Introduction

Borders are put in place for the purpose of regulation. They act as lines of demarcation, whether actual or imaginary. They attempt to provide clear visual and psychological markings of where one thing or place begins, and where it ends. To go beyond any border is to cross over defined lines which have been used in various ways to determine the identity, place, and function of a particular landscape, whether this landscape be physical or psychological. The act of going beyond borders in poetry, both as subject and as tool, provides opportunities for stretching, expanding, and furthering personal, academic, and professional horizons. The concept of “Poetry Beyond Borders”, therefore, is one that encourages us to look outside of the traditional, customary characterizations of the identity, place, and function of poetry. The motive behind such an outlook stems from a need by those in literary, cultural, and historical arenas to re-examine the role of poetry in the lives of its audience, and to ascertain an understanding of both its use and impact on those who contribute to, and benefit from, its presence.

Foreword

Poetry is multifaceted and timeless. Resultantly, its subject and its crafting provide a rich array of possibilities for engagement and use. Within this edition, poetry is presented as powerful, with the kinetic energy to teach, transform, and heal, even while revealing, subverting, and problematizing. These seven narratives from across the Caribbean region and beyond share the writers’ personal and professional encounters with poetry, and, as such, are strategically situated within this edition to chronicle the multiple perspectives of composition, pedagogy, culture, recitation, performance, gender, and therapy.

What Happens When Poetry Teaches?

Poetry means different things to different people. This article examines poetry as a genre of literature where writers deliberately select words and artfully arrange them in such a way that they paint vivid images on the canvas of the reader’s mind. It notes that some schools neglect to include poetry as a part of the English Language Arts curriculum, and that even when it is included, there is an imbalance between teaching prose and poetry, and classrooms are fraught with fledgling uninspired teachers fumbling to get students engaged in this neglected literary form. The writer makes the case that by employing innovative best practices in their lessons, educators should create opportunities for students to read, memorize, write, appreciate, and analyze poems. In taking the stance that poetry is an avenue to thinking and making inferences, the article makes the point that training the minds of the students to “dig deeper” will build higher-order thinking skills, an attitude that will be transferred to other areas of the curriculum. It calls for teachers to model and be enthusiastic about teaching poetry.

High Time to Break Up the Boys’ Club: The Gendered Politics of Spoken Word and Open Mic Spaces in Trinidad and Tobago

The increased visibility of spoken word in media, public campaigns, and literary festivals demands critical attention to the social organisation of the art form, movement, and space. This paper explores the gendered politics of spoken word and open mic spaces in Trinidad and Tobago since 2000. Based on semi-structured interviews with spoken word poets and open mic organisers, this article discusses the unequal gender power relations between male and female spoken word poets in open mic events. I argue that unredressed gender stereotypes and male privilege contextually marginalise female spoken word poets and maintain the posture of “power” for male spoken word poets and organisers in the movement.

Frank Discussions in Verse: What Women Tell Each Other in Opal Palmer Adisa’s 4-Headed Woman

Opal Palmer Adisa presents frank exploration in poetic form on subjects like mental and emotional breakdown, menstruation, pre-marital sex, abortion, oral sex, masturbation, adultery, and pressures of family life, to name a few. She gives symbolic and metaphorical signification to what is still considered taboo, immoral, or unspeakable in certain enclaves and communities, relegated to the private spheres and spaces of our lives but needing to be uncovered, addressed, and resolved through open dialogue and debate. An overall message is conveyed in 4-Headed Woman: Poems that women’s issues are best dealt with when women support and encourage, provide solace and advice, share life experiences, and listen to each other. This supportive and communicative process need not always be immediate or face to face and can transcend barriers, as well as occur among intersections—of space, time, age, ideology, sexual preference and orientation, class, and race—as illustrated in the writings on the wall in the ladies’ room. The paper analyses selected depictions from the collection of women’s hidden and outer realities in the privacy of this public place/space—of how women publicly address the private concerns, problems, and situations they face in a society of paradoxical expectations. The ideas of a community of women and the complexity of women’s lives are portrayed in the symbolism of the 4-headed woman, further echoed in the 4-part structure of the collection that culminates in the experimental poetic performance piece which draws together each thematic focus of the entire text.

