Deepening Understanding through Poetry

Well, hi there, Peter. It’s so wonderful to have you on the show today.

Thanks for having me. Good to be here.

wonderful. So would you mind just sharing a little bit about yourself and your journey?

Sure. So I’m located in Columbus, Ohio, home of the Buckeyes right now. I spent most of my career in Chicago and Oak Park, Illinois, with a couple of stints in London, England. And I came back here a little over two years ago to be close to my parents, sister, and nephew. And I’m doing poetry and programming, poetry programming in schools here. I started out working in social services with an organization called Jobs for Youth Chicago where I taught their pre-employment training workshop and some GED classes. And then I worked at a place called Neon Street Center for Youth as a caseworker counselor and education coordinator with unhoused youth and wards of the state. And then I went back to grad school here in Columbus and went into teaching full-time back in 1994.

So what led you to make that shift from being a social worker into teaching English and being in the classroom?

So my initial gig with Jobs for Youth, was teaching at a social service agency. And when I was the caseworker counselor and even the education coordinator, I realized I missed the impact I could have in the classroom. So I decided I wanted to go back and become a teacher and I had an English degree. So sort of by default, I became an English teacher and it was quite a career.

Wonderful. And so I resonate with that now. I will I do want to back up the as a Penn State fan. I do take issue with the Buckeyes from last weekend, but I’m just I’m going to digress, but I’m just going to say. But as you’ve made the shift over into teaching English, I know that part of your passion, a big piece of your passion is within poetry, specifically spoken word poetry. So I’d love to know.

Was that a part of your English curriculum? How did you first find that kind of fit?

So first off, I hated poetry as a student and I hated teaching it as an English teacher. It was my least favorite unit to teach. I did it because it required in essence. And I stumbled through it and I’m sure I made my initial students feel the same way I did about poetry. So one year about 1998, I brought back a former student, Jonathan Vaughn, who enjoyed poetry, was a good writer, and I said, Jonathan, you got to help me get some magic in the classroom around poetry. I’m destroying it in the worst sense, right? So he taught a lesson and it went very well. And at one point he brought up the idea of a poetry slam. So my students said, hey, could we try that? And I said, of course. I’d been to poetry slams. was in Chicago, the home of poetry slam. So we held a slam. And my thing is I never show scores. I don’t like that element of it but we held a poetry slam and the kid with the lowest grade in either of my sophomore English classes won. And it changed the course of the trajectory of his life and it made everyone look at him differently and start thinking about themselves a little bit differently. Certainly made me look at myself differently as an educator. So the following year, that summer I got together with a couple of other English teachers, Pat Staszak and Sally Frost, I almost forgot her name was so long ago. And we decided we were going to flip kind of the poetry, sophomore poetry unit on its head and make it very student centered, very contemporary work, spoken word, its connection to hip hop as sort of cousins from the spoken word movement. And from that, another student with the lowest score in his junior class won the poetry slam.

And that led to a transformation. His name is Dan Sully Sullivan. He’s one of my co-editors for the respect of Mike Anthology and went on to earn a double master’s degree and just published his second book. Right. So seeing those kinds of transformed me as an educator. And in 2001, I took a sabbatical to go over London and I went to the lowest performing borough there to see if this stuff could work there. And it was incredible. I stayed an extra year as a leave of absence and co-founded the London Teenage Poetry Slam and when I went back to Oak Park I said I’m done being a traditional English teacher I think I have something here that could have a real wide impact and since then I’ve been pushing into classes traditionally English classes getting kids writing and performing poetry.

So amazing. And the thing is, I mean, I’ve seen this with students that when you can engage them in this particular art form, it opens up a world to them that they weren’t aware of. don’t think that they untapped things within themselves that they weren’t aware of. And it becomes really powerful. With spoken word poetry, slam poetry,

For those who may not know what that is or they think they might know but they’re not really sure. Can you give us some like a framework of what you would consider to be spoken word poetry, slam poetry, and maybe an example of what that would look like?

Sure, so spoken word poetry has been around forever, Poetry was an oral tradition initially. The way I frame it is spoken word poetry is poetry that’s said out loud. And the hope is it’s not just reading it off the page in a monotone voice, but you’re trying to engage your audience with the poem, right? Slam poetry is poetry readings that are competitive.

