Week 7: Reginald Dwayne Betts in Bullets into Bells

Week 7: College Reading and Writing: Suffolk County House of Corrections at South Bay

Reginald Dwayne Betts: Annotating, Summarizing, Analyzing, Imitating

to annotate: to make notes on something to help you understand it better

to summarize: to put something in your own words

to analyze: to consider a question on the text, providing supporting examples from the text

to imitate: to create an original piece of writing based on something you have read

Exercise: Read and annotate

1. Read the poem out loud and underline any words you need to look up

2. Write any questions you have in the margins, the white space on the page

3. Put tricky parts into your own words in notes in the margins, the white space on the page

When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving by Reginald Dwayne Betts

    in the backseat of my car are my own sons,

    still not yet Tamir’s age, already having heard

    me warn them against playing with toy pistols,

    though my rhetoric is always about what I don’t

    like, not what I fear, because sometimes

    I think of  Tamir Rice & shed tears, the weeping

    all another insignificance, all another way to avoid

    saying what should be said: the Second Amendment

    is a ruthless one, the pomp & constitutional circumstance

10  that says my arms should be heavy with the weight

    of a pistol when forced to confront death like

    this: a child, a hidden toy gun, an officer that fires

    before his heart beats twice. My two young sons play

    in the backseat while the video of  Tamir dying

    plays in my head, & for everything I do know, the thing

    I don’t say is that this should not be the brick and mortar

    of poetry, the moment when a black father drives

    his black sons to school & the thing in the air is the death

    of a black boy that the father cannot mention,

20  because to mention the death is to invite discussion

    of  taboo: if you touch my sons the crimson

    that touches the concrete must belong, at some point,

    to you, the police officer who justifies the echo

    of the fired pistol; taboo: the thing that says that justice

    is a killer’s body mangled and disrupted by bullets

    because his mind would not accept the narrative

    of  your child’s dignity, of  his right to life, of  his humanity,

    and the crystalline brilliance you saw when your boys first breathed;

    the narrative must invite more than the children bleeding

30  on crisp fall days; & this is why I hate it all, the people around me,

    the black people who march, the white people who cheer,

    the other brown people, Latinos & Asians & all the colors of   humanity

    that we erase in this American dance around death, as we

    are not permitted to articulate the reasons we might yearn

    to see a man die; there is so much that has to disappear

    for my mind not to abandon sanity: Tamir for instance, everything

    about him, even as his face, really and truly reminds me

    of my own, in the last photo I took before heading off

    to a cell, disappears, and all I have stomach for is blood,

40     and there is a part of me that wishes that it would go away,

    the memories, & that I could abandon all talk of making it right

    & justice. But my mind is no sieve & sanity is no elixir & I am bound

    to be haunted by the strength that lets Tamir’s father,

    mother, kinfolk resist the temptation to turn everything

    they see into a grave & make home the series of cells

    that so many of my brothers already call their tomb.

Exercise: Questions for Comprehension

1. What do you think Betts means by "all I have stomach for is blood"?  Who is he mad at?  Who does he admire? Point to lines in the text that support your position.

Exercise: Summarize the poem

Write a paragraph summarizing the poem with quotations, in-text citation, and a Work Cited Page

example summary, incorporating quotation and in-text citation:

Reginald Dwayne Betts' poem "When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving" starts with Betts thinking of

police violence while his "sons play in the backseat"  (lines 13-14).  He thinks "this should not be" a

poem, and mentions a number of things that are "taboo," including when Americans might "yearn/to

see a man die" (Betts lines 26, 21, 34-35).  He concludes by contrasting "a part of me that wishes it

would all go away" with "the strength" that lets other people "resist the temptation" to commit

violence out of anger and end up in a "series of cells" Betts seems too familiar with (lines 40, 43-45). 

Work Cited Page

Betts, Reginald Dwayne. "When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving" Bullets Into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. Ed. Brian Clements et al. Beacon Press, 2017.

Exercise: Analysis

Question for analysis: What do you think counts as "sanity" for this speaker? Use quotation and summary to support your answer. 

Exercise: Imitation

Write your own poem thinking about gun violence in America.  Include "rhetoric," "taboo," and "pomp."