Every year, PLP hosts two exhibitions. We host a winter and spring exhibition. Not so long ago I worked on a Star Wars themed winter exhibition where PLP 11 created the Mosley Eisley cantina in which we performed poetry. The reason we had such polar topics of poetry and Star Wars was because we were actually studying beat poetry at the time of the exhibition and we decided to create a room that would cross over into both territories.
About month before the exhibition, my class started looking looking into beat poetry and many poets of the Beat Generation/movement. We first examined why the beat movement occurred and how poetry could be related to a sociopolitical movement. We soon learned that beat poets were the first to explore a contemporary, often edgier and negative side of their art. Notable names like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg took what their teachers and given them and made it their own. Times were rapidly changing (1950’s) as these poets came to their height of success and they symbolized the rapidly changing, often troubling times.
Our first “mini-project” of our beat poetry learning was called bio of a beat. In this project we detailed the lives of a beat poet and made a critical analysis of their work in any form we want. I personally detailed the life and works of Bob Kaufman. He was a very interesting man to say the least and he never wrote down his poems. He was all about the power of the voice and spoken word so this project proved especially challenging to me. I got over this hurdle by putting extra time into researching and finding accounts of his poems from people around him who heard.
The next major milestones for Beat poetry were the poem book and finally, the exhibition. Throughout my time studying the literary and historical sides of beat poetry, my teacher, Ms. Maxwell has our class writing poems and journal entries daily. With all this poem writing practice we would each individually create a book of poems to display our work. I used several different poem writing styles and eventually settled on the name “What Lies Beneath” as a reference to the frequently introspective and metaphorically complex nature of a lot of my poems. I really enjoyed creating this book of poems and especially writing these poems. I find writing poetry can be therapeutic especially when your writing because you want to and not because you have to. I feel this is the artifact I am most proud of from all of my best poetry learning.
For our exhibition project, the class collaborated on creating a Star Wars cantina themed room where we would present some of our poetry live to an audience. We would perform two sets of poetry each around 2-3 minutes long. Before the exhibition I practiced my poetry on a mic that we brought into the classroom. It’s very surprising how important the delivery of your poems is and not just the content. Where to annunciate, the speed and flow of your poems were all thing you had to get used to. The day of I spent a lot of time going over and making sure I knew my poems but my time was cut short by the amount of stuff to move. We were presenting in the weight room so we had to move all the weights, all the exercise equipment and then move all of our stuff in. It was a lot to do but a good team effort made it possible. The actual presentation of the poems went well for me and it was definitely another highlight of the unit for me. Although the decoration of the room wasn’t out of this world the presentations were great and everyone had greatly unique poems. After the exhibition there was a lot of clean up and in hindsight the weight room wasn’t my arms favorite choice.
Beat poetry was a movement throughout the 50’s that brought in a wave of social change, political change and more than anything it was an outcry from the public that the were unhappy. Beat poets symbolized the movement and the altering of their art was very representative of the change that was needed. I am really intrigued by the beat poets and how they played a role in changing in society but more than anything I enjoyed learning about poetry. I found out I was passionate about poetry and learned a lot about it. In this unit I learned lots of new researching skills, lots of historical information on beat poetry and lots about literature including literary devices, poetic devices, great poets and so much more.