Right. That’s essentially the difference. And a slam poem is going to be a spoken word poem in essence, because it’s spoken out loud. Now there are some people might debate on that point, but what I was always taught when I was in London, I was a founding member of an amazing writing collective called Malika’s Kitchen, co-founded by Malika Booker and Roger Robinson. They’ve gone on to win the largest prizes in the United Kingdom as page poets. and what they stressed as well one of my poetic heroes, first poet I brought to work with my students, Patricia Smith, they always stress page before stage, right? So we’re gonna work on the craft on the page before we bring it to the stage. And then I always believe in the notion of sincere enthusiasm. So when you get up to share your poem, if you’re a shy person like I am, you can’t be your shy self, you have to be a bigger version of yourself, but stay true to yourself as well, where we’re not looking for an actor or… actor’s rendition, it’s your poem, but you gotta say it like you mean it. So that’s my explanation of how I define spoken word poetry and slam poetry.

Yeah. Are there ever any riff-offs in a slam poetry?

What do mean by riff-offs?

So in some examples that I’ve seen that students almost improv back and forth based on their original piece.

So that’s freestyling. So that’s more in the hip hop world than the poetry world to have freestyle competitions. Now my students back in the late 90s after showcases would always have rap battles, freestyling with one another. Or cyphers where they’re in a circle and they’re passing it off and it’s all extemporaneous. But in terms of poetry slams, typically speaking, it’s something that’s been written and oftentimes memorized and then presented.

So now when you’re guiding students in this work, are there specific frameworks in terms of, like are there specific pieces that you want your students to be working towards, for example, specific kinds of rhyming or couplets or frames that you’re having them do, or is this kind of whatever they want?

So typically I teach free verse, right? I’m gonna teach up some poetic devices and to avoid cliche. And I’m partial to personal narrative poems, right? Cause again, I hated poetry, but I enjoyed reading and teaching novels and short stories. So I like there to be a story there. And I want to learn about students. know, part of the beauty of this is it builds empathy, builds a sense of community and you know, teaching in London, teaching in Trinidad, teaching all over the United States, right? It’s helped me develop empathy as a human being and as an educator. It helps the teachers develop that, helps classmates develop that. So for me, it’s a free verse, teach metaphor, simile, personification, maybe some end rhyme here or there. Maybe I’ll do a form like the guzzle, which has repetition and sound elements, or the golden shovel form where there’s a particular way it’s gonna be, but generally speaking, it’s gonna be free verse. I don’t want them handcuffed by the notion that they have to rhyme, particularly use and rhyme because it limits their vocabulary. Now, eventually I’ve had plenty of people, we had a hip hop wing, plenty of people that went on to just rhyme, but first they developed some of their other skills. So it wasn’t a Dr. Seuss rendition in essence.

Gotcha. And when you have, when you’re working with students in that capacity and you just talked about empathy and learning so much about our students, I remember my daughter actually did this last year in her 10th grade English class and she came home with a piece that was about something that happened to her when she was younger that we didn’t know about that. Just, I mean, it made me cry knowing that she had been carrying something like that. Have you ever had that kind of vulnerability with students happen and

Have you worked through that in a classroom setting?

Yeah, I that happens quite often and usually it’s a very healthy thing. I usually get to know the school social worker, certainly at Oak Park I did and in London, so we could make them aware. Particularly if you become a mandated reporter, then you’re a mandated reporter, right? So if someone’s talking about harming themselves, it would be hard. And in some instances, I remember in London, a young girl, she was probably 12, 13 years old, revealed that she was being abused by a family member.

and we went to the social worker and she was removed from that setting until it became safe again, right? So in some instances, it’s for whatever reason it is, writing poetry, like with your daughter, it taps into something with some young people where they’re able to share something that otherwise they either felt they never had permission to share or they hadn’t even thought about necessarily.

But again, it builds that classroom empathy. Let’s say someone writes about their parents are going through a divorce or they lost their cousin over the weekend, their cousin was shot. Right? If that comes out in a poem, sometimes there’s someone else in the class whose parents just went through a divorce or who had a family member who was shot recently and suddenly they’re able to bond to be supportive, more supportive of one another. And certainly the teacher gets insights that for whatever reason, not even in a personal essay, is coming out.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I wonder, now your program itself has produced three, yes, three national young poet laureates. What specifically about your program and this approach do you feel really taps into that student potential and the ability to share so openly when maybe they couldn’t before?

