WordPlay

Summer Camps at the Poetry Center

2012-05-07T17:22:34Z

This summer, the Poetry Center is offering two fun and amazing summer camps. The first is "Inventions & Mysteries: Creating Worlds Through Writing Camp," for grades 6-8, offered June 4-8. In this camp, led by local writers Elizabeth Falcon and Erin Armstrong, the students will explore Brian Selznick's books The Invention of Hugo Cabret (now a popular movie directed by Martin Scorsese) and Wonderstruck. Students will create their own "cabinets of wonder," as well as writing inspired by art, film, mixed media, and field trips around the UA campus. Click here for more information and to register for the camp.

In addition to the middle school camp, there will also be a Creative Writing Camp offered to grades 3-5, from June 11-15. Also led by Falcon and Armstrong, in this camp children will enjoy a week of poetry, storytelling, letter writing, creative movement, book-making, and performance. They will generate, create, and compile writing for their own handmade books, as well. The week concludes with a reading for family and friends. Click here for more information and to register for the camp.

And check out a slide-show from last year's summer camps, to get a better sense of the play, energy, and creativity that goes into our camps! Also, please read some previous blog-posts, which reflect on the importance of the summer camps here at the Poetry Center. Hope to see y'all there!

The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Reflections on Summer Camp

Reflections of Creative Writing Camp in 3-D Summer Camp

A Scavenger Hunt

2012-05-01T18:40:03Z

Jeevan Narney is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Arizona, and writer-in-residence at Sam Hughes Elementary.

I think Family Days were the highlight out of all the field work that I have had to do this semester. I saw the children of Tucson come out of the community to the University of Arizona Poetry Center for one purpose: poetry. The November wind blew and the morning sun lit the roof of our hair. It was a great day. The air soon was vacated with the voices of laughing children of ages ranging from Kindergarten to even high school. The parents smiled like children themselves. They were happy to be here with their children. It's been a neat semester of seeing how the Poetry Center provides poetic opportunities to learn more about poetry to our youth in the Tucson community.

A scavenger hunt. Very exciting. No boys, but four boisterous girls ranging from the ages of 2^nd grade to 5^th grade, who were interested in my activity. We went outside in the Poetry Center's Meditation Garden. It was relatively a quiet day, but the girl's voices were giddy and gushed with ideas of what they thought might come into the grasp of their hands during the hunt. I told them to look to become hunters and gathers. "Go look for the unexpected. Stones, flowers, leaves, a scrap of paper. Who knows what you will find? I'll even go exploring with you." The garden looks simple to an adult like me, but for a child, they easily explore an area more complex than I suppose it to be. The students came back with the ripple smooth rocks and aging soft leaves. But, they saw beyond what the trees and leaves surface. There was a story, a poem, to be landscaped with crayon and colored pencils which I provided on the table in the patio area. They calmed down and held on to my directions which wobbled out awkwardly, but surely. It was a growing experience for me to speak clearly in the air growing slightly warm with more sun. My assignment was to pretend that they were to object found. "If I were a rock..." They wrote poems exchanging ideas back and forth. They drew pictures with their poems. But, there was one girl who preferred just to draw. Colors swam on the blank white papers. I was impressed. I realized that for them the creative process is as tangible as holding a rock.

Soon the four girls stopped the activity, and skipped inside. The rest of the Poetry Center was lit with exuberance of small children ranging from infant to high school students. I circled the room briefly, feeling the energy of all the activities pulsing like a fast beating heart. I think I've learned that children's imaginations reap like the good light of this morning just as I had experienced with the elementary students if one is dedicated to letting the students go wild with their lyrics on the page once they are melded together some idea of what they wanted to do.

I think it was fun to be outside and watch their poems come to life on paper once we got down on our knees and discovered what we could find there their among the wintered objects that stirred the young children's imaginations.

It was delightful for me to be part of their creative lives, though our time together was as brief as the daylight is for one day. I learned to be a poetry leader to four girls in the Meditation Garden. I learned to listen intently. Soon after, they became the poetry leaders leading me through their giggly, but profound lyrics.

Reflections of a 49-year-old Intern

2012-04-23T18:13:23Z

Even if I am the world's oldest intern, I still am glad that I have had the opportunity to work at the Poetry Center for the past two years. In the spring of 2010, I made the decision to leave Honolulu, Hawaii, where I had lived and worked as a high school English teacher for 18 years. I would travel to Tucson, AZ, a place I'd never been before. I'd enroll in the Creative Writing graduate program to pursue an MFA degree in fiction writing. In order to augment my funding support, I applied to be an Education Intern at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. I still remember the interview. I hadn't had to apply for a job in almost two decades, and then all of a sudden there I was: I remember sitting in my friend's office, borrowing his phone as I talked to the Poetry Center staff about joining them that upcoming autumn.

Two years later, I am all set to graduate. With the support of the Creative Writing faculty and my classmates in workshop, I have produced a novel manuscript and have read and learned so much about fiction writing. On Mondays and Thursdays, for a total of ten hours a week, I show up at the Poetry Center and work my internship job. In just about six weeks from now, these experiences will be behind me. I will leave Tucson and make my way back to Honolulu where I'll continue my life of writing and teaching. As my UA experience concludes, I find myself in a reflective state of mind. I will be benefitting from my time in Tucson for the rest of my life. If anyone ever asks me how I benefitted from my internship, I would have so much to say. For two years I have worked with the talented and experienced education staff at the Poetry Center. I have facilitated poetry-related field trips with young people from schools all over Tucson. I would like to think that I have taught these students well. As I reflect on my experiences leading field trips and helping with Saturday Family Day events, I know I have learned as much as I have taught. That seems to happen in a nurturing learning environment: the students can become teachers, and the teachers can discover that there is always more to learn.

