Teaching Donna Stonecipher’s Model City
To start, a question: what was it like?
What was what like? The country? 2020? The first decades of the twenty-first century? Living through a global pandemic?
The subject of this blog, Model City by American-born poet Donna Stonecipher (c.1969), is a poetry collection that opens with this very singular question and builds a town of poetic answers in response to it.
Model City is predicated upon a straightforward poetic conceit: a question is posed and an answer is sought. At the outset of this collection the inaugural question that is posed is ‘What was it like?’; over the course of a 73-section, 288-prose poem sequence or cycle, the poet attempts to answer it. The subject – the ‘it’ – of that question is ambiguous, indeed from poem to poem the subject (the “it”) shifts. The title of the collection (Model City) combined with the book’s epigraph from famous Swiss-French modernist architect, designer and urban planner Le Corbusier (“We are waiting for a form of town planning that will give us freedom”) give us a good starting point: was it like to live in a model city that was built as an architectural ideal, as a model of urban planning? The multitude of answers reflects the multitudinous and multifaceted nature of cities. Although it may start as a rumination on the folly of utopic dreams and social experimentation, this collection grows and sprawls (as cities do) to consider bigger concepts: capitalism; the passage of time; identity. And to explore these big weighty concepts the poet opts for the poetic form most associated with the city: the prose poem. Stonecipher has fun with typography and structure in this collection: every section of the poem looks identical, with four 3-line stanzas to each page. The poetic architecture is designed to reflect the perfectly ordered model cities as conceived by urban planning visionaries such as Le Corbusier. It has a neat effect.
And if this all sounds too heavy and concrete for Secondary pupils, it’s really not. The poems are difficult, but the challenge is not insurmountable. With lots of scaffolding and collaborative learning these texts could be pitched anywhere between the top end of S3 to Advanced Higher. The collection is structured in such a way that you can pick and choose a small selection of the more accessible poems (eg. Model City [1], Model City [2], Model City [71]) for pupils to critically unpick.
If you have a Level 4 class…
Study one of these poems alongside Edwin Morgan’s excellent vision of Glasgow, ‘A City’ (you can find this in Morgan’s Collected Poems, Carcanet, 1996). Use Morgan’s poem as the given text in a Set Text paper and include a final 8-mark question on interesting visions of the city in two contrasting poems.
If this seems too challenging a task for pupils, you might think about using this collection (carefully selected excerpts/lines) as a lead into a piece of broadly discursive writing on urban planning and model cities. Direct pupils to a Scottish example of “model” town planning with the example of New Lanark heritage centre. Pupils could generate an informative report or a two-sided essay exploring the pros and cons of “model cities”.
If you have a Senior Phase class…
You might want to use these poems (or again excerpts and extracts) as creative writing stimuli. Broadly Discursive pieces at National 5 and Higher might be used to explore the need for better town planning (at local or national level). Dystopian short stories set in a “model city”, or stories baed on characters who inhabit “model” spaces, would make for sophisticated Creative pieces at either level.
If you have an Advanced Higher class…
Use one or two poems from the set to generate a Textual Analysis paper. 20 mark questions could be set on: interesting use of poetic form; poetic voice; or on the theme of utopic dreams and social experimentation.
Look in the Teaching and Learning section of the site for more resources on The Outrun.