Drake\u2019s \u201cNice for What\u201d are perfect for The Method <\/em>because both artists use the repetition of sound and of a percussive vocabulary as instructions for understanding their work.<\/p>\n\n\n\nOn the Importance of Repetition<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
Robert Hayden and \u201cThose Winter Sundays\u201d<\/h1>\n\n\n\n