It was a chilly Thursday morning when I pulled into the wooded parking lot of NewGate School in Lakewood Ranch. I felt like Mary Lennox as I entered the campus, like I was entering a mysterious and secret garden of education. (This is how I’ve always thought about Montessori schools.) My “key” to this garden came a few weeks ago through a friend who’d asked if I might like to be a substitute judge for NewGate’s annual Poetry Out Loud competition. I wanted to pull a Jerry Maguire and say, “You had me at poetry.” However, this was a very serious friend, so I simply said, “Yes!”

For the uninitiated, Poetry Out Loud is a nationally recognized arts education program that promotes reading poetry through its recitation. It’s similar to a poetry slam, except that students choose a poem to recite rather than write one of their own.

The event was held outside so that students could perform unmasked. Though that meant my fingers were so cold they could not easily snap their approval, I was too focused on the performances to notice. It was such a joy to see young people make themselves vulnerable in front of their peers, to embody another speaker in voice and gesture, to translate a poem from the page to the stage.

A special kind of preparation is required to pull off such a feat. As I watched teen after teen take the stage, I kept thinking about the component parts that go in to such a task. It reminded me of when I was learning and teaching those very skills.

At the time, I was a teaching assistant in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida. There, in a classroom transformed into a black box theatre, undergrads took a class called Intro to Comm as Performance. It was a magical class that taught students to analyze poetry and prose for the purpose of performing it. To be sure, we used some of the tools of the traditional English classroom: We noted the number of stanzas, annotated the figurative language, and looked for devices like alliteration. But those elements were baked into a larger analytic framework, one that we employed to help make decisions not just about what the poem meant, but how to perform it. This framework is called “The Pentad.”

The Pentad

Introducing the Pentad

The Pentad is a tool for uncovering a speaker’s motives, and it was developed by philosopher and literary critic Kenneth Burke as part of his theory of dramatism. This may sound complicated, but really it just boils down to looking at five elements (hence, Pentad):

• Agent: Who is talking?
• Scene: When and where is this person talking?
• Act: What is happening?
• Agency: How is the poem structured on the page?
• Purpose: Why is this person talking?

If you take the time to understand each of these elements about a poem, you will have enough information to perform it.

At this point you may be thinking, “But poems don’t always explicitly state who the speaker is or where this person is talking or what is happening.” There’s no reason to fret, however, as the Pentad accounts for this. Within each element, there are certainties, probabilities, and possibilities:

• A certainty is something we can know for sure because it is in the text to be observed.
• A probability is a weighted likelihood, based on inferences from the text.
• A possibility is based on the slightest of hints, but still inferred from the details in the text.

So while you may not know exactly who a speaker is or where she’s talking, you can make inferences about probabilities and possibilities based on clues in the text. The beauty of this kind of analysis is that it satisfies a multitude of needs: English teachers can use it because it requires students to dig into the text to justify their answers, and drama teachers can use it because it helps students make informed decisions about their choices for performance. In that way, it delightfully straddles the line between text-based and open-ended.

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Using the Pentad: An Example Dramatistic Analysis

In order to dig deeper into these elements, let’s look at an example dramatistic analysis of the poem “.05” by Ishmael Reed:

Agent

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The first, and arguably most important, place to start when analyzing any poem using the Pentad is agent. We need to figure out who is speaking these words. And as people are not one-dimensional, we need to figure out who this person is on many levels:

• Biological – Is the speaker human? Something else? Male or female?
• Physical – What are the specific physical qualities of the speaker? Height, weight, coloring, physical state of health?
• Social – What is the speaker’s economic status and/or profession? What is their religion? What are their family relationships like?
• Dispositional – What is the basic bent of this character’s personality? What is their customary mood or life attitude?
• Psychological – What are the attitudes, desires, motivations, likes, and dislikes this speaker has?
• Moral – Is this character good or bad? Honest or dishonest?

Here are possible answers to these questions about agent in the poem “.05”:

Biological

male, adult, 60s+ (probability)

Evidence: The speaker in the poem reflects on his life as if he’s experienced the majority of it (“If i had a nickel / For all the women who’ve / Rejected me in my life”). The speaker is likely a man, as he would wear a “derby” hat if he were head of the World Bank; such hats have historically been worn by men.

Physical

unattractive, short (possibility)

Evidence: The speaker uses a lowercase “i” instead of a capital “I” to refer to himself; this could speak to his perception of himself as “less than,” shorter than average, or unattractive, especially when coupled with the fact that he has not had many relationships (he would be the “World Bank’s assistant / Janitor” if he had a nickel for all the women who’ve loved him).

