Back to High School, Mary, and Chocolate

Yesterday I felt like I was part of a BIG DEAL.  I participated as a judge for a LitFest held at a far west suburban high school.  Evidently, it's been a "thing" for a couple decades. Students from thirteen schools participated.  Leading up to this event, I read and commented on 235 poems and then yesterday led two poetry workshops.

At the Fest, students heard the keynote, Simone Elkeles, best-selling author of teen romance novels, speak about writing, her process, writing as career, the general lack of glamour, the need for revision.  She had the students with her all the way. After, students had an opportunity to attend two of six workshops in diverse genres--slam poetry, personal essay, descriptive sketch, dramatic scripts, and poetry.

My workshop centered on Found Poetry--centos, cut-ups or remixes, and erasures.  Each of the 120 or so students who attended the poetry workshop had a chance to write a cento and an erasure poem. There was little hesitation on their parts to write or share--a marvel in itself to me after so many years in the classroom prodding reluctant learners. I provided a list of lines for composing short centos. And three passages for erasure poem experimentation--a section from Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, a poem that appeared on Rattle after the death of Stephen Hawking, and a letter from Nelson Mandela to his daughters.  My hope was that students would see ways to FRESHEN their writing.  I was certainly impressed! How wonderful to have students around me who WANTED to take the risk.

It might seem odd, but the most impressive part of the day was the award ceremony. You might think boring, long, drawn out, but more than 300 students gathered in the auditorium to celebrate each other and WRITING awards. Students CHOSE to attend this LitFest. chose to submit pieces of writing beforehand. Judges read and assigned awards for Honorable Mention, Third, Second, and First Place, and then lastly, the Critic's Choice award. I actually felt quite emotional thinking about the efforts behind this annual event that has taken place for a couple decades, the people who made it happen, and the excitement of individual students when names were announced and celebrated by classmates who cheered them on. My mind spun to sporting events where the cheering can be deafening. How often do we get to see this type of jubilation over WRITING. It's so often such a solitary endeavor, and often unrecognized. While judges read the top winning pieces, there was no audience chatter, no cell phone distraction, and no one exited.  The audience was diverse, but the response was uniform--respectful!  It seemed like a BIG DEAL!

My favorite conversation of the day was with a young woman, a senior named Mary, who had been to the LitFest four years in a row. She approached me during writing time to ask my opinion about short poems.  She was articulate and earnest.  She told me that this year she had submitted a shorter poem uncharacteristically, and that she was beginning to think that there was some merit to "less is more."  She said at times it was hard to give up passages that just weren't working, hard to let them go--the idea often attributed to Faulkner--“In writing, you must kill all your darlings” and more recently to Stephen King, who evidently wrote, “kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.” I found myself so moved by her insight (something I'm only now acquired as a more "seasoned" writer, her spirited eyes, and her ease in conversing about something that was clearly a passion.  It was not so much that she was asking about "short poems" in the end, but about a writer's ability to discern what's working. I think her analysis of the merit and challenge of drafting and revision required no response from me--I simply nodded vigorously. 

As an aside, another young woman, maybe a freshman, approached me and asked what do you do about those lines you've written in a story or a poem that you LOVE, but when you give the manuscript to someone else to read, they don't "get" that one line you think is pivotal. My response was that maybe it's her obligation to look back at it and without overexplaining it, see if she can figure out how to help the reader get there. Such thoughtful people.

As a teacher, it was good to be back in a school which feels like home to me. At the awards ceremony I was pleased to see that in the process of blind judging, I had chosen Mary's poem for third place-----a "short" poem titled "Home." 

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By far this erasure below by Austin Kleon received the best response from the high school crowd!

Find Austin here:  austinkleon.com/newspaperblackout/

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Want to tackle a cento--the uniting of lines from other poets’ writing to form a collaged poem.  Here's a list to help you begin.
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a dead raccoon  (Lauren Gordon)

all its salty tears  (Shannan Ballam)

And whatnot  (Esther Lee)

check  (Sean Howard)

disappear without a trace  (Ada Limon)

emptying its anger  (Kyle McCord)

honey from my lips  (Jeff Whitney)

I am not light.  I do not gallop.  I'm ash  (Donna Vorreyer)

I cut my hair.  (Anna Meister)

I mistranslate myself.  (Kelly Corinda)

in the morning world  (Robin Chapman)

indelible tattoos  (Terrance Hayes)

into the river a stone's throw  (Lisa Fishman)

it is easy to imagine  (Gordon Buchan)

It no longer opens  (Katherine Hollander)

it's totally over  (Kay Ryan)

of air.  (B Soloy)

shimmering  (RKR)

standing  (Ross Gay)

Talk to me.  (Christine Swanberg)

the blood on the moon drips  (Micah Bateman)

the drowning clutch anything  (Emily J. Cousins)

The heart is a cloak  (Ralph Hamilton)

the trees  (Andrew Haley)

this hole in me  (Larry Janowski)

thunder punctuates  (Steven Stamatis)

time felt like a kitten  (Bill Yarrow)

to panic at any time  (Anne Shaw)

to spit or to spirit away its pain  (Galway Kinnell)

to the eyes  (Angie Macri)

we read the article with a little shake of shock  (Matt Mason)

What is missing  (Tim Green)

Where the fire enters  (Roger Reeves)

wings. They buzz  (Thom Caraway)

write like you mean it  (David Ulin)

You found me with my head bowed.  (Matt Mauch)

Want to try an erasure poem.  Here are a couple texts for experimentation!

letter_to_daughters_nelson_mandela.docx

​fahrenheit_451__ray_bradbury.docx