Theme for English B

This first-person, free-verse poem has five stanzas of widely varying length, and, while some of its lines rhyme, there is no set rhyme pattern. Such a spontaneous, intuitive formal quality characterizes jazz poetry, and this genre has special consequence within the dramatic situation: Jazz poetry’s cultural mythos informs the spirit of the poem, yielding a distinctly Black voice whose Blackness is the occasion for the poetic utterance. The speaker is a Black college student who lives in Harlem but is from the South—an identity that carries complexities and complications unappreciated by his white peers.

Four of the five stanzas concern the process of writing an assignment. The longest stanza, the fourth stanza, is the assignment itself. The first and last stanzas are the shortest—only one line each.

The first stanza, essentially a dialogue tag, clarifies that the following stanza quotes “[t]he instructor” (Line 1). This quote is written in italics, further distinguishing the separate voice, and contains the writing prompt from the titular class “English B.” The one-page assignment should “come out of you” (Line 4). The content’s autobiographical (or confessional) nature will, says the instructor, make the writing “true” (Line 5).