The goal of our project is to design a curriculum to intentionally teach about race, gender, and other issues of social justice that intersect with Shakespeare’s works. At the center of our pedagogical initiatives are contemporary young adult verse novels (novels in verse), specifically those created by writers of color. By inviting students to read the poetry in these novels and then write their own ReVerse-ing poems, we seek to engage young people in conversations about issues relevant to their lived experiences. The premise of our work is that young people, if provided examples of verse-making that also mirror their lives, will be able to engage with the poetry of Shakespeare with a deeper sense of purpose. Much in the same way that companion texts and restorying allow students to frame their lived experiences and then to speak to those experiences in their own voices and from their perspectives, we strongly believe that reading verse novels will provide them with the necessary models and mentoring devices for their own creative acts. In using the term, ReVerse, which is derived from the etymology of verse, meaning to turn, we aim to encourage  young people to turn the poetry of Shakespeare to more accurately describe their experiences. ReVerse-ing, in our minds, entails the processes of adapting/appropriating the poetry of Shakespeare, focusing not so much on the line and meter of it but on the playful and artful deployment of words in the creation of meaning.

Because of our shared interests and collaborative work with the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva, our curricular objectives skew towards Latinx topics and issues, such as bicultural experiences, translanguaging, racial colorism, belonging, and other intersectional nodes inherent to Latinx ways of being and doing. Given the time and space allotted to our essay, we will place special emphasis on the verse novel Under the Mesquite by Guadalupe García McCall. We end our discussion on the role of verse novels in teaching poetry, however, largely by showcasing fictional teachers who encourage their students to write in texts such as Words with Wings by Nikki Grimes, Locomotion by Jacqueline Woodson, and They Call Me Güero: A Border Kid’s Poems by David Bowles. These verse novels create poetic worlds in which young poets find out and then find ways to use their cultural wealth. As Tara J. Yosso persuasively argues, even as many in the United States see these Latinx communities as having a cultural deficit, young Latinx people living between cultures and having multilingual skills that they deploy in everyday acts of translation and code meshing support the notion that diverse communities have incredible cultural wealth (75–81).

In the Borderlands of Genre

Verse novels, Krystal Howard tells us, live in a generic borderland, “somewhere between the lyric, the narrative, and the dramatic” (330). Though the form has existed since the late eighteen and the early nineteenth centuries, the verse novel for young readers in the early twenty-first century “has emerged as a significant and popular hybrid form that engages with multiple genres including poetry, prose, and drama” (327–28). Held together by a central narrative thread, the fragmentations and spaces offered by linking poems together require readers to “pause for contemplation and fill in the gaps created by a collage of language, line, poem, scene, and paratext; this process creates an intimacy between the reader and the speaker of the poems” (329). The aesthetic experience of creating the intimate connections between speaker and readers, Howard posits, “provides the structural space necessary for reader contemplation and becomes a mode in which young readers can actively participate in the making of meaning by putting together the fragments of someone else’s life and then parlaying the resulting insights into a deeper understanding of their own experience” (329). For Mike Cadden, this structural space for reader participation, in effect, casts young readers into the role of a play’s director. As he notes,

The verse novel leaves all of this description [of visual elements commonly left out of screenplays] to the reader’s imagination, as when we read a play rather than see one. It is the work of the person staging the drama to make those visual decisions, and that same task belongs to the reader of a verse novel. The person reading is put in the role of a play’s director. (25)

Creating possibilities for reader interactions with the text, according to Cadden, is what makes verse novels so successful. As Karly Marie Grice, Rachel L. Rickard Rebellino, and Christine N. Stamper further point out, “The emphasis on co-construction of the narrative allows verse novels to reach each reader where he or she is, enabling a text to function simultaneously as a metaphorical mirror and/or window” (50). This, they note, is specifically important for readers whose lived experiences are underrepresented in the world of young adult literature (Grice et al. 50). When we consider that some of the more notable young adult novels of the early twenty-first century are verse novels penned by popular and dynamic writers of color who wish to propose better and more accurate representations, as our bibliography shows, verse novels can be deemed as educationally magical. They not only promote greater interaction with the text and thus serve as better mirrors in which young Latinx readers can see themselves and their culture reflected, but they also are penned by some of the foremost writers of young adult literature and are, therefore, widely available.

