Authors: Anastacia-Reneé, Mary Beth Cancienne, DaMaris B. Hill, McKinley E. Melton

Target Group: All Ages

Warm up – create a playlist for the week

• Tell me more: What’s your modality (Pandora, Spotify, Vinyl, Mix Tape, YouTube, etc.)?
• What is informing your playlist? (emotion, memory, current events)
• Invite students to pair/share some of the standouts from their playlist; are there overlaps? Songs that are in conversation with one another?

Follow-up

• Choose one of your favorite songs from the playlist (one that you know the lyrics to), and add an additional two lines of lyrics.

Explain the “Bop” form

• Poets.org – Explanation of “Bop”
  • “the Bop is a form of poetic argument consisting of three stanzas, each stanza followed by a repeated line, or refrain, and each undertaking a different purpose in the overall argument of the poem”
• Situate within a broader discussion of music and Black poetry
• Break down key elements of the form
• Help students navigate the essays and poems in the Furious Flower resource, “Language, Music, and the Vernacular in African American Poetry”
  

Assignment

• Direct students to write a bop using the lyrics from music on their playlist.

Group Closing Discussion

• What did you learn from this exercise?
• What challenged you? What excited you?
• What can you take from this exercise and direct toward other creative efforts?

Supplemental Readings

• Dawn Lundy Martin and Adam Fitzgerald – “On the Black Avant-garde, Trigger Warnings, and Life in East Hampton”
  
• Evie Shockley – “Race, Experiments, and the Black Avant-Garde” (Furious Flower 2019, pp. 69-82)
• Meta DuEwa Jones – “The String of Grace: Renovating New Rhythms in the Present-Future of Black Poetry and Music” (Furious Flower 2019, pp. 213-230)