Abbey and Grady Lesson Plan

Snacks:

Salty (extended play) → Salt and vinegar chips

Decencies →  (French cuisine) cream puffs

Never after →  apple flavored things

A Half Red Sea →  Fruit punch

Goals:

• Learn the pitfalls of “pigeonholing” writing into one style or aesthetic
• Discuss the difference between innovative poetry and avant-garde poetry and what’s at stake in defining “innovative”
• See how biography differs from self-representational writing

Outline:

Biography Powerpoint (Grady), 3:10-3:20pm

• Background
• BAM & Mullen (Thorsson & Intro)
• What is/are black aesthetics? (Intro to Renegade Poetics)
• Goals

SSR, 3:20-3:30pm (Abbey)

• What’s the thesis?
• Do you agree with her argument in Renegade Poetics?
• Turn to the person next to you and discuss your structural outline (4-5 minutes).
• Does anyone else have anything else about anything in the introduction or SSR?

Activity, 3:30-3:55pm

Is this poem avant-garde? → yes, no (BAM and its legacy), it’s innovative (hula hoops!!!)  

Did anyone write about this poem in their part B of the SSR? What did you write about?

• “the defense of marriage act, alternatives to” (G)
• “never after” (A)
• “you can’t deny it” (G)
• “Womanish” (A)
• “duck, duck, redux” (G)
• “my last modernist poem” (A)
• “statistical haiku” + “Johannesburg Mines” (G)
• “clare’s song” (A)
• “Dependencies” (G)

Poetry

• What else do you want to talk about?

Autobiography, 3:55-4:05pm (Abbey)

• Represent yourself and the identities you hold (that you want to share) in any form or media that you feel best represents you!
• Or do the same activity with a figure you’ve studied in this class!

Follow up questions:

• How does your self-representation differ from a traditional biography? Is there anything it captures that a biography (or a traditional autobiography) doesn’t?
• OR, if you did a figure, how does this representation differ from the ones you’ve done for class?