The Cost of Affiliation in the Poetry Community: Stay or Go?

In 2013, at the Artward Bound, an annual extracurricular activity for

10th graders in Holderness, my boarding high school in Plymouth, New

Hampshire, the Massachusetts slam poetry artist Anthony Febo was invited

to teach students about poetry. He inspired many young poetry lovers minds

with his incredible poetic talents and passion. Among those, there was one

student, K, who was able to gather his schoolmates, forming the first

student-led club in my high school: the Holderness Poetry Club. I happened

to be one of the first people who joined the club, and as a long time member,

I helped K with many of the club activities until I graduated from high school.

Throughout almost three years when I was there, the club grew and

developed enough to become a discourse community of novice poets.

Holderness Poetry Club had successfully become a recognized club in my

high school and a place where members could write poems, share their

works, and work with each other to improve each others writing skills.

As poetry has been a common interest of many people since long ago,

there are various studies of different discourse communities that involve

poetry as a part of their activities. It is not difficult to include poetry in these

discourse communities, as student writer Marissa Penzato quotes from one of

her interviewees responses in her academic paper Fanfiction, Poetry, Blogs,

and Journals: A Case Study of the Connection between Extracurricular and

Academic Writings, writing a poem is just writing down sentences that

rhyme and make sense together (663). However, surprisingly, there are not

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that many studies of a poetry-centered discourse community. This makes

Holderness Poetry Club stand out, as the club can be considered a discourse

community that concentrates entirely on poetry. In order to study more

about the club, I collected 68 emails sent from K to club members, including

myself, the clubs total of 90 posts on the Facebook page, 29 anonymous

posts on the Confession link and 11 published works in the schools

newspaper, the Picador. I also created a brief survey with 10 questions to ask

five members in the club. As I conducted my research, I would go deeper into

analyzing the club as a discourse community and examine how members,

with different poetry experiences and personal background, had different

ways and decisions to be affiliated to the club and to get adjusted to the

resulting cost of affiliation.

Like other discourse communities, the Holderness Poetry Club had

what the professor of linguistics and codirector of at the University of

Michigan John Swales calls a broadly agreed set of common public goals in

The Concept of Discourse Community (220). Besides having poetry as a

common topic of interest, K also established some other goals in his first few

emails, which were to talk about poetry, to experience new aspects of

poetry, to learn about different kinds of poetry and how to perform a poem,

to be able to practice writing and reciting poetry and to share poems to

others, both publicly and anonymously. Since K mentioned these goals

through emails and the clubs first few meetings, they were publicly

discussed and acknowledged by all members. The goals of the club were

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reasonably common for poetry lovers who wanted to learn more about

poetry in writing, analyzing and performing. One particular part of the goals,

arguably the most interesting thing about this discourse community that

attracted members, is that members could share their works publicly and

anonymously. This worked out well with both extroverted and introverted

members who both wanted to share works in their own ways. Holderness

Poetry Clubs goals were successful in aiming for not only the mastery of

poetry as a literacy, but also making it convenient for members in their

poetic practices.

Another important and necessary aspect of a discourse community

that Swales mentions is communication among members. A discourse

community would have its own participatory mechanisms; in this case,

Holderness Poetry Club had weekly meetings, specifically once a week,

discussions via emails and an option called the Confession, a link attached

on the clubs Facebook page. The link was created in order to provide

members an opportunity to express themselves anonymously, since a

significant number of members in the club was not comfortable raising their

voices in public. The Confession functioned as a link to an open online

textbox, where members could type any anonymous comment and send

what they typed to a Google Document page managed by K and the clubs

Facebook page administrators (see Figure 1). Responses from the Confession

were published on the Facebook page, and members could like or comment

on each response. The clubs participatory mechanisms, with many options

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for member to choose, were great tools to provide information and

feedback and informational opportunities (221), which is one of Swales

characteristics of a discourse community.

