Poetry and society

This week we've started talking about POETRY. We've discussed the role of poetry in society, and the ways in which we are accessing poetry, no longer so much through books, but more and more often through YouTube videos.

In this week's PLA we analysed some Black British poems, like, for example, John Agard's "Listen Mr Oxford Don", Meiling Jin's "The Knock", and Grace Nichols' "Wherever I Hang", all of them dealing with the immigrant experience: the criminalization that is so commonly projected onto immigrant subjects, the feelings of unbeloning they experience, or their fear of deportation, among other things.

          

                                                                                              

While talking about the new channels that poets are using to disseminate their poems and that audicences are employing to gain access to poetry works, my students introduced me to a Spanish poet called Loreto Sesma. I've just seen one of her videos, one in which she recites her poem "Desastres", and I'm struck by some of her lines, like one that says, "¿Por qué no se habla de aquellos que se esconden en un verso?" So I'm really grateful to my students for introducing me to a new poet. Thank you, guys! So good to learn things from you!

I myself introduced them to a British poet who also resorts to the Internet to spread her poems, Hollie McNish, whom I got to know thanks to my colleague Irene Pérez. In class we saw McNish's video-poem "Foreign" and part of "Embarrassed". The former talks about many Britons' hypocritical behaviour, that is, their acceptance of foreign money and objects, and simultaneously, their rejection of foreign people, whom they accuse of being a burden on the British economy. The latter poem talks about hypocrisy too, though in this case the target is society's double standard when it comes to women's tits: female breasts are OK if they're for show, but wrong, an embarrassment, if they're for breastfeeding, McNish denounces.

I hope my students enjoyed listening to McNish's poems and all our reflections on poetry.

And I also hope that some of them will take this week's new challenge. Here it is.

Will you dare to write a poem in which the poetic persona is an immigrant?