The following framework was written by Samiya Bashir and pertains to June Jordan’s Poetry for the People (Expanded Edition): A Revolutionary Blueprint. (Haymarket Books, 2026):
“I’m not interested in making the book ‘more techy.’ Instead, I want this new edition to reassert June’s original premise in changed conditions. Poetry is still for the people, and modern tech is simply another set of tools. Our job is to protect the people from becoming tools of the technology.” —Samiya Bashir
Thirty years ago, we met in person in on-campus lecture rooms. We still do, but we might also meet online, on Discord, under trees, in group chats. Where the original edition addresses building a democratic classroom, shared responsibilities, editing collectives, etc., let’s consider how, for instance, we might build a people’s poetry classroom over Wi-Fi, without losing the people?
The Classroom & Communities of Trust Across Screens
Creating collective agreements for online spaces:
Decide when/if cameras should be optional and when/if they should be mandatory.
How will we utilize the chat as a parallel poetic space?
Adapting “stacks” and “rounds” to digital space, i.e. hands, reactions, breakout rooms, etc.
A few tips for hybrid classrooms:
Consider pairing, “buddy” style, an in-person student with an online student.
Rotate roles: i.e., chat host, note-taker, timekeeper, care-checker, etc.
Ensure accessibility by utilizing:
live-captioning
screen-reader-friendly documents
asynchronous forums for students who can’t speak easily in live space
Community Beyond Campus Walls
While this blueprint originally has explicitly addressed ways to build this program on campus or in university classrooms, Instructors and students can work together to add pathways for:
Mutual aid projects
Prison education, juvenile detention, reentry spaces
Community centers, libraries, tenant unions, labor orgs
Online-only gatherings for disabled, immunocompromised, or geographically scattered folks, among other community based, and community led, opportunities
A few important considerations:
Community-centered syllabi which assumes no grades, no credits, and no institutional support and includes notes on:
trauma-informed facilitation
consent around sharing personal or political material
the risks of visibility for undocumented, trans, disabled, or criminalized students
Revising Assignments to Include Digital & Public Technologies
Alongside the additional collaborative writing assignment for classrooms and community spaces which we’ve included with this new edition, “Community Poem Project,” consider new ways to engage the original assignments as both “low-tech / analog” and “digital / hybrid.”
We can now offer analog and digital versions of the same impulse, even as we still remember how a hand-to-hand poem hits different. Where our practice describes photocopied anthologies, campus readings, bulletin board announcements, local zines, and more, we can consider how both the original, analog form strikes the right note, and when the analog can or should bed replaced by or supplemented by a digital format. For instance:
Anthology Projects
Keep:
Printed chapbooks and anthologies
Add:
PDF anthologies which students can email or share
A simple class website or digital archive
Messaging apps and online zines
A community facing newsletter issue (i.e., “Poetry for the People—[City/School] edition”)
Collaborations with local online outlets, community radio, or podcasts
Public Reading / Performance
Keep:
In-person readings, workshops, and open mics
Add:
Video and/or social media, live readings, open mics, and promotional media, with the community explicitly invited
Audio chapbooks and/or mini-podcast episodes
Recorded performances with community access (password-protected where needed)
Poetry in Public Space
Keep:
Posters, broadsides, handwritten flyers
Add:
Poem-posters in laundromats, bodegas, mutual aid fridges, and more
Digital posters for individual, community-based, and mutual aid social media accounts and organizational newsletters, pages, etc.
Text message poems, and digital “poem hotlines”
QR codes that link to audio poems when scanned in the streets and other public spaces
Poetry, Algorithms, and Attention
Poetry for the People has always been dedicated to reading the world critically. Now that the world includes digital feeds and platforms, Poetry for the People must also mean: poetry against the algorithm. Instructors and students can work together to expand the program’s practice, in line with their particular community context, to explicitly:
Name social media as both:
a tool for community building and
a machine which can flattens, surveil, and commodify speech
Collectively brainstorm, seed, and circulate a simple critical vocabulary:
i.e., algorithm, virality, shadow-banning, moderation, platform capitalism, etc.
Ask each other: How will we consider these issues, and work with/against them in our poetry and our process?
Collaboratively develop new assignments, for example:
Analyze a hashtag movement as collective poetry (#BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, etc.).
Compare a poem that is on the printed page, a live performance, a text post, an image post, a video post, etc. What changes in meaning, scale, or risk?
Ask each other: Who gets to speak “freely” online? Who is punished, ignored, or targeted?
Build in Practices Against Isolation
This thirtieth anniversary edition cannot pretend we have not been living through:
rising fascism
a global pandemic
ongoing mass death
intensified racial terror and backlash
profound social and psychic isolation
Poetry for the People is itself an anti-isolation technology. Our teaching and learning practices invite us to re-enter, rebuild, and recreate our relationships with ourselves, with our peers, with our community members, with history, and with the future.
Instructors, students, and student teacher poets can collectively identify:
Check-in rituals that go beyond “how are you” or bland ice-breakers
Consider: one word for your body, one for your mind, one for your hope, etc.
Paired or small-group “pods” that last the whole term
Assignments that require reaching beyond the classroom:
interviewing elders, neighbors, essential workers
writing poems with someone else, not just about them
regularly assigned co-authored pieces as a normal part of our work
What’s Changed in 30 Years
The core principles of Poetry for the People remain unchanged, but the conditions of the practice have:
Then: We had and used landline phones, photocopiers, campus-only flyers, physical anthologies, and in-person meetings.
Now: We still use many of these tools, but we also have smartphones, group chats, video conferencing, digital design apps, social media, and more.
Then: Poetry was insurgent, alive in community, yet marginal to institutions.
Now: Poetry, professionalized through MFAs, prizes, conferences, and brand-building, is often seen as a career path.
Then: Students experienced isolation due to racism, capitalism, imperialism, and heteropatriarchy.
Now: In addition to the above ills, students experience even more intensified isolation due to the above plus algorithmic isolation, digital echo chambers, pandemic fallout, and screen-sick loneliness.
Professionalization of Poetry
Poetry as Work, Not Just Career
Throughout the twenty-first century, poetry and publishing had been diversified and expanded—often through the deliberate work of Poetry for the People alumni—to include a greater variety of voices across every demographic spectrum. Small presses have exploded, and the overall publishing landscape has come to resemble our communities much more than it did when we began this program. However, what we also now see are the ways that poetry, in addition to being more significantly funded, has also been more significantly captured by brands and institutions which do not have our collective liberation at heart. To that end, while more of us may be “professional poets,” we must continue to consciously, and transparently, resist becoming gatekeepers.
Instructors can work with students and student teacher poets to:
Clarify the difference between:
poetry as livelihood (grants, teaching, publishing, gigs)
poetry as labor for liberation (community, organizing, testimony, mutual aid)
Offer reflection questions for students to consider with each other, and with their larger communities:
How do we keep poetry accountable to the community, not just to institutions?
What happens when poetry is reduced to a viral meme or a line on a CV, rather than a line in a movement or an explicitly moving line?
How do we build and share our skills (submissions, applications, residencies) while resisting the pull to turn poetry into a competition?
In partnership with Haymarket Books.