And so I returned to perusing the Norton Anthology again (dear, dear, Norton Anthology). While many essays were of interest, most seemed to have little connection to comp, and I was unable to locate anything worthy of my final exploratory source (Alas!). Thus thwarted by the official literary imperial that is Norton, I decided to turn to a far more dubious and expansive source: the Google.
After unsuccessful "poetry and college composition" and "poetry and freshmen composition" searches, I searched "poets on teaching college composition," thinking that surely poets' experiences teaching college composition would incorporate poetry. Instead Google decided that what I really needed was to get a Poetry Degree 100% online, and to learn how to teach college mathematics using poetry, and to know the secrets of using my appreciation of poetry to earn a six-figure job! After learning all this, I modified my search and was directed to the Poetry Foundations "Learning Lab." The Learning Lab proved fruitless, as did a general search of the Poetry Foundation, as did another handful of Google searches. Finally, after an hour of interesting but essentially forward-motion-futile searching, I found myself at a loss. Norton had disappointed me, Google had done me dirty, and even the Poetry Foundation remained unsatisfactory. Bugger it all. What next?

Well, not knowing what else to do, I began reading back through my previous exploratory blogs and realized I had never turned my attention back to Claudia Rankine's Citizen, a text I had been initially been very curious about exploring for its poetic potential in the composition class. And a text that would most definitely provide a poet's eye view into issues relevant to composition. So to Citizen, for my fifth and final source, I go!

Citizen takes an unflinching look at what it means to be a citizen conscious of the current state of racial relations in "post-racial" America. In it, Rankine brings together traditional verse, prose, and visual elements to explore the place of "blackness" within Western Culture. In the context of this current exploration, I find Citizen particularly relevant for several reasons. First, it deals with current issues of race, pernicious social inequality, prejudice, and privilege, discussions of which have a ready, if not necessary, place in the college composition classroom. Second, when talking about how one might utilize poetry in composition, Citizen presents itself as an answer. Citizen itself operates as a model of what it looks like to incorporate various mediums and strategies of rhetoric into one cohesive work, a work that brings together poetry, prose, and visual elements toward a single end. Third, Citizen exemplifies how we as individuals best, most fully, consider language not simply as essay, or as argument, or as poetry, or as prose, or as visual rhetoric, or as solipsistic reflection, or as a product of the other, or as oppressive power, or as any other single dimension, but as a compilation and more than sum of all of these various elements. In short, Citizen provides an example of how to might look at language holistically, and thus, for me, points the way toward a more holistic approach to teaching composition.

So, to answer the hypothetical from earlier in the essay, yes Citizen could be the book on that table. Further, to get back to the original question, yes poetry can and, I believe, should have a vital role in the composition classroom. This role certainly includes helping to teach style, and rhetorical analysis, and close reading, and rhetorical grammar, and the joy of language for language sake. Yet even beyond all this, the place of poetry in composition studies is to facilitate a more holistic approach to language: how it is invented, arranged, stylized, remembered, and delivered, how it comes to take on both individual and collective importance in the world within which we live. It is this holistic approach, exemplified by Rankine's Citizen, I'm eager to continue to explore for my own composition classes.

Rankine, Claudia. Citizen. Minneapolis: Gray Wolf, 2014. Print.