While we certainly agree that verse novels have much to add to a reading curriculum, our position in this essay is that verse novels can also function as an invitation for students to write poetry. Our project builds on Laura Turchi’s use of companion texts that students read alongside (preferably before) Shakespeare’s plays and Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and Amy Stornaiuolo’s use of restorying (rewriting stories with textual equity in mind) as a pedagogical tool of textual justice. Our project also is supported by the work of Allison Skerrett and Randy Bomer, which situates border-crossing compositions as fundamental to Latinx student learning. Much in keeping with Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s theories concerning the Borderlands and the crossing of borders, Skerrett and Bomer understand border-crossing as an everyday reality, meaning that border-crossing can encompass the crossing of the physical border between the US and Mexico, and it also can mean going from home to school, moving between languages, and traversing cultures and the forms of knowledge they cultivate. By allowing young writers first to understand their hybrid mestiza consciousness—that is, living in the liminal spaces between nations, languages, and cultures—and second to write about and from these assets and sources of strength, we can create what Skerrett and Bomer term “classrooms in the borderzones” and empower young writers to draw on their everyday lifeworlds (320). Put differently, we can encourage young writers to make meaning from the multiple borders they cross, inhabiting their texts with Spanish, English, and Spanglish, as well as their varied intersectional life experiences.

Given their hybridity informed by narrative, poetry, and drama, verse novels hold at least one more potential: the possibility of engaging more deeply with the works of William Shakespeare, which are a mainstay of many English curricula. In our view, verse novels are inherently dramatic, or, as Joy Alexander claims, “a modern means of rendering soliloquy or dramatic monologue” (271). Because of their use of voice and their affinity to drama, as Cadden posits, “we can learn a great deal about (and teach) the relationships among novel, poetry, and drama through an investigation of the qualities of the verse novel” (21). Our turn toward Shakespeare, in this sense, not only involves an engagement with the poetry of Shakespeare (under the idea that poetry is best taught when placed alongside other poetry, in companionship), but it likewise includes the notion that drama, in this case Shakespeare’s plays, can better be understood in relationship with other forms of drama, particularly those that also use verse forms. Verse novels, we argue, fulfill this dual-purposed companionship.

In the following section, therefore, we look at ways in which verse novels allow young readers to explore relationships between these dramatic forms and examine their own versions of crossing borders. Then, by recruiting their languages and lifeworlds, specifically those drawing from their border-crossing experiences, we propose that students can begin to ReVerse, to become meaning-makers in the service of gaining personal agency and, by their poetry, to become agents of change in educational and societal practices.

“If You Want to Really Hurt Me, Talk Badly about My Language”

Guadalupe García McCall’s Under the Mesquite traces the story of Lupita through her high school years in Eagle Pass, Texas, a border town in the Rio Grande Valley of Southeast Texas that nestles itself next to Piedras Negras, Coahuila, on the other side of the border. Lupita and her family are not originally from El Águila (Eagle Pass):

When I was six years old,
our family left our beloved Mexico
and moved to los Estados Unidos. (10)^[1]

Though the family lives in the US, they still travel to visit family in Mexico, where they can be “true Mexicans, for a day” (142). While the verse novel begins with Lupita and her family crisscrossing the US/Mexico border, the rest involves the varied and myriad ways in which Lupita crosses borders in her everyday life as a high school student in the US.

In order to demonstrate the pedagogical potential of this verse novel, we highlight two scenes that depict Lupita’s everyday border-crossing in Under the Mesquite. In the first scene, found in the poem “Drama,” we encounter Lupita in acting class. For this particular lesson, the teacher, Mr. Cortés, walks in with a bag of Blow Pops in his hand for what he states will be “voice lessons” (66). He then instructs the class and Lupita as follows:

“here, put these in, one on each side
of your mouth, como ardilla listada.”
He puffs out his cheeks with air
to demonstrate, making a chipmunk face. (66)

He continues,

“If you’re serious about acting—
And I think you are—then you need to
lose your accent.” (67)

This scene ends with a surprised Lupita saying, “I have an accent?” (67).

What begins as a familiar scene in which students in a drama class are given elocution and voice lessons turns very quickly into one fraught with the politics of linguistic assimilation. Much like the use of marbles by Henry Higgins to rid Eliza Doolittle of her Cockney accent, the Blow Pops in this scene in Under the Mesquite have the disquieting intentions of encouraging Lupita to lose her way of speaking, in this case the Mexican-ness in her speech patterns. These “voice lessons” in a short time become a divisive point for Lupita and her friends. In the poem entitled “To Be or Not to Be Mexican,” a clear riff on Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, Lupita’s friends mock her newfound ways of speaking:

“Anyone want my enchi-lady?”
Sarita says, picking up an enchilada
with her fork and showing it to
a group of our friends
who are sitting with us in the cafeteria.

