Exploring structure in Hanif Abdurraqib’s poem “It Is Maybe Time to Admit That Michael Jordan Definitely Pushed Off”

This lesson will get your students up and moving!

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2021, he released the book A Little Devil In America with Random House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Gordon Burn Prize.

The Lesson

I start class with telling students that we will be reading a poem by author and official genius Hanif Abdurraqib using this introduction slide:

Then, as I advance to the next slide, I announce the title of the poem we’ll be reading: “It Is Maybe Time to Admit That Michael Jordan Definitely Pushed Off.” I ask students if they are familiar with this infamous moment in sports history. In my six classes, there was a fairly even 50/50 mix of those who are familiar and those who are not, as I expected. Hence, the next slide with this video:

Fun fact: this basket is the last shot Jordan ever took as a Chicago Bull and it successfully won his team the season championship. It’s kind of a big deal. This quick video clip highlights “the push” from multiple angles. We have a quick class poll – did MJ actually push?

Now that everyone is knowledgeable about the context of the poem, we are ready to read. Unfortunately, there isn’t an audio or video available online so I pass out a handout of the poem and call on a volunteer to read the poem out loud.

After we read the poem through once, I advance to the instructions for the next step in the lesson. This part is crucial to students’ discovering how the pacing, punctuation, and overall structure of the poem function to create meaning. I suggest that you read the directions out loud before you move the class to a space where they can move around freely (outside, the hallway, the cafeteria, etc.). Stress the importance of reading the poem OUT LOUD with their voice as they walk.

For accessibility, if anyone is unable to walk, they can tap out the “steps” on a table or on their desks.

Here are some of my students walking the poem:

Once finished, we come back in to debrief the experience. Students chat with a partner first about what they noticed while walking the poem, make annotations about their noticings on their handout, then we share our insights as a whole class. By putting physical movement to the poem, students are quick to identify elements of the poem’s structure that they had not noticed before by just reading it on paper.

You might have noticed the cars on students’ desks in the above pictures, which leads to the next part of the lesson. Did you know that Michael Jordan is co-owner of a NASCAR racing team? The 23XI (pronounced “twenty-three eleven”) team.

The final part of the lesson asks for students to demonstrate their understanding of the poem’s structure and pacing through visual representation. By previously walking the poem, students will now take their findings and illustrate them in the form of a NASCAR road course track. Or, in simpler terms, a racetrack.

I teach 47-minute-long classes, so by the end of the first day, we accomplished all of parts of the lesson discussed thus far, and got started on making the racetracks. The second day was spent finishing the racetracks. As a fun bonus, I announced that my 9-year-old NASCAR-loving son would help me judge the best track for each class. He as the track officianado and I as the poetry pro.

To end the lesson, students reflected on what they learned about the poem through their experience. I offered them a choice: they could either write a creative piece inspired by the poem using it a mentor text, or write an analytical paragraph about the poem.

Overall, the poem and the activities were a huge hit and will be returning to this lesson again and again in future years. It bears saying that you may want to choose a different poem if you have any students who have recently lost a mother figure, as this poem deals with the speaker’s grief of losing his mother. The brilliant thing about this lesson is that it can work with any text – even prose! You could use the racetrack idea to illustrate the structure of an entire novel… the possibilities are endless.

Here are my slides for you to use. If you would like to edit them, please do not request access. Instead, go to File –> Make a Copy and edit away! I ask that you leave the credit slide at the end, please.

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