SOME ALL-PURPOSE STUDY QUESTIONS FOR DIASPORA POETRY

Many of us are needlessly panicky about poetry (something to do with 7th-grade English is my guess); we think it's some rarified, flowery form of language that only sensitive, misunderstood types who've really suffered can fathom.  Sure, there are insufferable posers who pretend that poetry is only that; but for most of the rest of us, modern lyric poetry is what we put in our CD players every day.  The point of this class is to see how "serious" that poetry is.  That calls for serious questions, which we may not be equipped with the right tools to even pose, much less answer.  So if you're intimidated, stop:  ask yourself some of these questions in order to get thinking productively about the poems you're reading and hearing, and to begin teaching yourself how to recognize, describe and analyze poetic form.

What kinds of preconceptions, if any, do you have about poetry, poets, and their peculiar language and conventions?  How/how much do any of these poems clash with your preconceptions?

How do you hear these poems in your head when you read them on the page?  How does your "internal audition" compare with actually hearing them performed out loud?  (How much of a problem is language or orthography?  Are there rhymes or rhythms that wouldn't exist in "standard" English?)

How important is each performer's particular voice—how do their styles of delivery vary (in speed, pitch, timbre, enunciation, etc.)?  Would anyone else ever be able to perform their poems as effectively, do you think?

Are the "a cappella" poems (if there are any) more or less effective than those with music, or does it depend? 

How do you see jokes, puns, and other wordplay working in any of these poems—as a distraction, an embellishment, the main point? 

Why are some poems short and compact, others long and sprawling?  What can one structure do that another can't?   

What characteristics of the African-derived performance traditions mentioned by Thompson and Roberts show up in any of these poems?  (How and where?)

Some questions to ask of any poem, performed or not:

•     Who's speaking?  To whom (named or implied)?  About what (what's literally "happening" or being being said, in plain language)?  How would you characterize the speakers(s)?  Are there any rhythms or tensions set up by shifting between speakers, personae, or points of view?

•     What's the overall "mood" of the poem and its subjective effect on you?  Can you pinpoint some of the elements which built that mood?

•     How's the poem structured:  how long are the lines and stanzas, and what kind of groups or sections are they organized into?  Any reason behind this, that you can see?

•     What seems to be the primary function of the poem:  to emote, meditate, philosophize, teach, rant, tell a story, boast or ridicule, play with words (not the only possibilities)?

•     What kind of a beat or rhythm is there?  Is it steady, or does it change or vary?  Where, why, and how?  Does the musical beat reinforce or cut across the speech rhythms and/or rhyme patterns?

•     Close detective work:  What words, phrases, or rhymes (or variations on them) get repeated?  How are techniques like assonance (the repetition of vowel sounds within words—I went home in the gloaming) or alliteration (the repetition of initial consonant or vowel sounds—wild and woolly) used to emphasize something or to build up certain ideas over a section or an entire poem?  What about "internal rhymes" (rhymes within one line, rather than at the end of two lines in a couplet or quatrain)?

•       What's innovative or extraordinary about the formal, technical or performative features of this poem—or, by contrast, what traditions does it seem to quote or come out of?