Sarah Gord Blog 8

A variety of poems week express the frustration of being either unseen or unheard. Idris Goodwin’s “Say my name” highlights the unwillingness of people to really see him and the callous, casual ways in which he is dismissed through the dismissal of his name. The repetition of “Can I just call you” as a cop-out of learning how to correctly pronounce his name shows how often he hears this question; as a one-off, it seems harmless, but the repetitive nature of dismissal is grating and frustrating. His name is central to his identity on the one hand and something that calls his identity into question each time someone mispronounces it. His name is, of course, also linked to biases and much more dangerous implications than simple frustration; as he points out, “Being named Idris in North America will arrest people.” To be unseen but also overly examined puts him at risk not only for his own sense of self but at times for his safety.

In “America’s Pastime,” Jason Carney links violence against black people to American norms and values. He manipulates traditionally “American” images and reframes them to make intentions and the implicit, explicit. He refers to “American postcard portraits of lynching” and “the revival of baseball bats” to draw parallels between the idyllic and the horrific. He does not shy away from graphic images, forcing the reader to picture these moments, often forgotten or ignored in mainstream narratives of American history. He argues at the end of the poem that lynching, which he describes in pictures, is actually alive and well (unlike the stagnant past that photographs evoke).

In my 7^th and 8^th grade English class, my students have been reading To Kill a Mockingbird, and we’ve talked a lot about both the history of lynching but also “courtroom lynchings” (in which black people were – and in many ways, still are – given shady legal representation, forced to present their cases to white male juries in rushed trials, and systematically given impossibly harsh sentences). When we finish the book, we’re going to examine the ways that things have and have not changed in the criminal justice system with a focus on what my students, as young people, can do to make their voices heard. Reading this poem felt especially relevant this week, and I may actually discuss this with them when we finish the book.