And just to clarify, so there are two National Youth Poet Laureates programming. So one, Kara Jackson was through the Library of Congress and Urban Word. That’s the one that Amanda Gorman won a couple of years prior. And then the other is Scholastic Arts and they have four or five. So it’s National Youth Poet Laureate of the Midwest is what our students, so that was Natalie Rose Richardson and R.C. Davis. But I would say it all comes down to what I learned from Alika’s Kitchen, being a member of that, and from Patricia Smith and

My school was incredible in allowing me to bring in international renowned poets to do workshops with our young people. So Terrence Hayes won the National Book Award. Tiamba Jess won the Pulitzer Prize, Patricia Smith, as I said, was a Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist. Kwame Dawes, Adrian Matika, who’s the poetry editor of Poetry Magazine. Franny Choi, all these people we brought in and basically it built a skill set and the notion of craft that then became ingrained in our programming taught me to be better at this. When we would do showcases after school, our poetry showcases, there would be two or three rounds of critiques and editing on their piece before they would be able to bring it to the stage. And we would develop captains of those groups.

So someone who’d been in three or four showcases could become a captain. And then they would start giving feedback before it would come to myself or my sponsors of the club, my co-sponsors, right? So it developed this notion that, this craft is something we’re really proud of. And I don’t want to share something out loud other than the initial draft, but I want to share something that I’ve redrafted and I’ve gotten feedback and I’m hungry for that feedback to make this more original, more interesting, more surprising.

Yeah, I was gonna ask about how you look at this as a craft. So many artists specifically talk about the craft, but I think it’s sometimes this hidden, like, what exactly do you mean by the craft? like a muse, but I love how you’ve described that, that this is really about revision and going back and getting better each time and looking for the gaps and being willing to be open for that and not kind of hold your darlings and keep getting better from that feedback over and over. You’ve talked about now being in Chicago and being in London and how both of those experiences have been so worthwhile to your own craft. I’m wondering how they’re so different in terms of cities and cultures. How have you fused them or what you’ve learned in those two cities in how you teach and approach poetry?

Yeah. So again, I learned for instance, being in London, one of my schools, I brought a little booklet. This was Kingsland Secondary School in Hackney in London. And back then there were about 800 total students and they spoke 49 different languages in that school. So they had emigrated from all over the world. Right. So I learned about the wider world made me reflect on myself and my privilege. Right.

Students, you know, it might be students from 10 different countries in the same classroom. They’re learning about distinct elements of each other’s cultures, as well as where they overlap and where they have similarities. So all of that carries over to myself personally as an individual, but as an educator. And I’ve also been exposed to a wide range of poets. So one of my former graduate students from London, Raymond Antrobus,

There’s now this award-winning poet. I use one of his poems in our opening unit pretty much every year, which is the first time I wore hearing aids. And we use that as an entryway in, OK, so Raymond’s telling about his experience first time wearing hearing aids. Let’s think about the specific things. And then what are some of the broader reaching universal things? And now you think about a first that impacted you, and you’re going to be writing about that.

So I wouldn’t have been exposed to Raymond Antrobus had I not lived in London and been told about him. Sully is actually the one who introduced me in Chicago, but then when I went back to London, I looked him up. So I’m bringing in those kind of world perspectives to the classroom. I’ll use a Roger Robinson poem. So he’s British, but he spent much of his childhood in Trinidad. So he’s accessing that, and that’s widening the world for my students here in the Buckeye State, for instance.

So outside of bringing in cultural aspects and components into the work you’re currently doing, which I think is amazing, are there any other ways that you found opportunities for integration across content areas, maybe science or math or any kind of other content that we might be looking at?

So I’ve attempted in math and can’t say I succeeded. History for sure. So I’ve worked with a lot of history classes. And one of the things, it deviates a bit from what I was saying with personal narrative. But sometimes we’ll do persona poems where they’re writing from the perspective of someone they’re studying in history or someone from that time period and trying to develop a sense of empathy through that to do some research about this person and then try to speak through their voice as authentically as you can. So that’s one thing I would do with history classes in particular. I’m sure there are people who would be better at it in terms of math and science, but I have not been able to successfully do that, at least in my mind.