According to Swales, genres also play a significant role in discourse

communities, as genres articulate the operations of the discourse

community (222). In the

Holderness Poetry Club, there

were many things that could be

considered genres. Besides the

emails about meetings and

poetry discussions, the

Confession could also be

Figure 1: A screenshot of the Confession
considered a genre, as it online textbox
showed another use of language in the club. Another genre would be the

works that members shared, the group poems composed by all members in

the club, and poems that were published in the Picador. The permission to

publish works on the schools newspaper made the club recognized as a

discourse community in Holderness School. In addition, the club also had its

own lexis, which mostly concentrated on the poetic language in poems and

the performance techniques of poetry, which divided into poem reciting and

slam poem performing. The lexis used was distinctive to poetry lovers, as it

focused on poetry and its technical aspects. With multiple genres and the

lexis, the club qualified as a discourse community.

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 The last criterion in Swales six defining characteristics of a discourse

community is that a discourse community has a threshold level of members

with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise (222).

Before he founded Holderness Poetry Club, K won first place in the National

Poetry Out Loud contest at Holderness School; there was no doubt that he

had a high level of expertise in poetry. Other members in the club also had

different levels of poetic skills, from students in AP literature courses and

ones in regular English classes. I was somewhere in the middle, where I could

understand and write some poems in freestyle or simple rhyme schemes.

Also, the members varied from high school freshmen to seniors; therefore,

changing membership happened when the twelve graders graduated.

Interestingly, the levels of expertise were also varied with members different

English literacy, as there were many members whose first language was not

English. With an exception of K, these members poetic literacy was less

fluent compared to native English members. In general, Holderness Poetry

Clubs members had varied ability levels of understanding and writing poetry.

As the linguist Ann Johns says in Discourse Communities and

Communities of Practice: Membership, Conflict, and Diversity, If students

want to become affiliated with academic discourse communities, or even if

they want to succeed in school, they might have to make considerable

sacrifices (511). During the time when I was in Holderness Poetry Club, I

saw a lot of things members had to sacrifice to get more immersed in the

club and its activities; I, too, experienced some of these sacrifices. Since

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some of the members, including K and me, are international students and

non-native English speakers, it took us a much greater amount of effort to

mediate our mother tongue and home culture. For instance, there were times

that I had to use a dictionary to figure out how to interpret some words in

Vietnamese, my mother tongue, into English ones in order to write my

poems. Another time was when I had to ask my American friends or go

online to learn the pronunciation of a poem I planned to recite in the club. In

addition, in one of my survey questions, On a scale from 1-5, how do you

like Poetry Club? If you can, please give me specific reasons, a comment I

received was Poetry was a genre of writing that we didn't get a chance to

explore in-class, so the club was a fun way to learn about poetry with friends.

It also served as an outlet and a break from my science classes. Alternating

between science and poetry, two subjects with different languages, was also

a cost of affiliation that I and many of our members, whose high school

required at least three mandatory years of science courses, had to handle to

get assimilated to the club. Some other sacrifices members had were related

to our high school activities, including sport events, tests, exams, other club

activities and school events that caused conflicts with members schedule,

making them unable to attend the club meetings. As I conducted my survey,

most of the answers I received for the reasons of failing to go to the club

meetings were schedule conflicts and tests coming up (see Appendix). Like

other discourse communities, in order to get affiliated to Holderness Poetry

Club and poetry, members, who were students like me, had to give up some

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time and temporarily drop off other affiliations from our home culture and

school life.

In Holderness Poetry Club, since members had to go through many

different costs of affiliation, there were times that they came to the point of

thinking about whether they should continue to be a part of the club.

