Some notes on Teaching Poetry in a Crisis

—by Cole Bellamy

“We’re rebuilding the plane in the air”

That was the metaphor administration kept using—it would be said at least once, in every one of the twice-weekly meetings—from March, when we closed the campus, until graduation in June.

In my dual-enrollment English class, the shutdown coincided with the end of a unit on Hamlet, and beginning a unit on poetry. The plan had been a straightforward end to the semester: something my high school seniors could handle amid the mad rush of prom, graduation, and the rest of the ceremonial dog and pony show. Of course, as we all know, that was not the case. When the order came to shut down and move to online learning, I was faced with the prospect of quickly changing everything to fit into a Zoom window.

The job of a teacher, much of the time, is to be an advocate for the material—to sell students on the importance of the subject—this is already a fraught prospect when it comes to poetry. In my nine years in classrooms, I’m not sure if I’ve ever fully managed to convince students of the importance of poetry; not for lack of trying, of course, but in the nakedly transactional age of Trump and Tik-Tok, it can be an uphill battle. Add in the obvious limitations of distance learning, and the looming global crisis, and I wasn’t feeling terribly optimistic.

Even in the best of times, online teaching can feel like shouting into the void—the organic flow of classroom discussion is lost, replaced with videos, message boards, and infrequent Zoom chats. Poetry has always been a staple of my classroom—it can be an excellent tool for education, as it distills so many of techniques of effective communication into a concentrated form. It’s also a natively communal medium, something that should be read out loud in a small group, as opposed to prose, which is best read silently to the self. Losing that ability to lead face-to-face discussions, and to emphasize the experience of reading and listening to poetry, presented a major difficulty. I tried to substitute with brief video lectures, discussion questions, but it couldn’t replace the experience of the classroom—when a class discussion is really “cooking” there’s nothing quite like it. Still, I woke up every morning, put on a shirt and tie, went out to my back patio, read poetry to my laptop, posted follow-up questions, and waited for the message boards to fill up.

Feeling out and responding to the needs of students can be difficult enough face-to-face, and nearly impossible at a distance. We always hope that students will let us know what they need, but it isn’t always so simple. It was in our discussion for the poem ‘Lineage’ by Margaret Walker that the character of the class changed. The poem is one that I’ve taught many times, it looks into the past, into the speaker’s ancestors, searching for strength in a difficult time. It ends with a pointed question “My grandmothers were strong. / Why am I not as they?” I asked for students to discuss how the author created an emotional reaction in the poem, and that opened the flood-gates. Students began sharing their anxieties about the pandemic, their doubts about the future, and the feeling of being suddenly derailed right on the cusp of the rest of their lives. That was my cue to shift focus, away from what we can learn from poetry—how it can inform our sense of language and helps us become better communicators—to what poetry can do for us—how it can provide us with words to fit what we might already be feeling, how it can let us know we are not alone in those feelings. I shifted my focus to poems that deal with isolation, grief, disappointment, and the possibility of hope in difficult times. I also moved toward covering and discussing more contemporary work-—recent poetry that I had read and enjoyed. My students particularly liked ‘February and my love is in another state’ by Jose Olivarez, ‘Ruminant’ by Clodagh Beresford Dunne, and ‘America’ by Sarah Maria Medina.

I would love to say that my online poetry unit was a glorious life-changing experience for everyone involved, a spark that starts a life-long love of poetry; realistically though, I’ll settle for the possibility that I was able to provide some comfort and stability during a difficult time.

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Cole Bellamy is a writer and educator from Tampa, Florida. He is the author of three collections of poetry: Lancelot’s Blues, The Mermaid Postcard, and American Museum, and his work has been featured in The Louisville Review, Penumbra, Defenestration, and most recently in Muse/A. He teaches creative writing at the Morean Arts Center, and blogs about Florida history, nature, and culture.

Who’s Afraid of Insta-Poetry?

by Cole Bellamy

From time to time, I get a book in the mail and get asked to review it for the local alternative weekly. It’s a fun little side gig, a review pays about enough for a good dinner, and I get to keep the books. Earlier this year, I was sent a copy of Nikita Gill’s Your Heart is The Sea from Thought Catalog Press, I wasn’t really aware of Nikita Gill before, and I was only vaguely aware of the phenomenon of young poets finding fame (and publishing contracts) by appealing directly to readers through social media outlets like Instagram or Twitter. Sure, I had heard of Rupi Kaur, and knew she sold a lot of books, but I didn’t really have much of an opinion of her work one way or the other. Your Heart Is The Sea was my first introduction to made-for-social-media poetry; ultimately, I gave the book a mixed review (it contains some good poetry, but should have been edited down into a shorter, better, book), and I was left conflicted.