I shake my head
and take a bite of my burrito.
When I look up again,
everyone around me is laughing,
but I don’t get the joke. (78)

Continuing with jokes, this time with tacos as the word of choice,

Sarita glances at me sideways,
holds up a taco, and says,
“How about a tay-co?
Anyone want a tay-co?” (79)

When Lupita stands up for herself, saying, “I don’t talk like that,” her friends point out:

“Yes, you do,” Mireya jumps in.
“You talk like you’re one of them.”
She spits out the word in disgust
and looks down at her lunch tray,
like she can’t stand the sight of me.

“One of them?” I ask.

“Let me translate for you,”
Sarita sneers. “You talk like
you wanna be white.” (80)

Like Lupita, we (as spectators) are made to shudder at the insistence by Sarita to translate the subject of the conversation. The next gesture is just as cutting and hence as important:

“What,” Sarita asks, “you think you’re
Anglo now ’cause you’re in Drama?
You think you’re better than us?”

“No—”

“Then stop trying to act like
them,” Mireya says accusingly.
“You’re Mexican, just like the rest of us.
Look around you. Ninety-nine percent
of this school is Mexican.
Stop trying to be something you’re not!” (81)

Again, we are left to shudder at the double meaning embedded in Mireya’s use of the word act here, bringing together the notion of theatrical performance with the kinds of behavioral shifts associated with assimilation. The scene, which quickly moves beyond the limits of a simple lunchroom spat or “drama” between friends, conjures up the ways in which ethnicity is not merely constructed but necessarily performed—one either acts Mexican or like one of them. We further can gather from Mireya’s admonishment that characters have choices to make in how they perform their social roles. Lupita, to Mireya, is playing her role wrong. The episode ends with an appeal by Lupita for a more holistic view of Latinx identity:

“Being Mexican
means more than that.
It means being there for each other.
It’s togetherness, like a familia.” (83)

At play in these scenes, whether through Lupita’s realization that she has an accent or her being called out for sounding white, are the politics of language in the Borderlands. Anzaldúa’s statement that frames this section, “If you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language” (66), is specifically relevant in this instance. This is because the language that Anzaldúa insists is twin skin to her ethnic identity is in actuality the patois of the Borderlands. It is a border language, a composite of the several living languages that she speaks, ranging “from English to Castilian Spanish to the Northern Mexican dialect to Tex-Mex to a sprinkling of Nahuatl” (x). To our purpose, Lupita’s insistence that Borderlands people can speak a myriad of languages and still be familia is in alignment with Anzaldúa’s theorization of a Borderlands language. Indeed, the pushback that Lupita encounters is a form of linguistic terrorism, of being the subject of burla (derisive laughter). As Anzaldúa notes, “We’re afraid the other will think we’re agringadas [white] . . . We oppress each other trying to out-Chicano each other, vying to be the ‘real’ Chicanas” (66). This, then, is Lupita’s experience at the hands of Mireya. Her antidote to Mireya’s derisions is to propose, accurately, that the language of the Borderlands is much like the lived experiences of the Borderlands—there is not a simple language or experience; there are many possibilities, a multiplicity of realities. In this regard, Lupita echoes Anzaldúa’s ultimatum, which insists that “until I can accept as legitimate Chicano Texas Spanish, Tex-Mex and all the other languages I speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself” (66). Legitimacy, as both Lupita and Anzaldúa understand it, entails being “free to write [and speak] bilingually and to switch codes without having to translate” (66).

These scenes in Under the Mesquite and Anzaldúa’s theories on language resonate with recent scholarship on code-meshing and its pedagogical utility. As Brooke Ricker Schreiber and Missy Watson note, by engaging with code-meshing, students are invited “to investigate/consider how language standards emerge, how and by whom they are enforced, and to whose benefit, by bringing to light in the classroom how language standards sustain and are sustained by social inequity” (95). As they further state, code-meshing pedagogy is built “to honor, include, and strengthen the range of language and rhetorical resources students already possess, and to honor students’ wishes to combat expectations about communicative standards” (95).

To the purpose of this essay, we believe that code-meshing pedagogy, alongside disrupting monolingual practices and inviting students to utilize their multilingual assets, will also have a positive impact on the reading and writing of poetry. As we have seen with Lupita, young Latinx poets should be invited to wrestle with the forms of linguistic assimilation that take place in their everyday lives, what Anzaldúa calls linguistic terrorism’s wish to tame a wild tongue (66). As our reading of “To Be or Not to Be Mexican” advances, the opportunity to learn about linguistic oppressions and to practice disrupting them via the writing of code-meshing poetry can be a game-changer for young Latinx students. From these poetic exercises, we believe, young Latinx poets can learn how and practice ways to disrupt linguistic oppressions that are meant to “hurt” them. In this sense, code-meshing poetry can be seen as a culturally sustaining practice, a way of using one’s cultural knowledge and tools to sustain culture and to be sustained by culture.

