Michael Gaudelli’s poem “Resistance” demonstrates a deft command of poetic form in service to complex storytelling and meaning-making. While the connection to The Tempest is not immediately apparent, by incorporating a version of Caliban’s line—“You taught me language, and my profit on’t/ Is I know how to curse”—Gaudelli connects the play to his meditation on the history of oppression and resistance to colonialism and racism. Yet by shifting the emphasis from you taught to we…learned, Gaudelli implicitly introduces resistance to the Shakespearean language as he cites it.

By rooting the poem in the story of the Israelites Gaudelli makes an additional connection to the larger narratives and rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement.

As Gaudelli notes in his reflection (Part 1 and Part 2), wordplay and rhyme scheme help the “flow” of the poem. But I would argue that it also adds meaning beyond the words. The tendency toward slant rather than perfect rhymes introduces subtle discomfort, perhaps reflecting the difficulties of the struggle for equality. The overly perfect rhyme of “another” with “another” introduces a relationship of identity between people of color—seen through white supremacist eyes as “another” or an Other—and the ongoing resistance that would break down the narrative centrality of whiteness. The poem seems to stutter on “Gained the knowledge to beat em,” which breaks the formal structure by rhyming with the two lines before and creating an internal (rather than end) rhyme with the next line, “Learned their language just to Curse them in it,” which produces an end rhyme with the next line, “Heard, it is all supposed to go down on 60 Minutes.” This structural stutter could be taken to symbolize the struggle to integrate the “knowledge” imparted through structurally racist systems of education into the language of resistance.

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