Poetry for the People

Student Teach Poet, Facilitator
UC Berkeley, African American Studies
2015 – 2016

About

Poetry for the People (P4P) at UC Berkeley is an arts/activism program, founded by the late June Jordan in 1991. P4P continues to pursue Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a beloved community for all. P4P has an academic focus on the reading, writing, and teaching of poetry, and the program also engages in bridging the gap between the university and the larger community, working with teens and young adults, schools, and community organizations, and activist projects in the greater Bay Area.

Housed within the African American Studies Department, June Jordan’s Poetry for the People introduces students to poetry as culture, history, criticism, politics, and practice through one to two hours of lecture and two hours of discussion/workshop per week. The course requires students to learn both the technical structure of various forms of poetry as well as the world views that inform specific poetic traditions.

Constructed with democratic and social justice ideals in mind, students are required to read poetry outside the “standard” Western canon typically taught in English courses. The poetry written in this course comes from a vulnerable place — Jordan believed in confronting politics through the personal, and students are encouraged to take from their own lived experiences to create emotionally impactful work and take up space in a society that denies them that.

Example topics covered

• ‘Building Alliances Across Difference’, ‘Race as a social construction’, ‘Environmental Racism’ exploring African American Poetry

• ‘Islamophobia and profiling exploring’, ‘Occupation, Palestine, and Homeland Poetry’, Arab/Arab American Revolutionary Poetry

• Disability Poetics

• Trauma, Colonization, Resistance & Resilience

• Mixed Race History/Claiming Identity/Borderlands Poetry

role

As a Student Teacher Poet, I co-led a 2-hour discussion section of 10 students every week. In each class, students were expected to author one new poem based on the content of the lecture that week, employing the strategies learned from the surveyed poetic traditions. During the discussion, we would review and workshop each student’s poetry and they would be asked to revise the poetry in conjunction with the feedback the following week

Learning goals

1. Build a community of trust in their section and big class to support the development of each other’s poetry in workshop and the final performance

2. Master June Jordan’s guidelines for the writing and criticism of poetry

3. Develop applied knowledge and experience through community projects

4. Develop critical thinking about race & culture in the US and the world

5. Learn about the three cultural traditions, including annual emphasis on the following:

   • Learn about African American culture through the humanities by examining the production and social function of literature, music, and performance. Explore the unique role that African American culture has had in defining and responding to larger constructs of American Culture.

   • Examine the history (status, culture, social institutions, and protest traditions) of African Americans since 1865. Acquiring particular attention to the interplay between race, class and gender.