Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems

Radical Teacher, Spring, 2004 by Gail Green-Anderson

Neon Vernacular: New And Selected Poems By Yusef Komunyakaa. Wesleyan University Press, $15.95

In a Fall 2002 Introduction to Literature class at LaGuardia Community College in New York City, I taught the poetry of Vietnam veteran and Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Yusef Komunyakaa, who had given a reading at the college a year before. Students read, talked, and wrote about poems based on Komunyakaa's experiences in Vietnam from his 1993 collection, Neon Vernacular. Komunyakaa's poetry was part of a group of readings that highlighted powerful literary responses to violence, something that I thought students might find particularly meaningful in the wake of September 11th.

However, as the fall term progressed, I found that the poetry students were reading and discussing took on a different meaning in relation to what we were heating in the news and what I was seeing at the entrance to the college. U.S. inspectors were looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, an invasion of Iraq appeared imminent, and recruiters from the armed services, a frequent presence at the college, seemed to have more students at their table. I worried that students' interpretations of Komunyakaa's poetry might be heavily influenced by the images broadcast by the popular media, that students might imagine themselves going off to rid the world of danger and coming back to write poetry about it.

I sought the help of Kenneth Peeples, a Vietnam Veteran and librarian at LaGuardia community college, who had offered me advice years before when I had taught Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July. Ken's name and a letter he wrote to his parents are engraved on the New York Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in lower Manhattan.

I had hoped, when I assigned Komunyakaa's poetry, to take the class to visit the memorial. However, I became concerned that the trip might also fuel recruitment efforts at the school; I was worried that the memorial might contribute to students' seeing themselves as future heroes.

Some advice from Ken gave this field trip shape. He informed me that the New York Vietnam Veteran's Memorial had a website: http://www.nyvietnamveteransmemorial.org. The website includes not only the letters that appear on the memorial but biographical information about and sometimes photographs of the people who wrote them.

As part of an assignment in which students analyzed two of Komunyakaa's poems, I asked students to develop their understanding of the individuals who fought in the war so that they might better understand Komunyakaa's narrative voices. I asked them to visit the New York Vietnam Veteran's Memorial and to select one letter that they would actually visit on a class trip to the memorial. Students browsed on-line, looking at the photographs of the individuals who wrote the letters and reading their letters and the accompanying biographies. They selected letters to visit at the memorial. On a November morning, we rode the subway to the memorial, and students located their letters on the memorial. The papers they wrote during the following few weeks incorporated passages from them. Students used the real experiences of the letter writers to better understand the narrators in the poems.

The website gave students an opportunity to connect to Komunyakaa's narrators with real soldiers writing letters home to loved ones. Some of the individuals who had written the letters survived, but many did not. I hope that the website in combination with the trip to the memorial served to temper fantasies that the news in combination with the recruiters might have been generating. In addition, a group of students interviewed Ken, who told them directly about the terrible costs of war. Ken's words provided an additional context that was crucial to students' readings of Komunyakaa's poetry.

Still, given the times we live in and the power of the media, I think teaching the poetry of war demands that the poetry be taught in a rich political context, one that helps students see that the voices of real soldiers are often extinguished when young men and women are killed in war. As long as the United States continues to send young men and women to their deaths in Iraq, as long as the recruitment tables are a presence at my college, I don't feel that I can risk teaching the poetry of war in the same way that I did last fall.

Is there a book, film, essay, poem, or story you've found particularly useful in the classroom and want to share with other Radical Teacher readers? We are especially interested in Teaching Notes on new materials not widely known, but we would also like to hear about newly rediscovered older works as well as new ways of teaching familiar ones. Contributions should be 500 words or so and should include the following kinds of information: school, course, kinds of students, how you taught the work, difficulties as well as triumphs. Also, please supply the title, author, publisher, and current price (or comparable data for a film). Send a hard copy to Bob Rosen, Department of English, William Paterson University, 300 Pompton Road, Wayne, New Jersey 07470--and also an e-mail, with the header "Teaching Note, " to: rosenr@wpunj.edu