Reply to comment

We began today's class by breaking up into small groups to discuss our intitial reactions to Gwendolyn Brooks' poem, "The Mother.  When the class reconvened to combine our individual conversations, it became clear that the very pieces of the poem some students found most praiseworthy were the same pieces other students found most offensive.  Some praised Brooks for the courageous vulnerability that allowed her to reflect abortion as a real experience, full of difficult, messy emotion, rather than the black and white political issue to which it is often reduced.  Other students had a strongly negative reaction to any language (our's or the poet's) that might be manipulated by anti-choice factions into restricting reproductive rights.  We discussed the various sentiments we found and disagreed upon within the poem; grief, relief, certainty, loss, guilt, regret, love, etc., but spent the better part of an hour reflecting on the different lenses through which such a poem might be read.  We looked through the personal/emotional lens, which seemed most benign to some, most compelling to others.  We looked through the theoretical lenses of politics and structure, finishing with a conversation about the power of language, as discussed in Johnson's essay.  As with the powerful use of apostrophe in this poem, is language strong enough to call up the presence of what has been lost, or what has never been?  We failed to reach a consensus on this point, and were shooed out the door at 11:30, the debate still raging.