No, I mean, it’s difficult in some of those other areas to do that. But I think, especially in your example of persona poems, and if we expand that perhaps even into music in terms of having your lyricist and a musician together, I just actually saw Sara Bareilles do this with a perspective of Obama currently watching this year’s election here in the United States. So, which was a really interesting assignment, I think, for anybody. What would a previous president be thinking as they’re watching a current election happen? So, having something along those lines, even just connecting with another art form, I think, is probably super important for what you’re working on with students.

So now you’ve co-edited Respect the Mic, which celebrates 20 years of your program’s work. What was it like to put that collection together and how do feel it captures the spirit of your students’ voices?

Well, that was a beautiful process. So I had three amazing co-editors. So the aforementioned Dan Sully Sullivan, who came through our program helped run the program with me. And then two poets who were fortunate enough to learn from doing master writing workshops, Franny Choi and Hanif Abdurraqib, who now lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he grew up. So, but we got a lot of input from current students at the time and alumni, including the title. And our publisher was great about that. They wanted that kind of input. And we also had alumni help with the organization of things. Asia Calcogno comes to mind, someone who’s in the book, but also helped out. She earned her MFA. She was very helpful. Grace Fonda, another former student who’s in the book who earned her an MFA, right? So we leaned on them to help give input along the way before it got into the hands of the four co-editors. and I think it captures the spirit about 60 % were written while they’re in high school, 40 % when they’re in college or beyond. So Sully was probably 35 years old when he wrote the poem that’s in the book. So it has a wide range generationally, but there was a lot of interplay. And since 60 % of them were in high school, they were in the the program at the same time and maybe were influenced by an A Van Jordan or a Patricia Smith who came in and they were in that workshop together. So I think it does a pretty good job of showing the diversity of the voices that came through that program and the quality of it. think 13 of the poems were selected by Poetry Magazine to be published there. We had poems for Poem a Day and the Academy of American Poets, poets.org.

So, you know, I’m biased. I think it’s strong poetry, but we had outside sources that agreed with that.

So walk me through what it would have been like to go through one of these units that they produce one of these poems. So for a teacher who’s listening to this and they’re like, how did he do this? What are the steps that you take in order to frame this out? What does that look like?

So at this point, what I’m doing here is we’re using Respect the Mic Anthology as the first semester textbook. So typically the first day is a buy-in day, right? Because most students are like I was. They’re not fond of poetry as a medium. They don’t see themselves wanting to be a poet, right? So I try to demystify that process and talk about athletes like a Zion Williamson or Damien Lillard or someone like Olivia Rodrigo who write poetry, but they’re not considered quote unquote poets necessarily, right? So part of it is buy-in and then it’s, I teach them about our enemy in poetry, which is cliche. One of our allies, which are striking lines, which are often poetic devices. And then I show that interplay with music. So we look at music lyrics and then backward design. Okay, so Lil Wayne said this, what poetic device did you just use here? How did he show us this instead of telling us?

And then the other skill that I learned from Roger Robinson, who learned from Kwame Dawes, which is the idea of specific incident. So to ground a poem in a singular moment, ground the poem in a singular moment. And again, I’m going for personal narrative poems, but not vague always, this always happens, that always happens. But this happened this particular time. And then she would show us who was there, when it happened, where it happened, what happened.

So that first day it’s kind of developing that stuff and then we do a first poem. At least this year we’re doing that off of the Rehmat Antrobus. Then the next three days we’re choosing a couple of poems from the book and we have a free website that has videos for 70 of the 76 poets where they’re sharing what they wrote. Sometimes they’re talking about the writing process or giving writing advice. So we’re doing that and then saying, okay,

