POETRY AND THE DROPOUT CRISIS
By Grace Lee Boggs
Michigan Citizen, July 30-Aug. 5, 2006
I came away from the July 22 Live Media Arts Project (LAMP) community
workshop with a renewed sense of the power of the imagination to
bring about social change and of young people to stir our imaginations.
LAMP is a project created by the Detroit Summer Collective to engage
the hearts, minds and imaginations of young people in discussing and
solving the school dropout crisis instead of reducing them to a
“problem” and statistics as the mainstream media does.
During the week student youth interview peers, community leaders and
young adult dropouts with the aim of creating a CD that can be used as
an educational tool and resource for community dialogues about urban
public schools and what students are experiencing in these schools.
Each week they focus on a different art form e.g. Hip Hop writing,
songwriting, stencil making, Every Saturday they hold a community
workshop.
About 15 people participated in the July 22 workshop, mostly African
American young people. Facilitators were local activist/poets
Angela Jones and Will Copeland who are shining examples of how poetry
as an art form can inspire change.
The step-by-step process of the workshop can be replicated.
Will performed his poem “Three Wise Men” to give an idea of poetry
as story-telling and Angela performed her “Self-Portrait” to
illustrate the role of observation.
- We were asked to come up with 2-3 words that come to mind in
connection with school.
- We listened to a student read “Overpass,” a poem by V. Francis
which tells the story of two twelve year olds who leave school early
“cause school wasn’t about nothin noway” and end up picking up a couple
of rocks and throwing them from the overpass. “It wasn’t anythin
personal/it was just somethin to do.”
- Asked about how schools link youth with criminality, we cited
security guards, locker searches, safety glass, detention, line-ups.
- We then broke up into three small groups to discuss the “Overpass”
poem and the similarities and differences between students leaving
school because they’re bored and leaving to sell drugs.
- When we reconvened, we discussed the community response to the war on
drugs, the institutional meanings of words, and how we can change their
meanings.
Then we were asked to write a poem.
The session concluded with Joshua Tuck reading the poem he had
written. A high school junior, Josh is one of LAMP’s most engaged
students.
EDUCATIONAL HOLOCAUST
By Joshua Tuck
They put us through the process
they start by bringing out our soul
having us color,play and sing
then slowly as we go through the layers and stages
standardized lessons feast on our healthy souls
now, being soul-less they replace the void with cryptic ideas
and patterns to make our thoughts alike
reality has been altered to what they feel we should see
schools are nothing but prisons
we are nothing but prisoners with slightly more free time
but I see through the dimensions built by the system
I know that classrooms are cages
and I know that uniforms are orange jumpsuits
and I know why they call us by our last names, these are military
tactics
strategic planning to warp our minds
and make us drones for the economy
I.D. cards, another method of a tracking device
scholarships and sports are simply bait to get us hooked
on their game and phonics
lectures haunt our minds and downsize our brains
we roam through halls looking for a lost cause
and pieces of our soul that we recognize in our peers
maybe they picked it up on their way to class
after the brutal crucifixion of our souls
we die for the good of the economy
we give up our native language of freedom for a check with numbers
but we forget to count how many deaths we've been through to get here
how many times we have been told "no"
and how many times we have been lead astray
the walls will come down, we see the prism
but it has been built without our help
we are the stones that the builders refused
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