I’m saying it this way to be purposefully inflammatory, but also because it’s true. Everything we do is a poem, and everything we do is pervasive. History is a poem and it is pervasive. Grammar is a poem and it is pervasive. Vocabulary. Reading. Writing. Culture. Everything. Literacy and Social Studies are taught together because they are inherently the same, intertwined in ways that cannot be unwound. They are both pervasive and poems.

For the purposes of this essay, it is important to define what a poem is. In 1968, Czeslaw Milosz wrote a poem titled, “Ars Poetica,” which literally means, ‘The Art of Poetry.’ This is a style of poetry, in the tradition of Horace, which attempts to answer the question: ‘Why do I write?’ I first read Milosz’s poem in the very first semester of my MFA program, and it has lived inside my body ever since like an earworm, a mantra, an echo. He writes, “The purpose of poetry is to remind us/how difficult it is to remain just one person.” When I first read this, I imagined it literally, a series of people trapped inside one body trying to escape. This image is likely not what Milosz had in mind, but it is evocative, and I think it speaks to the heart of both poetry and learning. Learning, or significant learning, stems from the ability to hold multiple ideas in contention. Learning is a juxtaposition. That’s what humanities class does best. It holds ideas beside each other in a personal and global way.

One of our essential questions in 8th grade humanities is: “How can I use writing mechanics to enhance my communication?” Consider for a moment, all the languages we speak in a single day. The way we speak to a teacher is different from a sibling is different from a parent. Our diction is personal and ever-changing. It is a constant balancing act of relationships. Eula Biss says, “imagination is treacherous,” but so is language. Poetry is the act of organizing these languages and in the process understanding our full selves. Poetry is the act of constructing our multiple selves through syntax and diction into something ethereal. It speaks literally to this question of communication through mechanics. It’s about turning the individual into something grand and global. It’s about turning the personal into something consumable or even tangible. Poetry is about defining your abstract chasm of emotions, your enormous internal world, and making it into something electric that people feel inside their body when they read it. This may seem like quite a leap, but isn’t that what learning is too? Isn’t learning about making connections? Isn’t learning inherently personal? Isn’t learning turning facts into lightning? Both literacy and social studies are acts of the individual. They are things that exist in a personal realm. What is culture, grammar, or vocabulary without distinctiveness? Without personal experiential qualities? Those concepts, standing on their own as abstract ideas are flaccid, and they require the individual to acquire true value. What is a story, really, without a reader?

Another one of our essential questions is: “How does the medium shape the message and the message shape the medium?” It may be too late to admit this, but sometimes I worry that I don’t know what a poem is, sometimes I read something I wrote and I worry: is this a poem? Is this a story? Is this somewhere in between? In order to truly understand form, function, and literary medium, students must first understand each genre and its value. Fiction. Creative nonfiction. Journalism. Drama. Graphic literature. Short story. Flash fiction. But where the magic resides is often in the plasma between these genres. What students often come to understand is that the medium is malleable based on the authors’ perspective. You see, the truth is, everyone knows what a poem is. A poem is what you decide it is. A poem is personal. A poem is anything as long as it matters. That’s why everything we do in middle school humanities is a poem because when learning is personal; it matters.
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However, middle school humanities isn’t just about the personal. It’s not just poems. The truth is learning isn’t just about the individual. It’s also about the world. That’s right, the whole world. The novelist, William Faulkner, in his famous Nobel Prize speech, spoke about, “the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” Faulkner speaks of the pervasiveness which I strive for in the classroom. He later describes these emotional abstractions as, “universal bones.” Those are the bones I aim to build humanities class on. Learning is inherently individualistic, but it shrivels without the juxtaposition of a global perspective, without universality to lean upon.

One of our essential questions in 7th grade is: “How can literature serve as a vehicle for social change?” This speaks directly to the concept of the universal within an interdisciplinary classroom. A recent example is the 8th grade reading the short story, “What We Fed to the Manticore,” by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri. This story focuses on themes of greed, excess, and hunger. However, it is also a thinly veiled metaphor for climate change. This story allowed students to better understand the elements of craft in a short story while also creating a meaningful conversation about consumerism and its impact on climate change. The majority of students were also unsure of what a manticore is, which led to an even more interesting conversation about myths from around the world. Why has everyone in class heard about Pegasus but not a manticore?  Later, when discussing the impact European Colonization had on the Lenni Lenape, this story came up again as a representation of consumption and destruction. This story is a pervasive choice, and by combining the study of reading with social studies, it allows students to have a more global perspective and educational experience. These conversations do not function in the same way when these classes are dissected.

All of this is really to say that the interdisciplinary study of literacy alongside social studies allows students to experience these subjects in both a more personal and global way. The individual is highlighted as well as the universal. When these concepts exist side by side simultaneously, they both glow brighter. I think back to that Milosz quote. I think that maybe what he meant isn’t a bunch of people trapped in one body trying to escape, but instead that the object of poetry is to hold things together.
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Michael John (MJ) McGinn attended Ursinus College where he received his BA in English and creative writing, followed by an MFA in fiction writing from Adelphi University. MJ has won numerous awards for his writing, including the 55 Writing competition in 2011 and the 2017 Robert Muroff award. His work was named in the Wigleaf 50 for best very short fiction, and he was named again on the Wigleaf list in 2019. In 2018, MJ led a panel on sports writing about Voice in Sports Writing at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. MJ was also selected for a fellowship in 2019 with the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and has won a National Endowment of the Humanities grant as part of the NEH's American Landmark series to study Japanese American incarceration and the history of the Little Tokyo neighborhood in Los Angeles. When he isn't teaching or writing, MJ enjoys hiking, drawing, skiing, going to museums and bookstores, and voracious reading.

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