Brutal Imagination Poetry
For our final unit of the year, we read Cornelius Eady’s 2001 poetry collection Brutal Imagination. This collection examines the 1994 case in South Carolina, in which a white woman named Susan Smith killed her two children and told authorities they had been kidnapped by a Black man. For two weeks, the nation searched for this Black man to no avail, until the sheriff turned towards Smith as a prime suspect. Eady’s collection is from the perspective of the imaginary Black man who Smith created. Eady uses the poetic form to explore complex racial dynamics through personal experiences, societal structures, pop culture, history, fantasy, and the news media. After reading the collection, students watched Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing, which tells the story of a Brooklyn neighborhood on a scorching hot day when racial tensions threaten to boil over. The film culminates in the police murdering a Black man and a resulting riot by the residents of the neighborhood. We then wrote two poems in response to these works, along with our own experiences and perceptions of race and racism.
Poem 1: Found Poem
A found poem is constructed from a range of other materials, which may include newspaper articles, overheard conversations, speeches, signs, graffiti, other poems, or any other text. Our found poems are constructed from Brutal Imagination itself, along with primary source articles and footage from the Susan Smith case.
Poem 2 - Ekphrasis
An artist’s response to another work of art is called “ekphrasis” (from the Greek ekphrázein, “to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name”). An ekphrastic poem responds to another work of art. Brutal Imagination includes several ekphrastic poems, which inspired us to write our own. Our poems respond to music, photography, poetry, news stories, and other media.
