How I Refute Them Poetically

• In Event: Adolescents’ Intellectual and Emotional Communion: Exploring Shared Vulnerability and Connection in Literacy Learning

Abstract

In the Spring of 2019 the remnants of a once very successful spoken word poetry team reconvened with the intention of representing their high school in a Chicago-land poetry competition.This team of three female-identified poets of color met over the course of a semester and produced both individual poems and a “group” poem intended to be written by, in the voices of, and performed by all three poets. In this context, the poets did not only write from their own perspectives; they also wrote in each other’s voices and from each other’s points of view, resulting in a truly collaborative poem that reflected the three poets’ writing as a group. Youth used various tools and methods to compose their group poem (Authors 3&4, 2022), including techniques for surfacing and taking up one another’s voices in their writing.
This paper will examine one interaction where two Black poets attempted to write a section of their poem in the voice of their teammate, a Latina poet who was not present on the day of their writing. The two focal participants engaged with multiple techniques to write in their teammate’s voice, including using Spanish words, researching Mexican-American culture and history online, and calling a different Latina friend in order to get her perspective on their writing. We will analyze that interaction through the lenses of Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia, or multivoicedness (Bakhtin, 1981), in which we understand any given piece of writing to be saturated with multiple voices and perspectives, and playful/joyful performativity (Enriquez, 2015; Stornaiuolo & Whitney, 2018), in which we understand youth writing to be fundamentally an act of identity construction, performance, and/or resistance. We take up these lenses in order to think about how, even when writing about deep personal issues of identity, these poets took on one another’s voices in service of a group composition that ultimately belonged to the team and its sociocultural context, rather than belonging to any one poet (Bakhtin, 1986).
We also highlight what we see as one of the central characteristics of the team, though, was their pursuit of joy (Muhammad, 2020) as they wrote with and for one another. This feels relevant at this moment in time, when, as humans, our awareness of our own and others’ distinct identity markers–the things that make us “us” and not someone else--seems particularly serious (e.g., Kathryn Stockett [The Help], Jeanine Cummins (American Dirt) are among white authors who have been justifiably criticized for writing in voices and from perspectives that are not their own). By contrast, in this study, the Latina participant returned to the group and read her teammates’ writing in her voice as honoring and funny, and the experience served to build connection and vulnerability–being seen by and witnessing one another–within this group. We bring to our analysis a focus on agency, identity, and power in writing (Lewis, Enciso, & Moje, 2007) in order to clarify how this team, comprising three adolescent girls of color, found and created so much joy in their writing process.

Authors

• Andrea Vaughan, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Melina Lesus, University of Illinois at Chicago