Dr.
Krystal Howard graced SDSU students and faculty on February 27th with
a lecture discussing her current research interests. Titled “Form as Political
Resistance,” her talk looked at verse novels for children and young readers
that focus on the education of the young poet--specifically Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming and Kwame
Alexander’s Booked, both of which
“advocate for the value of stylistic imitation through the depiction of
children who write influence or erasure poems.” She discussed how these novels
“highlight model authors who emphasize racial tensions” and that “the influence
of erasure poems within these novels reflects socio-cultural concerns and
follows the long-standing tradition in children’s literature of using texts as
pedagogical tools that model behavior, and, specifically in this case, writing
behavior.”
Before
beginning, she explained that she got into this area of focus by reading the
verse novels Autobiography of Red by
Anne Carson and Out of the Dusk by
Karen Hesse in an undergrad creative writing poetry class and became interested
in “the form of the book.” This interest lasted with her through her MFA,
Master’s, and Ph.D. programs, where, in the latter, she focused on verse novels
for young readers.
Underway
with her lecture, Dr. Howard stated that Brown Girl Dreaming and Booked “focus on the artist coming
of age” and that “each of these texts advocates for the value of stylistic
imitation through the depiction of children who write influence or erasure
poems.” Defined by an audience member, erasure poetry is “taking someone else’s
text and whiting out/blacking out some of the words in order to say things that
combine into your own work.”
Both
these texts also “engage directly with the relationship between an artist’s
creation and an artist’s environment” which “leads to emotional maturation for
the characters within the text, while serving as evidence that learning to
write poetry can be accessible to young readers situated outside of the text.”
She also noted how both Brown Girl
Dreaming and Booked “highlight model
authors who emphasize racial tension,” with Brown
Girl Dreaming looking at life growing up during the Civil Rights era and
the influence of Langston Hughes on the young writer and Booked showing a contemporary young author erasing parts of Huckleberry Finn. As such, “the
influence of erasure poems within these verse novels reflects socio-cultural
concerns and follows the long-standing tradition in children’s literature of
using texts as pedagogical tools that model behavior, and, specifically in this
case, writing behavior.”
Dr. Howard emphasized that “the
inclusion of fragments of the protagonist’s writing within the pages of the
narrative underscores an emphasis on formal experimentation, collage, and the
politics of form.” She
defines collage--loosely--as “the layering and linking
together of miscellany within a single work,” but, according to scholars such
as Rona Cran and Rachael Fairbrother, collage in literary texts “moves beyond
the assemblage of fragments, bringing ideas into conversation with one another,
encouraging a sense of defamiliarization in the reader or viewer in order to
fix attention on uneasy realities in contemporary culture, and, ultimately,
emerging as a powerful site for political resistance.” Collage in the two focus texts, then, serves to “give voice to the difficulties
experienced by the protagonists and to explore the issues of both confession
and crisis.”
She
focused specifically on the power of collage as a form of subversion and art,
arguing that “in contemporary children’s and young adult literature, collage is
used in order to unsettle the traditional artist coming of age narrative, and
to make visible the political and social forces that help shape the writer’s
developmental process” before moving on to discuss how “the verse novel is
uniquely situated to address pain and healing because its form draws attention to
itself as a created artifact.” An example of this is “the lyric’s emphasis on
emotion, as well as poetry’s general use of space on the page, [that] invites
the reader to linger over language, breaks in line and stanza in between poems,”
which, considering that Woodson’s and Alexander’s verse novels contain poems
within them written by young protagonists, “calls on the reader to hold space
in the narrative and slow their pace further in order to consider the writing
of the characters separately.”
She elaborated on what constitutes a
verse novel, speaking of them as “a popular hybrid genre that engages with
multiple genres, including poetry, prose, and drama” that “focuses on the
emotional event and shows the reaction before and afterwards,” and is
“characterized by hybrid construction.” She clarifies further that her definition of
verse novels is “…a
series of poems linked by a narrative thread” that involve fragmentation and
white-space to make the reader pause to contemplate the “gaps created by a collage of line,
language, poem, scene, and para-text” which “creates an intimacy between the
reader and the speaker of the poem.” The importance of this is that, “by
weaving together narrative and the confessional voice, the verse novel provides
the structural space necessary for reader contemplation and becomes a mode in
which young readers can actively participate in the making of meaning by
putting together the fragments of someone else’s life and then parlaying those
resulting insights into a deeper understanding of their own experience.”
Continuing,
she moved on to discuss verse novels that focus on the growth of the young
writer, and how they “are unique because they present the child writer learning
aspects of craft through influence, both by revering and parodying various
source texts.” She quotes Tom Hunley in how poets gain their individual voice
by imitation of other poets and Harold Bloom’s argument about how “‘poetic
history is held indistinguishable from poetic influence, and an individual
becomes a poet when she first discovers or is discovered by the dialectic of
influence, first discovers poetry as being both external and internal self.’”
She adds to this Dr. Joseph T. Thomas Jr.’s ideas of how child poets are
“influenced through reading official school poetry, the dominate mode of poetry
in schools, the kind of poetry written by adults and taught to children in the
classroom” and that “‘certainly there are children who strive to emulate the
adult poets they encounter, but more common are those who specialize in the
sometimes bawdy playground poetry. These child poets reveal that children have
a poetic tradition all of their own. A carnivalesque tradition that signifies
young adult culture.’” All of this, according to Dr. Howard, is apparent in
Woodson’s and Alexander’s texts. She states “While Woodson relies on poets
typically associated with official school poetry, with whom her child poet
speaker forms an artistic connection, Alexander draws on the childhood
tradition of found poetry in order to emphasize play and humor as well as his
character’s general distaste for his educational environment as a catalyst for
his protagonist’s poetic tact.”
Concluding
her talk, Dr. Howard expressed that Woodson’s and Alexander’s verse novels “draw
connections between the education of the poet and elementary, secondary, and
post-secondary institutions, linking pedagogy in the classroom and narratives
directed at young readers” while also noting that “the act of inserting a
creative protagonist’s own poems into a narrative is inherently pedagogical as
it models for young readers how a poet might begin his or her own writing
practices” serves as a powerful rhetorical move on the behalf of the author. Additionally,
their verse novels are groundbreaking due to the fact “they draw on various
traditions in order to illuminate contemporary issues surrounding racism in
artistic expression” as well as “put forward influence, imitation, and writing
response as key developmental practices” with Woodson’s protagonist “employ[ing]
a method of influence that utilizes source texts by imitating structure, line,
and style and Alexander’s by “use[ing] the erasure poem as a form of play and
subversion in the educational setting.” These practices instilled, therefore,
are an imperative aspect in the development of the young writer, states Dr.
Howard, and they “provide a map for, and
a window through which, young readers can see themselves becoming poets through
sustained close-reading of model poets, and a crafting of response poems that
are inspired by the works of other writers that they read.”
After the talk, Dr. Howard answered a myriad of questions from faculty and students
alike, and each left feeling they had learned something important about the
nature of verse novels, whether that be in their construction or application. We
at the NCSCL and the faculty of the English and Comparative Literature Department
are grateful for Dr. Howard’s visit and look forward to seeing more of her
research in the future.
For
more info on that, check out Dr. Howard’s website and the next NCSCL blog for a follow
up podcast conversation between her and our very own NCSCL Director Dr. Joseph
Thomas Jr.!
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