Response 5

Teaching Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson (2014)

            Teaching poetry in the classroom is not an easy task as many kids struggle with understanding this art form if they try to engage with it at all. Brown Girl Dreaming provides a great text for teaching poetry because it is in narrative form. This biographical poem tells a story and students who would normally pushback and struggle with studying poetry can easily comprehend the events within the plot. The free verse of Brown Girl Dreaming allows the study of its poetry to focus on certain techniques – such as alliteration and line-breaks – rather than focusing on constructed form filled with metaphor and allusion. For those students who struggle with studying poetry, Brown Girl Dreaming in narrative free verse is comprehensible yet poetically complex and is an excellent poem for these students to examine.

            Initially, to approach Brown Girl Dreaming as a story is to approach this poem on familiar ground for students who resist examining poetry. Get them interested with what their familiar with. Brown Girl Dreaming is filled with universal themes that students will be able to relate to. They should also be quite familiar with discussing theme in narrative. One theme this poem explores questions how one understands their childhood and where they come from. Woodson struggles with the idea of home moving from Ohio to South Carolina with the long-term goal of possibly moving to New York. This theme is not hidden away in metaphor or allegory for students to dig to find the treasure. It exists in the larger narrative of the story. After introducing the themes through familiar questioning, teachers can then approach the emotion, rhythm, and free form in the poetry. The poems entitled “our names” and “ohio behind us” are two good poems to discuss the theme of home and how Woodson struggles with it and to inspect some of the rhythm and emotion of the verse.

After discussion of the theme of home that Woodson struggles with the teacher can move to discussion of how this struggle is developed in the poetic voice. In the poem “our names” we see Woodson emotionally negotiating this transition. “In South Carolina, we become” (45) is the first line, then a list follows. In examining this stanza, we must first examine the form. With this first line we see how Woodson struggles with identity after their move from Ohio to South Carolina. The first line breaks at the question “we become” what? Become is a word in transition; become connotes a transition between then, now, and the future. Just as the children are physically in transition they are in identity as well.

The following lines answer with a list of all the different names the children are called: “The Grandchildren / Gunnar’s Three Little Ones / Sister Irby’s Grands / MaryAnne’s Babies” (45).  The various names they are now called are new and different just as the place they move from and to. How these names are listed each to their own line, and italicized, objectifies the names as if Woodson does not yet know which one she can relate to. Here, as elsewhere, Woodson uses italics to voice another person’s words. These are others’ names used for them, not their own and no longer individualized. Students should not struggle too much with analyzing the form of this first stanza and feeling the emotion of anxiety it creates.

The second verse of this poem has a more accepting tone and develops towards individualization and love: grandmother calls them “HopeDellJackie” all their individual names grouped together. The progression of this stanza then leads to “but my grandfather / takes his sweet time, saying each / as if he has all day long / or a whole lifetime” (45). Finally, they are “each” their individual selves again. “Each” hanging off line 11 of this poem places emphasis on the word and what it connotes. The rhythm slows down, the grandfather “takes his sweet time.” The anxiety of the first verse loosens up and by the end of the second verse there is acceptance of this change. For students who have difficulty discovering the dynamics of poetry through interpretation of structure, investigating a known theme of the text through its interpretation of the poetry should be easier for them to apply analytical skills to poetry. Connecting this poem to the one that follows, students can further examine how emotion is portrayed through form and they can connect the struggle with identity to that of home.

“ohio behind us” is the second poem in part two, after they break from their father and move to South Carolina. This poem discusses the theme home, and expresses again the emotion of anxiety. As with the first poem “our names” there is no metaphor or difficult structure to unpack in order to find some beauty of the verse. This aspect of the poem will allow students who struggle or fear analyzing poetry to approach it with teacher guidance. For these students, the teacher could approach this poem by discussing the theme in context of the larger text. How is home troubling to Woodson in this specific transition in her life? This approach is the same you would use for prose. Taking another step closer to the poem, read the poem aloud. As with “our names” the rhythm of this poem reflects the emotion of the experience. By suggesting this before the reading, you can ask students what emotions does this poem reflect in listening to and feeling its rhythm. When spoken the first stanza should be heard as the run-on sentence it is. This form points to the subject matter: “When we ask” the answer “mother” gives is uncertain and non-definitive because “she doesn’t know how long we’ll stay” (46). Like a parent trying to figure it out, she speaks in circles never landing on a definitive answer. This rhythm is repeated in the second stanza, also indicated by the parallel “When we ask” and the parallel structure of a run-on sentence. However, mother has a consideration of “to the North” for an answer, the relatively short line 10 of the poem. If these two stanzas are read as Bucher and Hinton suggest: “by reading slowly in a normal tone of voice and pausing at the punctuation, rather than at the end of the line” (308) students should feel the slight difference between the two. The second stanza has more commas, more pauses, more room for consideration. The anxiety from the first stanza to the second lessens as mother considers moving to the North. The volume – the amount of words – the energy, the rhythm of the first two parallel stanzas gives a lot of weight to the final three stanzas which are much slower and shorter; it’s as if the energy slows to rest heavy on the next three stanzas. This poem ends with the heavy realization that “home / isn’t really coming back home / at all” (47). The energy from the rhythm of this poem indicates the heavy emotional experience Woodson has as she contemplates this transition in her childhood. In reading this passage aloud students should be able to hear the energy and rhythm and begin to understand the emotion behind these words.

To approach this text as a narrative form providing themes the narrator struggles with, and then to approach the aspects of the verse should make it easier for students who struggle with and resist poetry analysis.

Works Cited

Bucher, Katherine and KaaVonia Hinton. Young Adult Literature: Exploration, Evaluation, and Appreciation. 3^rd Edition. Boston: Pearson, 2014. Print.

Woodson, Jacqueline. Brown Girl Dreaming. New York: Penguin Group. 2014. Print.