This can be used for F2F, or on Zoom, synchronously. It could also be adapted for asynchronous work.

Opening: Have students free-write for five minutes. What is something you want to change? It can be something in your real life or something in the world. What would you need to change it? Write for five minutes.

Partner Work: Have students pair and share their freewrites, or whatever part of it they feel comfortable sharing. They will then share something interesting their partner said with the whole class, so they should get permission to share. On Zoom, this would happen in breakout rooms. 

Share out. 

Then I will project this poem with Adrienne Rich’s voice reading her poem, “Diving into the Wreck.” I prefer this recording of her.

First, we will just listen.

Then, we will listen a second time and students should write down words or phrases that strike them. (On Zoom this would happen in the chat) 

Share: Students shout out their words. 

Contextualize: I will tell them a little bit about Rich and how she wrote this poem while teaching at CUNY in the late sixties/early seventies, and some people interpret it as being about her reflections on systemic inequities facing her SEEK students. Others interpret it to be more of a personal reckoning about diving into the wreckage of her consciousness wrought by Patriarchy.

*A colleague sent me this resource, which I want to “dive into” more deeply and maybe incorporate here. (From Rachel Blau Duplessis, Writing Beyond the Ending)

In “Diving into the Wreck,” descent, detection, and exploration are metaphors for the acts of criticism. The poet, as an undersea diver, takes a journey down to an individual and collective past, where some mysterious, challenging “wreck” occurred that no prior research or instruction can clarify. …Rich places her emphasis beyond the culturally validated frames of story and myth, on the absolute and concrete perception of the seeker. The diver spends much of the poem in descent to arrive at dissent, moving deeper than the surface of meanings and atmospheres in which it is “natural” to be the way we are. Further, the diver goes beyond the “ending” of the implied story of a wreck to examine clues to alternative stories that—first unnoticed—would otherwise be doomed to be permanently muted. The “book of myths” contains sentences and sequences that do not name properly, keeping things invisible or unspoken. But if explored from this muted experiential perspective without the scripts of narrative, the wreck will yield alternative meaning. In the act of detection, the analysis of the wreck, the poet discovers that she has herself become the object of the search: “I am she: I am he // whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes …” (PSN, 198). This discovery of multiple, androgynous, unifying identities is part of the truth of the wreck. The holistic “one” who is revealed underwater is constructed of opposites before their split: I and we, she and he, dead and living, speaker and spoken, individual and collective, cargo and instruments, seeker and sought. In this poem of journey and transformation, Rich is tapping the plots of myth while reenvisioning the content. While there is a hero, a quest, and a buried treasure, the hero is a woman; the quest is a critique of old myths; the treasure is the whole buried knowledge of the relations between the sexes that cannot yet be brought to the surface, and a self-definition won only through the act of criticism.)

Students will be instructed to pick one word they wrote down and look up its different meanings on the OED dictionary site.

By example, show them the different meanings of WRECK. Discuss etymology and parts of speech. 

Write: (Asynchronous) They should use this word to write their own diving into the wreck poem or paragraph. How do you get to the bottom of the wreck? What do you see there? What tools do you need? What do you salvage and bring to the surface?

Share out the next Zoom or in-person session. 

Reflect. 

Possible ways to further integrate this assignment: I see this as a possible stand-alone writing assignment with the added benefit of growing community or one that could lead to a larger writing project. It could be expanded into a personal narrative essay or it could be something that leads to a research paper.