On one hand, I am absolutely in favor of anything that gets people reading and writing more poetry. On the other, we’ve already seen what the strange crucible of social media has done to politics, personal relationships, and discourse, what will it do to poetry? While poets have always used the technology of their time to reach readers and express themselves (even Dylan Thomas was a radio star); media platforms like Twitter and Instagram are designed for quick consumption and immediate reaction; perhaps poetry is to be digested slowly. Furthermore, judging the success or failure of creative work through the metric of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ can tempt a creator to pander, to go for the most immediate reaction. Our current political reality shows us how the feedback machine of social media doesn’t exactly reward a person’s best impulses, and I can’t help but be suspicious of poetry born out of a system built for instant gratification.

Still, new forms of media and communication have the potential to further democratize poetry, allowing for more diverse voices to reach wider audiences. It may also serve as a gateway, for bringing more people in contact with the medium, which I can only see as a good thing. I suppose the risk is that with greater breadth, there may be a loss of depth; that immediacy comes at the cost of complexity. What we may be experiencing are the simple growing pains that come along with any jump in technology, poetry is not immune to the currents of larger culture, further, it has a responsibility to respond to the world as it is now, and to meet reach out to readers wherever they may be.

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Cole Bellamy is a writer and educator from Tampa, Florida. He is the author of three collections of poetry: Lancelot’s Blues, The Mermaid Postcard, and American Museum, and his work has been featured in The Louisville Review, Penumbra, Defenestration, and most recently in Muse/A. He teaches creative writing at the Morean Arts Center, and blogs about Florida history, nature, and culture at www.FloridaIsAVerb.com.

Failing at Poetry: Some notes on Creativity and Risk

by Cole Bellamy

There is no progress without experimentation, this is true in poetry as well. Poets seek to alter perception and to push the boundaries of possibility, through the skillful manipulation of language. To form new techniques, and explore new possibilities, experimentation is necessary; but of course, most experiments fail. To be experimental, then, is to accept and celebrate the necessity of failure. It’s simple enough to retain and continue a tradition, to adhere to a proven formula for success. All art forms have these formal traditions, and in fact most of the structures in our lives have them: expectations, assumptions, the obvious.

There is charisma in taking risks, and conversely, something that takes no risks can become a soulless empty product. Still, a failure that happens through taking a risk is more interesting, more passionate, more beautiful, than the successful execution of something that we all knew would succeed. Your home-made moonshine-powered ornithopter shaking itself to pieces the second you try to turn it on is infinitely more interesting than successfully starting your mass-produced car on the first try. The trouble, of course, is that we live in a culture that emphasizes success over all other things, that focuses on goals and outcomes, rather than on processes—in this context the car is superior to the ornithopter, because all that matters is getting where you need to go. In our day-to-day life, of course, failure is punished brutally, and while our culture fetishizes “risk-takers” we often lose sight of the fact that risk taking can be extremely costly practice- only available to the most privileged people. Poetry, however, is a relatively low-cost activity, one that makes experimentation, and failure, more widely available.

Even in poetry, though, there is still a doctrine of success. Success could mean publication in a prestigious journal, a teaching post, or just thunderous applause, and these things can often be accomplished through using tried techniques, largely through observing what has worked before, and mimicking it- there is an already-blazed trail to follow. This is still be extremely difficult and rewarding work, but there are established steps to follow to get a desired expected outcome. In this way, poetry can become a tool, yet another stick for fishing out termites, another skill to help us survive. We can write poems to impress people, to make them fall in love with us, to grieve, to process trauma—and these are, mostly, perfectly good uses for poetry.

Still, for those who make poetry their life’s work, the discipline demands we keep going deeper. Poetry is one of the few things that gets more difficult as the practitioner gets better. So, to keep progressing, to keep moving forward, we need to accept, and even celebrate, the inevitable failure that comes with experimentation. Learning to accept failure, however, can be incredibly difficult, especially for those of us who grew up in a culture that regards any failure as shameful.

A poem is a hand-made thing, and one of the reasons why we may love a poem is that we can see the imperfections in it: the reflections of the failures and the weaknesses of the poem’s creator. In this way, poetry can stand as a counterpoint to the aggressive doctrines of industrial culture- it can challenge the insistence that our creations only exist to perform a task efficiently, and without necessary complication.

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Cole Bellamy is a writer and educator from Tampa, Florida. He is the author of three collections of poetry: Lancelot’s Blues, The Mermaid Postcard, and American Museum, and his work has been featured in The Louisville Review, Penumbra, Defenestration, and most recently in Muse/A. He teaches creative writing at the Morean Arts Center, and blogs about Florida history, nature, and culture at www.FloridaIsAVerb.com.