Writing Poems with Verse Novels

In her advice to teachers who wish to get students writing poetry, Nikki Grimes states that they should provide poems that students can aspire to write themselves. As the author of Words with Wings, a verse novel that shows the creative process of transmuting daydreams into poems, Grimes notes that teachers should start with the verse that “touches [the students’] own lives, reflects their own realities. It need not all be light, mind you, or humorous. Their lives are made up of more stuff than that. The poetry you share with them does, however, need to be accessible” (“Verse Novels”). Once they hook onto the genre, Grimes advises, “everything else follows, after that” (“Verse Novels”).

Much like Lupita in Under the Mesquite who learns to use poems to delve into sensitive and difficult topics, Gabby in Words with Wings comes to find that

words have wings
that wake my daydreams.
They fly in,
silent as sunrise,
tickle my imagination,
and carry my thoughts away. (11)

She is successful, filling her notebook with poems, largely because of her teacher, Mr. Spicer, who purposefully creates assignments in which students daydream for a given amount of time and then are asked to write down their visions.

It is also a teacher, Ms. Wong, who is responsible for Güero’s learning about and then writing poetry in David Bowles’s They Call Me Güero: A Border Kid’s Poems. Ms. Wong is even more intentional about providing students with mentor poems that are accessible to a diverse audience, freely giving her students poems in Spanish that had been translated from Nahuatl (the language of the Aztecs/Nahuas).

Also going by the name The Bookworm Squad, the students begin to see themselves as superheroes whose superpower is “traveling through these pages / to distant times and places / to find our proud reflections” (29). The young poets grow to recognize that the poetry you read has a tremendous effect on the poetry you write. The superpowers of the Bookworm Squad, in other words, cannot fully be realized without diverse mentor poems, whether those poems are found in Korean lyrics or the poems of Gary Soto (34). As Güero states,

Ms. Wong becomes a hero to me
as she pairs up poems from past and present,

pulling back the lid and showing us the secrets,
like how Frost’s snow-filled woods symbolize death

or why Soto drops an orange, glowing like fire,
into the hands of a love-struck boy my age. (34)

Understanding that “poetry is the clearest lens for viewing the world” (33), as Ms. Wong informs him, Güero tells us, “I put pen to paper, and my soul comes rushing out in line after line” (34).

Likewise in Locomotion by Jacqueline Woodson, it is a teacher who is responsible for the poems written by Lonnie C. Motion, an eleven-year-old young man whose parents died in a fire. As a result, he is placed in a foster home, while his sister is placed in a different home. Missing his parents and his sister terribly, Lonnie uses poetry as a vehicle for viewing his world and his place in it. At the instruction of his teacher, Ms. Marcus, who constructs assignments in which the students try out different forms, Lonnie learns how to write haikus, sonnets, and free verse. When another student contests her assignment by stating, “I ain’t writing no poetry . . . No black guys be / writing poetry anyway,” Ms. Marcus informs them that “of course rap is poetry! / One of the most creative forms” (67, 70). Shortly thereafter, the student declares, “guess who else is a poet now!” (70).

Central to our discussion of Words with Wings, They Call Me Güero, and Locomotion, then, is the important role that teachers play in shaping young adult relationships to poetry. This is not unusual. Whether forming poetry clubs, as Ms. Galiano does in The Poet X; encouraging students to write in Spanish and English, as Ms. Abernard does in Gabi, a Girl in Pieces; or providing culturally relevant texts, as Ms. Wong and Ms. Marcus do in They Call Me Güero and Locomotion, respectively, young adult literature provides a blueprint for the positive effects that teachers can create in their students’ lives when they ask them to engage with poetry.

What is more, the verse novels mentioned in this study not only provide examples of the power of poetry for diverse young adults, but they also show how teachers can go about teaching poetry to their students. They Call Me Güero and Locomotion, in this respect, foreground the recalcitrance to writing poetry that students from diverse backgrounds may have, even as they highlight tactics that teachers might use to empower their students to write. Inviting students to read diverse poets who use verse forms to make sense of themselves and the world around them goes hand in hand with culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy because it encourages students to see Shakespeare as one among many versifiers and to begin to see themselves as potential poets as well. This philosophy and practice of ReVerse-ing does not stop at lowering the barrier to reading and finding meaning in poetry, in other words. It summons students to see poetry as something that they can make too.