Fortunately, as most of the members remained in the club, there were

multiple ways by which they tried to get assimilated to this young poets

discourse community. As for the members whose first languages were not

English like me, asking other members, learning more from the internet and

practicing in the club were some of the good ways to get used to writing

poetry in English. The members who had to take science classes also did not

find it too difficult to switch from one community to another. This was

because the club was student-led and therefore more casual. The harder cost

of affiliation to get adjusted to the club involved the conflicts in each

members school schedule, which resulted in failure to attend the clubs

meetings. Even when the members could make it to the meetings, they were

tired from having to do too many activities. This was when the Confession on

the clubs Facebook page and the publication opportunities on the schools

newspaper helped the members make up their missed meetings; it gave

them chances to share their poems or questions conveniently, a good way

for them to still stay connected to the club (see Figure 2). There were good

feedbacks in my survey about the Confession page with 4 out of 5 answers

rated 3 and above for the question On a scale from 1-5, did you like the

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Confession link together with some positive comments like I did! I liked it

because I didn't have to be self-conscious about my work or It was a

different way to express our emotions that required reflection instead of just

lashing out (see Appendix). A number of members also proposed alternative

meeting times to K that they could attend, and K would work out the best

time that fitted most of the members. Eventually, all members who decided

to stay with the club found their own ways to get over their costs of affiliation

to fit in the group.

However, while most members chose to stay in the club, I also

witnessed that some decided to leave the club, as the conflicts between the

club and their other communities were unbearable for them, and they no

longer felt they fitted in

the club. These conflicts

were somewhat similar to

Johns two examples of

the Hispanic graduate

student in a Ph.D.

sociology program in the

Figure 2: A published poem on the Picador.
United States, Casanave and the graduate student from Japan who faced

other kinds of affiliation conflicts when attempting to become a successful

student in a North American linguistics program (512). Both students in

these examples had conflicts of their personal beliefs and values and

expectations from their other communities that caused them troubles in

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getting along with their academic discourse communities. I found out the

same problem happening with some members in the Holderness Poetry Club

when I was still in the club, as well as an interesting pattern in my survey,

where my question about how much the members like poetry got more

positive ratings than the one about how much members like the club itself. I

also received comments spread in many questions in the survey regarding

the conflicted issues with the club, and was surprised to see 3 out of 4

comments that were related to conflicting personal beliefs and values like I

stopped going to meetings after a while because I was very busy and did not

feel that I fit in with the group anymore or failed to keep an open and

respectful mind during discussions of personal work waste of time and

disappointment from expectations in other communities like unorganized,

and it had a tendency to be really cliquey, Weren't very functional because

the school culture did not allow for productive unsupervised clubs or I

stopped going to meetings after a while because I was very busy and did not

feel that I fit in with the group anymore (see Appendix). I used to discuss

these issues with some members and, at some point, saw them leaving the

club, since these issues remained unresolved.

Going back to the graduate students in Johns two examples, another

problem that in the end led to the two students leaving their academic

discourse communities was that the leaders of the community failed to

comprehend their struggles and showed unwillingness to listen and find a

workable solution. Similarly, after Holderness Poetry Club operated for a

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while, I and other members began to have issues with K, as he did not listen

to our feedback; even in my survey, one of my surveyees still recalled that

The leader of the club was a good person and he had good intentions, it's

just sometimes they were very narrow minded, which is fine. It's just it would

have been nice if other people's voices were heard too. Though many

members contributed to many of the clubs activities, K was the only one

who determined how the club ran, as he was the leader. I heard many

members complained that K could be lenient to himself and cancelled the

club meetings due to his personal schedule conflict but could not tolerate

others having conflicts in their schedules. For instance, once in his email sent

to me and other members on April 29th, 2014, K infuriated many members by

saying NO PLAY = NO WAY TO GET AWAY; the capitalized letters that made

the line sounded serious and the diction used in the sentence made

members who participated in the school play and could not attend to his

previous meetings feel that K assumed they used their play practices as an

excuse to not come to the clubs meeting. At the time, one member even

sent me a personal email about how angry she was when she read Ks email.

Unfortunately, when I and other members confronted K about this, K did not

give us any response and remained the same way he was. This also affirmed

some members decision to leave the Holderness Poetry Club, since they

could no longer endure Ks lack of fairness in leadership and unwillingness to

listen to their voices.

