The Common Core’s Dead Poets Society
I decided to celebrate National Poetry Month by closely reading the Common Core recommended poetry list from Appendix B of the Common CoreStandards in English/Language Arts. Altogether, the lists offer a selection of 80 poems that I think we would all find fairly representative across the broad spectrum of poetry that might be chosen as exemplars. The people gathering the list obviously chose with an eye to quality and diversity and the introduction cautioned that the list was only a sample and that teachers should use it as a guide and not as a definitive list.
The problem with any list, of course, and especially a list in a document that has been given the power of the Common Core, is that it tends to become the de facto list from which teachers, and perhaps more importantly, publishers, choose when deciding what should be taught. I would expect to see these poems dominating text book anthologies for the foreseeable future.
On further analysis of the list, however, I did discover something, perhaps not surprising, but certainly concerning. Of the sixty poets represented on the list fifty were dead, most long dead, and only ten were living. Of the ten living poets listed none were born after 1954. Perhaps we should call it the Dead and Geriatric Poets Society.
In a way this is natural. For many years English anthologies were filled with the works of dead white men. Over the past two decades or so, we have managed to become more diverse in our offerings, but the idea that the old
