Poetry highlights in honor of National Poetry Month!
Poet of the Day: Tim Seibles
Tim Seibles, a recent Poet Laureate for the state of Virginia, is the author of several collections of poetry, including Body Moves , which was later reissued as a Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary, and Fast Animal , winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and nominee for the 2012 National Book Award. His honors also include fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and an Open Voice Award from the National Writers Voice Project. Seibles is known for his captivating reading voice. He is also a legendary teacher of poetry, having taught high school in his early years and later in the MFA program at Old Dominion University as well as in Cave Canem’s fellowship program.  The Poetry Foundation describes Seibles’s work as "[approaching] themes of racial tension, class conflict, and intimacy from several directions at once in poems with plainspoken yet fast-turning language."
This poet belongs in our classrooms because . . .
Tim Seibles belongs in our classrooms because his raw, honest, playful-yet-serious approach offers to us one of the most searing, accessible, and electrifying voices in contemporary American poetry today. Seibles’s ability to speak the same unflinching truth, whether he is writing about race, love, work, basketball, or cartoons, makes us realize the connectedness of things and the connectedness of our lives. His voice, whether heard in performance or experienced on the page, seems like a narration for when realization reaches our deepest self.
A Poem by Tim Seibles
"Kerosene"

            after the L.A. riot,
           April ‘92

In my country the weather—
it’s not too good         At every bus stop anger
holds her umbrella folded her
face buckled tight as a boot               Along the avenues
beneath parked cars spent
cartridges glimmer                A man’s head crushed
by nightsticks smoke              still
slides from his mouth  Let out wearing
uniforms hyenas rove in packs
unmuzzled and brothers strain inside
their brown skins like something wounded
thrown into a lake      Slowly
like blood filling
cracks in the street slowly     the
President       arrived his mouth
slit into his face         Like candles seen
through thick curtains sometimes
at night the dark citizens occur to him

like fishing lamps along
the black shore of a lake        like moths
soaked in kerosene and lit
Teaching Ideas
Seibles’s "Kerosene" is a poetic master class in context and disruption of that context, thus allowing the poem to feel as disconcerting as racial violence truly is. Seibles establishes a time and a place (the Los Angeles riots of 1992), but writes the poem in a way that stretches to so many other civil rights violations and instances of racial violence in the United States and beyond. Accessible imagery and standard sound techniques give way to unexpected twists and turns that force readers to reread and reconsider. 

The discussion questions and writing exercise below flow out of these ideas and encourage students to understand the full experience of Seibles’s "Kerosene." Having students do background research on Rodney King and the 1992 Los Angeles riots is also recommended.

Possible Discussion Qestions

  • The "spent / cartridges" are the first evidence of violence in the poem. How do you think the description of their "glimmer" complicates the tone?

  • What is the speaker’s attitude toward the President? How does our understanding of that attitude develop as particular descriptions are added? How do line breaks and spaces impact that development?

  • "Kerosene" can be challenging to read because of its enjambment, lack of punctuation, and the way that portions of phrases are split by spaces. How do you think this might impact the meaning of the poem? How might that disruption influence the reader to experience the poem beyond merely reading it?

  • The poem is decidedly in response to the riots in Los Angeles in 1992. How might the poem speak to issues of race, social justice, and violence beyond that particular event? Is the poem written in such a way as to make it more timeless?

Possible Writing Activity

Write a poem about something chaotic or tumultuous, from anything as simple as a hectic day to something as emotionally complex as a car accident, or perhaps best of all, another instance in world history when human rights abuses were met with direct confrontation. Use Seibles’s style of disrupting enjambments, lack of punctuation, and phrases split by spaces to heighten the chaotic nature of your content.

For a full lesson related to "Kerosene," visit: https://www.kylevaughn.org/resources.

Other Recommended Reading / Viewing / Listening:

Books 

Body Moves . Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2013.
Buffalo Head Solos . Cleveland State U Poetry Center, 2004.
Fast Animal . Etruscan Press, 2012.
Hammerlock . Cleveland State U Poetry Center, 1999.
Kerosene . Ampersand Press. 1995

Poems


" Faith"


Kyle Vaughn is the author of Lightning Paths: 75 Poetry Writing Exercises (NCTE Books, 2018). His poems have appeared in literary journals such as The Bangalore Review , Matter , Adbusters , The Boiler , and Vinyl . His book A New Light in Kalighat , featuring photos and stories about the children served by Urmi Basu’s New Light organization in Kolkata, India, was published in 2013 and featured by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's Half the Sky Movement. 

For more of his work and for lessons on poems and writing poetry, visit www.kylevaughn.org.