Baraka, black boys & poetic curiosity

Attendees listening to lyrics and poems on audio devices and responding to questions.

At our "Language Arts and Leadership" conference, I organized an activity where the high school boys listened to rap lyrics by Kendrick Lamar and Jay Z and a poem by Amiri Baraka.

After listening to Baraka's poem "Rhythm Blues," the task was to pose a question concerning something about the poem that stimulated curiosity. Baraka's poem includes double entendres, playful rhymes, black folk culture references, and repetitions of the word "blue," as in: "Blue slick / Blue slow / Blue quick / Blue cool / Blue hot." The poem closes with the lines:

Slave boy, leroy, from Newark Hill
If capitalism dont kill me, racism will!

Several of the boys raised a common question about the poem: "how can capitalism kill you?" The exercise was a pass-through exhibit where participants wrote and posted their questions on a board. So we didn't get a chance to discuss our queries about the poem.

I'm fascinated, though, that their curiosity about the potential lethal results of capitalism might linger with them for a while. They apparently had a sense of the dangers of racism, but they were unsure about the problems of an economic system.

Moving forward, I'll prompt more students I work with to identify aspects of poem that make them curious. I'll see what kinds of questions we might formulate based on reading poetry.

 Related:
• The Language Arts and Leadership Conference, 2017