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 As a student-led discourse community, the Holderness Poetry Club had

good aspects as well as parts that it should have improved. There were many

costs of affiliation, and while most members had different methods to get

assimilated to those sacrifices, some could not deal with them and decided

to leave the club. The club, nonetheless, still provided opportunities for

members to get involved in poetry and share their works with others in the

ways they wanted, and the only major reason that made some members

leave the club was the clubs lack of organization and Ks failure to listen and

find a solution to the members troubles. It cannot be denied that in the club,

members still had chances to improve their poetic skills, and they gained

significant successes like poem publications on the schools newspaper. In

general, the greatest success that Holderness Poetry Club got was that it

inspired members more to poetry as a literacy, regardless of whether it was

in understanding poetry, writing their own poems, reciting poems or

performing their poems to others. That was the main reason that helped

most of the members, including me, adjust to the multiple costs of affiliation

and choose to stay with the club.

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 Works Cited

Johns, Ann. "Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice:

Membership, Conflict, and Diversity." Writing about Writing: A College

Reader. 1st ed. Ed. Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs. Boston:

Bedford/St. Martin's, 2011. 499-518. Print.

Nguyen, Thao. Poetry Club Survey. Survey. 8 Nov. 2016.

Penzato, Marissa. Fanfiction, Poetry, Blogs, and Journals: A Case Study of the

Connection between Extracurricular and Academic Writings. Writing

about Writing: A College Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Elizabeth Wardle and

Doug Downs. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2014. 653 71. Print.

Swales, John. The Concept of Discourse Community. Writing about Writing:

A College Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs.

Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2014. 215 28. Print.

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 Appendix

Poetry Club Survey

1. How did you know about the club? (you can select more than one)

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2. Why did you want to join the club? (you can select more than one)

Comments (1): Febo was awesome.

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3. On a scale from 1-5, how much do you like poetry?

4. On a scale from 1-5, how do you like Poetry Club? Please give me specific

reasons. .

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Comments (4): Mixed feelings... I did not always enjoy how poetry club was

run. I think there were some... issues with that, but sitting down and writing

poetry with people was really fun.

We weren't very functional because the school culture did not

allow for productive unsupervised clubs.

It was really unorganized, and it had a tendency to be really

cliquey.

Poetry was a genre of writing that we didn't get a chance to

explore in-class, so the club was a fun way to learn about poetry with friends.

It also served as an outlet and a break from my science classes.

5. On a scale from 1-5, what do you think about the meeting times? Did it

work well for you?

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6. Why couldn't you go to the meetings? (you can select more than one)

Comments (1): I stopped going to meetings after a while because I was very

busy and did not feel that I fit in with the group anymore.

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7. Did you like the club's Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr pages? Why?

Comments (3): I think the Facebook page was a cool idea, but I think a lot

more could have been done with it.

I loved the anonymous submissions option!

I like the interactions between the admins and the confessors.

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8. On a scale from 1-5, did you like the Confession link?

Comments (3): I think had the idea worked better and it was more

organized it would have been really cool.

I did! I liked it because I didn't have to be self-conscious about

my work.

It was a different way to express our emotions that required

reflection instead of just lashing out.

9. Did the club have something that conflicted with you? How did you deal

with those? Did they affect your interest in the club?

Comments (4): Yeah, it kind of did. The leader of the club was a good person

and he had good intentions, it's just sometimes they were very narrow

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minded, which is fine. It's just it would have been nice if other people's

voices were heard too. I think the idea of the club was really cool, I just think

that some of the organization could have been better and if more people

were able to say their ideas as well, the whole club would have been even

better.

Again, it was frustrating that we never were able to do anything

significant. It made me not want to come back.

It failed to keep an open and respectful mind during discussions

of personal work, and due to this and other reasons it was unproductive and

kind of a waste of time.

The only conflict that I remembered having was schedule

conflict during exam season. We should have our meetings cancelled for the

sake of the tests instead of keeping going on. I ended up having to skip some

meetings as a result, and I also had a word with the club president. Other

than that, I enjoy being in the club.

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10. If given another chance, would you still join the Poetry Club?

Comments (2): I am glad that the poetry club existed, and it was a cool

experience, but that's not where my heart is anymore, so no. I would not.

It was doomed from the start. I run some very successful

student groups now and I know that at Holderness, it just wasn't going to be

that great.

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