What’s your favorite striking line? What poetic device were they using there? What are you getting out of this section of it? Blah, blah, blah. And then we come up with, we have writing prompts that are on the website. And then I expand on it when I’m in classrooms that were inspired by the poem that we looked at. And then they’re collecting writing prompts that speak to them and then give them some writing time in class to write a first draft of something inspired by one of the two poems from that day. We do that for a few days. So now they’ve written presumably four drafts of poems, four different poems. And then that Friday we bring them up and we do things to cut the tension. We bring them up in groups. We have them say their name out loud and the audience responds. So I’d say, hi, my name is Peter. The audience would say, hey, Peter. And then a student came up with this idea because the natural inclination is to say, I suck at poetry, right? So they have to say, and my poem is good. And the audience reflects back, yes, it is and then they share their poem and then we might do crazy waves to their teacher when their group is done. All these things to kind of cut the tension, right? Because public speaking is terrifying, especially when it’s a poem that they’re not confident in. So that fifth day is going to be that poetry cafe day or second semester we might do the slam. So that’s a typical timeline of the first week at least.

Yeah, thank you. That’s so helpful. Before I let you go though, one of the things that I know all teachers are thinking right now is how do you score something like this? How do you even determine a winner when you do a poetry slam when, I’m sure, these personal pieces to students that have been taken and all the time that has been taken with them? What does that look like for you?

Well, it’s not easy, but what you learn over the years is so typically we have the students vote anonymously for one another. And, know, by the end of the week or the two weeks at this point of doing this, they, get a sense of what’s, what is quality writing, right? And what’s a compelling story. Now, sometimes the compelling story might get weighed higher and sometimes it might be the quality of the writing, but generally they get it. And then when we get to a point where we have guest judges, I give them a

score sheet, but I’m not looking at the numbers. I’m going to ask them to rank order. And that’s again based kind of on a feeling, but what I tell kids is on any given day there could be a different champion, right? It depends on the mood of the people in the room. It could be your delivery was a little bit more powerful this time. Who knows? So there’s a lot of randomness to it. But on the other hand, because we know that cliche, like if someone comes up and is saying roses are red, violets are blue, all I have is love for you. You know, people are going to say, that’s cliche. We’ve heard it before. So there are some poems that kind of, they know, all right, that that’s not going to be a winning poem or someone who just tells a story and there are no poetic elements. They might appreciate the story elements, but they’re going to be like, yeah, but it’s not quite a poem. So I think in the end, it’s like appreciating art, right? And there are competitions like in London, I’d go every year to c at the portrait gallery they had a pop up competition where they had the winning painting and what that’s you know comes down to a matter of taste ultimately

Yeah. Now, have you ever had students who just refused or just maybe wrote? So how do you handle something like that?

You know, I try to use rationale. I try to use the science that fear and excitement elicit the exact same physical response. So with younger kids in particular, I’ll say, I’m not scared. I’m excited. Repeat after me. I’m not scared. I’m excited. Right. I also use the notion that this is great practice for job interviews. And if you want

You don’t want to get to a job interview where it’s a panel. It’s your fourth interview for a job you’d really want. And you have to talk about yourself in front of a group and you haven’t done it before because you’ve given into your fear, right? So this is practice in a safe environment to help your body and mind realize you’re not going to die, even though it might feel that way. Your heart might be beating really quickly, but you’re going to survive it. And you got to lean into that fight or flight and you got to, you got to fight the fight through this.

So that’s the rationale. Sometimes there are kids that are just too scared and it might take them until the next time around. But generally because of those other techniques I use, once they see their classmates get up there and they didn’t die, right? And they kind of had fun up there, it’s usually easier to cajole the rest. I also try to let them pick their spot. So all right, the first group, those who want to get it out of the way or those who don’t mind getting up there, all right, you’re the first group, come on up. All right, next group and so on and so forth. So little tricks of the trade that help grease the wheels, but ultimately every class there’s gonna be, or every other class at least, there’s gonna be one or two kids that you just can’t control to get up there.

Yeah, wonderful. Well, thank you so much for your time today and for allowing me and our audience to learn from you. It has been wonderful. For anybody who wants to learn more about your work, where can they connect with you?

Sure, I have a website that has contact page. it’s www.poet-educatorpetercon.org. www.poet.educatorpetercon.org. And then there’s a contact page. All right.

Fantastic. Wonderful. We’re going to put the link to that in our show notes so that everybody can make sure that they have easy access to that. Peter, thank you so much for today. I really appreciate it. You too.

Thank you. All right, take care.