Poetry Fires the Revolution

High School

By Justin Sybenga

“Should I give more importance to the task of finishing my very important novel, or should I accept this dangerous job that the party assigns to me, the guerrilla, the frontlines, where I could lose not just a precious two months, but all the time I thought I had left?”  
Roque Dalton, Salvadoran poet, 1969

There are such pressing unmet human needs that the artist must always wonder if creating beauty is the best use of his or her time and talent. For writers and artists coming of age in the middle of the 20th century in Central America, such questions weren’t theoretical.  

More than 200,000 indigenous civilians were killed in the Guatemalan civil war from 1960-1996, many of them murdered by government forces. Eight business conglomerates controlled almost all the natural resources and wealth in El Salvador under the eye of military dictators, before civil war erupted in 1980 and a dozen years of terror and bloodshed ensued. The people of Nicaragua endured the brutal Somoza dictatorship from 1936-1972, prompting the Sandinista insurrection after the Managua earthquake in 1972, which killed 10,000 and left 500,000 homeless. The repressive governments that controlled Central America in this era were backed by the United States, whose companies were generating enormous profits from coffee and fruit exports and who ostensibly wanted to save the Western hemisphere from the threat of communism.   

Images of starvation, homelessness, and brutal violence were impossible to avoid. A group of poet-activists formed in the 1950s calling themselves the “Committed Generation.” They dedicated themselves to fight for the rights of the poor and the oppressed, both through their writing and their political activism. Many of the greatest poets of the “Committed Generation” were jailed, exiled, or killed for denouncing the corruption and violence of the powerful and fighting on behalf of the common people.

In this series of three lessons, students will gain background knowledge on life in Central America during this volatile period in order to understand the risks these revolutionary poets took. They will read a series of poems by heroic Central American poets about the role of poetry in combatting injustice. Individually or in small groups, they will choose a poet to commemorate and will create a poster that includes biographical information about the poet and an image or metaphor about the power of poetry to change the world. These lessons can work well in English or Spanish classes. Spanish teachers could use the original Spanish poems rather than translations. There are many biographies available online in Spanish for the poets represented here, and students could create their commemorative posters in Spanish.

Essential Question

• What power, if any, does poetry have in the face of war, oppression, and injustice?

Objectives

• Students will be able to identify and analyze vivid images or metaphors about the role of poetry and social change.

• Students will be able to commemorate how a poet from Central America used poetry and action in the fight for justice

Time and Materials

• Three class periods

• Clips from documentary Harvest of Empire or readings about Central American countries

• Computers with internet access

• Slideshow on “Apolitical Intellectuals” by Otto Rene Castillo (provided)

• Set of poems about poetry by Central American poets with links to biographies (provided)

• Student worksheet on imagery and metaphors (provided)

• Commemorating a Poet assignment sheet (provided)

Lesson Activities

1. Choose a dozen or so quotes about poetry (here are a few resources) and post them on the walls, evenly spaced out, around your classroom. Feel free to find quotes from other resources that highlight other aspects of the power of poetry. Invite students to move silently about the room, reading each of the quotations. They should choose one that intrigues, pleases, or puzzles them and take a few minutes to journal about what it means before discussing as a class. Look for a natural segue into a conversation about poetry’s potential political power.
    

2. Tell students that they will be reading a number of poets from Central America, who stood against repressive military regimes in the mid 20th century. In order to sense the heroism of the Committed Generation, students must have an intellectual and emotional understanding of the violent conflict that raged through El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras during this period.  Students could watch the sections of the documentary Harvest of Empire, which highlight the political turmoil and US involvement in Guatemala  (13:00 - 18:37), Nicaragua (54:38-1:02:15), and El Salvador (1:10:40 - 1:16:54). Alternatively, students could be divided into four groups, and each group could read an article about this period of history in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador and report out to the class.
    

3. Poets and intellectuals had to decide whether to keep a detached distance from the events unfolding in their countries, or if they wanted to use their creative talents to lobby for social change. This lesson uses Otto Rene Castillo’s poem “Apolitical Intellectuals” to illustrate the choice between hiding safely in the academy or paying attention and empathizing with the suffering of others and risking everything to alleviate that suffering. The whole group analysis of this poem will serve as a model for the work students will do with other poems. Students will read the poem and identify and analyze images/metaphors that evoke ideas about the potential purposes of poetry. Then students will read a short biography to see how the poet’s beliefs were lived out. Finally, the teacher will show students models of the poster commemorating the poet that students will create for one of the other poets of the Committed Generation.

• Briefly describe the emergence of the Committed Generation
   

• Invite a student to read the biography of Otto Rene Castillo on the Teaching Central America website which is provided above the poem “Apolitical Intellectuals.” Discuss:

  • Why might have the government perceived Castillo as a threat?

  • Why might Castillo have been willing to sacrifice his home, safety, and his life?
     

• Turn to the poem “Apolitical Intellectuals” and ask students what they think the title means.  Political intellectuals are those who use their art and writing for activism -- whose artistic creations wake their audience up to see unfairness or exploitation in order to inspire political action and change. The prefix “a” means “not, absence, or without.” Based on Castillo’s biography, ask students to make inferences about what message Castillo might have for intellectuals who avoided politics.
   

• Invite student volunteers to read each stanza of the poem aloud. Once they’ve experienced the entire poem, use the five W questions to clarify the basic storyline of the poem.
   

• Tell students to reread the poem individually and to identify the images or metaphors that are most memorable. Have them share out some of the lines that stood out.
   

• Use the slideshow to model for students how to tease out the associations and connections the poet is creating with the images and figures of speech. Students should take notes on the note-catcher, practicing for the independent work that will come later. An analysis guide is provided below to help move from the teacher modeling analysis for the first passage to drawing analysis from students through questioning. Commentary on the lines is also provided in the Google slideshow, in the notes section under the slide.

• After analyzing the images and figures of speech in the poem, discuss the relationships between Castillo’s biography and this poem.

  • How was Castillo’s life similar to or different from the lives of the intellectuals he describes?

  • What does he hope that his political poetry can accomplish in contrast to the apolitical intellectuals’ work?

  • Is the end result of political poetry as evidenced by Castillo’s death and apolitical intellectualism the same or different? Why?