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State of the Profession: The Poetry of Disrespect
By Martin D. Snyder
College and university faculty do not always pay as much attention as they should to the plight of their secondary school colleagues. The situation of former Rio Rancho High School humanities teacher Bill Nevins, who is suing the school district, is a case in point. In a suit filed in September he alleged, according to the Associated Press, that his contract had not been renewed "because of student poetry that administrators felt was 'disrespectful' of the education establishment and the U.S. military." Nevins was the leader of the school's poetry team and writing club and had encouraged his group of multicultural students to read their work at poetry slams. Under Nevins's leadership, the club members had achieved considerable fame in New Mexico.
Action against Nevins is said to have been precipitated by a student's reading his poem, "Revolution X," over the school's closed-circuit TV system. Here are two excerpts from the poem:
Bush said no child would be left behind
And yet kids from inner-city schools
Work on Central Avenue
Jingling cans that read
Please sir, may I have some more?
They hand out diplomas like toilet paper
And lower school standards
Because
Underpaid, unrespected teachers
Are afraid of losing their jobs.
The founding fathers made this nation
On a dream and now
Freedom of Speech
Lets Nazis burn crosses, but
Calls police to
Gay pride parades.
We somehow
Can afford war with Iraq
But we can't afford to pay the teachers
Who educate the young who hold the guns
Against the "Axis of Evil."
It is possible that the alleged reaction of the school administration to "Revolution X" was motivated by offended aesthetic sensibilities. After all, this is not a genteel poem about angels, carousels, and tea roses. It's not polite or respectful. It is clearly angry and rebellious. It is, in fact, what the poet Edward Field says good writing is all about: "saying what's unacceptable, shocking the respectable world."
It is more likely, however, that hostile reaction to a poem like "Revolution X" has deeper roots. Novelist William Burroughs, writing about the literature of the Beat generation, put his finger on the key issue. "Once started," he wrote, "the Beat movement had a momentum of its own and a world-wide impact. In fact, the intelligent conservatives in America saw this as a serious threat to their positions long before the Beat writers saw it themselves. A much more serious threat, say, than the Communist party." Burroughs explains why: "Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not political legislators, who implement change after the fact. Art exerts a profound influence on the style of life, the mode, range, and direction of perception. Art tells us what we know and don't know that we know."
Edward Field described the transformative power of art succinctly. Referring to Allen Ginsberg's seminal Beat poem, he wrote:
Then came "Howl,"
a cry of defiance,
declaring the right to be whatever we are,
a mere poem that destroyed the destroyers,
the haters,
the killers in our government
and gave courage to the oppressed.
Smart people know that poetry can be dangerous. It can be an act of rebellion, a threat to established values and structures. And it can have a special attraction for the young. "I trust what teenagers see in poetry," wrote Edward Field, "why they are attracted to it. It has something to do with poetry as magic. It also has to do with an idealism that gets lost as you get older." Idealism, youth, rebellion—not a new but always a dangerous combination. And maybe that's why "Revolution X" caused such a stir. Maybe that's why school administrators, granted license by the model of our government's top leaders, decided it was necessary and acceptable to extinguish an alternative vision of our society and to silence its voice.
Of course, that sort of repression never really works. If poetry is banned from our schools, it will survive elsewhere—in the churches, gyms, parks, and coffee houses, wherever people gather to resist. But the attempt to suppress poetic expression is an ominous sign. Poetry is a keynote species in the ecology of academe. Damage to it may signal future danger for the environment of academic freedom. Is poetry alive and well on your campus?
Martin Snyder is AAUP director of planning and development.
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