Social

bank teller / occupation with money (possibility)

Evidence: The speaker contemplates his fate in reference to the World Bank; it is possible that he spends a lot of time in financial institutions but not in a position of great power, given that he is not the head of the World Bank in his hypothetical scenario.

Dispositional

lonely, insecure, daydreamer, awkward (probability/possibility)

Evidence: The speaker uses a lowercase “i” to describe himself, so he may be insecure. He is probably a daydreamer because the poem is his moment of reflection of the different ways his life may have turned out based on the women who’ve rejected and loved him (“If i had a nickel…”). He is also possibly awkward, as he has not had many romantic relationships (he would be “head of the World Bank” if he had a nickel for every woman who rejected him).

Psychological

desires love, has a sense of humor (certainty/probability)

Evidence: The poem centers on the speaker’s reflection of his romantic life; he places a high value on such relationships because he would not care if he were poor if it meant he could go home to a woman he loved (“All i’d think about would / Be going home”). He probably has a sense of humor, as he uses hyperbolic imagery in the first stanza to describe how much money he’d have based on the women who’ve rejected him (“Prepared to fly a chartered / Jet to sign a check” – ie., he’d have so much money that he could fly a private plane to India just to sign a check). It shows that he’s okay poking fun at himself.

Moral

good; values the “right” things (probability)

Evidence: The speaker values love over money; he says he “wouldn’t need / To wear a derby” if he had a nickel for all of the women who’ve loved him because though he’d be poor, he’d be happy.

Scene

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Now that we’ve figured out who is talking, we need to figure out the location or specific situation in which the speaker is speaking. With scene, we must ask ourselves:

• Time of day? Season? Year?
• Specified area? Location? Does this change throughout the poem?
• To whom is the speaker speaking? Self? Another person (present or implied)? A generalized group?

Just like with agent, the scene is going to have certainties, possibilities, and probabilities. Let’s return to “.05”:

Specified Time, Area – evening or nighttime around the dinner table; or, afternoon in the breakroom at work (possibility)

Evidence: The speaker may be speaking in the evening, as he is reflecting on his life (“If I had a nickel…”), like one might do around a fire or dinner table, talking with friends or family. Alternatively, he could be joking around in the breakroom at work, using self-deprecating humor with his co-workers. In that case, it could be around noon.

Act

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There are many kinds of actions a speaker can do in a poem. Perhaps they are remembering an event, telling a story, observing an occurrence, or giving advice. They may also be doing physical actions while they are speaking.

Here’s an example analysis of act for “.05”:

The speaker is reflecting on his life (“If i had a nickel…”). Based on the inferences made so far about who he is and where he’s speaking, he may also be doing physical actions while he’s speaking. This is an opportunity to think about what kinds of actions he might take in these contexts. For example, if he’s joking around in the breakroom with his co-workers, he might be holding coin and flipping it in the air (“If i had a nickel…”); he could even be using the coin as a way to add humor to this story by miming taking off his derby hat in the first stanza and making the coin “disappear” from his hand in the second stanza.

Agency

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Agency is the way a poem is structured on the page. This includes the number of stanzas, line length, width of the margins, and use of poetic devices (e.g., rhyme, rhythm, repetition). The reason we look at agency is because it can gives us clues about rate of speech, pauses, emotional states, and physical movement.

In “.05” there are two stanzas, and the speaker starts each stanza with the phrase “If I had a nickel…” (repetition/anaphora). The lines are short—on average 5-7 syllables long. The poem also repeats the use of a lowercase “i” throughout.

Purpose

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Why is the speaker talking? By this point in the analysis, the Pentad has helped uncover all you need to identify or make inferences about why the speaker is speaking. This will likely involve making a choice between multiple possibilities.

Based on the probabilities and possibilities listed above, I believe the speaker’s purpose would be to entertain his co-workers with a story in the breakroom. (Notice how this analysis is not concerned with a “correct” interpretation; instead, it focuses on possible interpretations.)

Putting the Pentad into Performance

Now that we’ve conducted a dramatistic analysis, we can start to make decisions about how to perform the poem. If I were going to perform “.05,” I would choose to perform it in an imagined breakroom at work, and I’d have the speaker flipping a coin and performing “magic” to emphasize certain lines. Perhaps you’d come to different conclusions and make different performance decisions—that’s great too! What’s incredible about the Pentad is that it supports text-based analysis in an open-ended way that fosters creativity and independent thinking.

Of course, the next step is to put the interpretation on its feet. This can seem like the scariest part! However, once students have completed the Pentad, they don’t have to guess at what they should be doing—after all, they know who the speaker is, where they are, and why they’re speaking. It doesn’t completely eliminate stage fright, but it can make students more confident in exploring options for performance.

Is there anything better than a useful classroom tool that gets students to read poetry AND gives them confidence to perform it? Not in my book.

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