ReVerse-ing for Justice

Restorying is not a new idea. Educators have long been utilizing different forms of retelling as a way of inviting their students into co-creative spaces in which they may respond creatively to a literary work. As Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and Amy Stornaiuolo point out, one form of restorying includes “reshap[ing] narratives to represent a diversity of perspectives and experiences that are often missing or silenced in mainstream texts, media, and popular discourse” (313). In this regard, restorying efforts by students may be viewed as examples of Critical Race Theory’s counterstories that counter pernicious myths by disrupting the silence that allows racist stories to be the only legitimate narrative about a particular issue or topic. Put differently, understanding restorying as counterstorytelling allows these co-created projects to, in the words of Lee Anne Bell, “expand knowledge, to reveal what has been left out, suppressed, misunderstood and ignored in order to build a broader understanding of our history as a society” (Bell 3). In our view, ReVerse-ing has the potential not only to challenge these pernicious myths but also to “take up the mantle of antiracism and social justice work through generating new stories that catalyze contemporary action against racism” (Bell 89). This is to say that we believe ReVerse-ing engenders the hope that society can be transformed if we empower young minds to imagine better and more just worlds, in this case ones in which their cultural and lived experiences are centered.

One way to materialize this hope, we believe, is to assign both in-class and out-of-class assignments that invite students to work with poems. For short in-class assignments, specifically those dealing with longer and more complex passages, such as the soliloquies in Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet, we suggest inviting them to create a short poem composed  of ten to fifteen words found in the passage. The key is to ensure that students understand that the poem they write with these words should address the main points of the passage. Their poem can rearticulate the issues raised, or it can critique them. Likewise, their poem can bend the gender or race of the speaker and in this way provide new insight into the passage. For us, the main point of the assignment is the journey and not the final output. Their journey as makers of poetry, in other words, is the primary goal. Asking the students to read their poems aloud not only helps them realize that they possess poetic chops but also helps them better understand the co-creative possibilities inherent in taking words from the Bard and making them their own.

One key component of the out-of-class poetry writing assignment is that students must employ their vernaculars in their poems. Alongside addressing topics and issues raised in the readings, the goal of these assignments is for students to use their various languages in educational spaces. Historically, and in their previous experiences with the educational system, students have most likely not been allowed to mix languages freely. Put another way, they have been asked to acculturate. Freeing them from such bonds, we believe, empowers them in significant ways. As Dolores Delgado Bernal notes, for too long, the “histories, experiences, cultures, and languages of students of color have been devalued, misinterpreted, or omitted within formal educational settings” (105). By inviting students to write in their vernaculars, this assignment puts them on a path that leads to the realization that students of color can become creators of new knowledge. For this work, though, they also need to believe that they are the possessors of knowledge and that they can acquire knowledge. We strongly believe that writing poems, in this case ReVerse-ing poems that talk with or talk back to Shakespeare, can propel students along this path, where they use their cultural and linguistic archive in the service of creating new knowledge.

We invite educators to adapt these assignments in ways they see fit. In our findings, these assignments invariably lead students toward realizing and hopefully acknowledging how vital their newly created knowledge is to the world. This is specifically true for marginalized students, who, whether because of race, gender, sexuality, religion, class, or disability, often feel excluded.

Conclusion

At the conclusion of Under the Mesquite, Lupita tells us that going away to college feels like she is being uprooted. She is happy, though, for it means that

I am transplanting myself
to a whole new place
with a new kind of language to learn. (157)

She will attend college on a performance scholarship, one she earned for her oratory skills in performing key parts of Euripides’s The Trojan Women. She trained with her mother, whom she lost to cancer in the course of her senior year in high school. Her mother, it should be noted, only speaks Spanish and Lupita’s recital is in English. When her mother begs her to perform the parts in English, Lupita is taken aback, but since it is her mother’s wish, she performs in English. Afterwards, as they discuss the competition, Lupita translates the passage for her mother. To this, her mother exclaims,

“¡Que talento! . . . So gifted to be able to put
yourself in their places.” (87–88)

What is left unsaid by Lupita is that she had chosen to recite from The Trojan Women as a way to deal with her mother’s cancer, that is, the tragedy of losing a dear one. As we conclude our discussion on verse novels and the teaching possibilities they create, we cannot think of a more poignant example of a young student using poetry to make sense of the world by making meaning in it.

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Verse Books

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