Poetry in Film: Performance, Identity, and Crisis

This paper will examine the way poetry – and particularly the performance of poetry by adolescent characters – is represented in film. The paper argues that film offers a space within which it is possible to reflect in particularly probing ways on the relationship between poetry’s often contradictory roles in both expressing cultural norms and enabling repressed, neglected or forbidden aspects of individuals’ experience to be articulated. In particular, the performance of poetry by adolescents in films often takes place in dramatized contexts where the exercise of institutional authority is being questioned and individuals are undergoing difficult forms of personal transformation, awakening or development. Analysis and comparison of some exemplary instances in which the performance of poetry plays a central role in such struggles reveals much about the continued potency of poetic forms in an era when mainstream poetry itself has come to be widely perceived as either marginal or irrelevant to most ordinary people’s lives.

The Use of Poetry and Sagacious Sayings to Initiate Active Engagement in a University Critical Reading and Writing Course

To gain optimally from their educational pursuit, university students should assume the roles of active participants in the process. As a facilitator of foundation critical reading and writing courses at a Caribbean university for over a decade, I discovered that students, especially those who pursue degrees in the sciences, find it very challenging to generate ideas for their academic writing. This article focuses on an action mixed method research project in which two groups of students from the Faculties of Science and Technology and Medical Sciences composed weekly Quick Writes about their experiences and engagement in their critical reading and writing course during the second semester of the 2016-2017 academic year. The process involved using their personal written responses to "poetic and sagacious sayings" as a means of generating ideas for further writing requirements.

Collective Poetry Making in the Poesis of Psychohistoriographic Cultural Therapy

Psychohistoriographic Cultural Therapy (PCT), pioneered in Jamaica in 1978, is a post-colonial model of group psychotherapy that privileges the use of the poetic to heal historical traumas. Embedded in PCT is a technique of collective poetry making. In this paper, the process is chronicled in five case studies: Madnificent Irations at the Bellevue Mental Hospital (Jamaica); Rethinking Cultural Diversity at the Cooperative Association of States for Scholarship (Georgetown University, Washington); Windows for Wavelengths at the Maudsley Hospital (London, UK); Identity and Achievement at the Afro-Caribbean Mental Health Centre (Wolverhampton, UK); and Mite de La Laine at the McGill University, (Montreal, Canada). An analysis of the PCT process and the collaborative poems created highlights how this model accelerates insight and resilience, confronts stigma, and facilitates rehabilitation and productivity.

Talk the Poem: Re-positioning Poetry Recitation as Transformative Pedagogy

Poetry is often perceived by many as the genre of Literature, which is only accessible to specific kinds of individuals, with special artistic sensibilities. As much as we have moved away from formalistic notions of engaging with poetry, the text or written word itself, continues to be treated as an isolated substance, awaiting profound interpretation from those who are gifted with the skills of response. This article explores the importance of offering encounters with poetry which will enable sustainable transformation and growth for both teachers and students. The Talk the Poem (TTP) National Poetry Project was established to provide secondary students from across the island with the space and opportunity to engage with and recite Caribbean and British poetry, through interactive workshops and a national recitation competition. Through a series of critical self-reflective moments, core members of the TTP project attempted to determine the role and scope of the project in the lives of the secondary school teachers and students. This article reports findings on the positive and insightful outcomes of the TTP experience for teacher and student participants, deciphered through document analysis, team discussions, interviews, and surveys.

Ethical and Methodological Dilemmas in Education Research

This paper utilized a non-empirical theoretical research framework for the purpose of examining possible solutions to the ethical and methodological dilemmas facing educational researchers. Two questions guided the examination: a) How relevant is research ethics in education research? and b) Which paradigm is a good fit for education research? A study of over two decades of seminal works and conference presentations revealed that education research is subject to the same professional code of ethics and guidelines as other Human and Social Sciences Research; therefore, educational researchers should avoid questionable practices by adhering to the “relativist utilitarian ethics of consequences” in the research process. While no single paradigm was identified as a good fit for education research, the quantitative–qualitative continuum, mixed–methods research, and alternative ways of teaching research methods courses were considered as possible approaches for addressing the methodological dilemmas that educational researchers encounter. Instructors of research methods courses are therefore expected to reflect on and re-evaluate the different ways in which philosophy, pedagogical strategies, and learning goals influence the redesign of their course.