So what have I learned over two years as a Poetry Center Education Intern? Well, here's a list as it rolls off the top of my head: I have learned that there is poetry in every day life, that every person regardless of age or background is capable of experiencing poetic moments. I have learned that while celebrated children's poets like Shel Silverstein, Jack Prelutsky, and Karla Kuskin continue to delight, it is also possible to inspire children with the works of Pablo Neruda, Lucille Clifton, Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens. I have learned that you can never thank docent Tony Luebbermann too many times for bringing bagels for Poetry Center staff, one day a week. I have learned that Tucson is a rich resource for talented singers, dancers, writers, artists, and educators. I have learned that poetry can be a vehicle for talking to children and young people about love, war, God, and all the big issues in life. I have also learned that poetry can be equally effective in discussing the seemingly small moments of life, the way a flower breaks into blossom or the way so much can depend upon a red wheelbarrow. Mostly, I have learned that to write and to teach and to learn and to read are all related acts. Through my internship at the Poetry Center, I was given a formal way to pass on what I was learning to students of a younger generation. The University of Arizona Creative Writing Program gave me an opportunity to become a better writer. My education internship at the Poetry Center provided me with a chance to become a better person.

Tim Dyke is an Education intern at The University of Arizona Poetry Center. This May, he'll graduate with his MFA in Fiction from The University of Arizona, and will be heading back to teach and live in Hawaii. We will miss him dearly.

This Fortnight in Poetry Education: National Library Week

2012-04-16T16:22:05Z

First things first: April is National Poetry Month, and this week is National Library Week! It's like a Turducken for poetry lovers. Our own Alison Hawthorne Deming and Norman Dubie are two of poets.org's featured poets, along with UA-alumnus-turned-ASU-faculty Alberto Rios.

Teachers can find National Poetry Month tips for incorporating poetry into the classroom here; feel free to check out the Poetry Center's lesson plan library here.

Brad Meltzer's article on the unsung heroics of school librarians at The Huffington Post is making the rounds, and you have until April 11 to participate in the six-word story contest hosted by atyourlibrary.org.

Gerry LaFemina claims that poetry in American is experiencing another Golden Age.

And our very own Tucsonian Joshua Furtado won the 2012 Arizona Poetry Out Loud State Competition! On March 29th, at Phoenix Center for the Arts, Furtado brought the house down with his renditions of Eve Merriam's "Catch a Little Rhyme," Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee," and Ravi Shankar's "Contraction." Josh will be heading to the Poetry Out Loud Nationals in Washington D.C., May 13-15, to represent the state of Arizona. Good luck, Josh! We're so proud of you!

You can watch his semifinals performance at the UA Poetry Center here.

Two new members of the Arizona Board of Regents were confirmed; Greg Patterson's confirmation hearing lasted more than an hour.

Finally, an article on why literature is important, discussing Michael Mack's new book, How Literature Changes the Way We Think, which I wish I'd had lying around last semester when my students asked me, on the day of the final, "Why should we care about literature?" The argument here, specifically, is that art is not simply a reflection of the world, but a space created where revolution can happen, where sidelined ways of living can be brought to the surface and championed, and where current culture and norms can be challenged. Why do you think literature is important?

Hilary Gan is an Education Intern, and an MFA candidate in Fiction at the University of Arizona.

Pioneers in Word and Deed

2012-04-09T14:53:15Z

Tim Dyke is pursuing his MFA in Fiction at The University of Arizona. He's also an Education Intern at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

As an Education Intern at the University of Arizona Poetry Center, I'd like to think that if a school group wants to schedule a field trip for a particular purpose, the inventive educators here will be able to create a program that can accommodate them. When teachers from a local Tucson elementary school asked if they could visit the library to see the exhibit on Sharlot Hall and Hattie Lockett, I said, "Of course." When I was told that the next Thursday morning would bring 25 Kindergartners and first graders to the Poetry Center, I anticipated a fun time. I also wondered what exactly a five-year-old or a six-year-old could appreciate about an exhibit that featured poets from Arizona's historical past. What could we do for their field trip that would be useful, fun and enlightening?

To plan the field trip, I began by consulting the Poetry Center website. According to the information provided, Sharlot Mabridth Hall and Hattie Greene Lockett lived and worked at the turn of the 20^th Century. Members of the Arizona Women's Hall of Fame, both Hall and Lockett were "women of thought and action, pioneers in word and deed." On the morning of March 8^th, I stood around a library case with an eager group of five and six year olds. We stared at leathered journals and photographs of an Arizona that might no longer exist. How did I connect the lives of these pioneer women to the lives of these young visitors? Well, I'd like to think that I began by viewing these students as explorers in their own right. I'd like to think I considered them to be children of thought and action, young pioneers of word and deed.

"These two women wrote more than a hundred years ago," I said to the field trip students. We were sitting on the inviting red couches in the Poetry Center's entryway. "They wrote about the land they lived in because they loved it." I asked the students to think about the places that they themselves knew best. I asked them to picture the rooms they lived in, the yards they played in, the locations that made them feel comfortable and at peace. After talking about places for a little while, we decided to go on a "field trip within the field trip." With pencil and paper in hand, the Kindergarten and first grade students followed me on a short little silent walk. We wove our way through the stacks of the Poetry Center library. In the Meditation Garden we stopped for a minute and experienced the place with all of our senses. As we left the garden, we circumnavigated the building, looking and listening. All the while students were thinking about how they might describe this place.

When we finished our short walk, we all ended up at the long library table. Covered with white mural paper, crayons, pencils and markers, the table invited us to record our thoughts about the places we just travelled. Students wrote down words. They drew pictures. They filled the mural paper with their impressions of the habitat that surrounded them. After thirty minutes of writing and drawing, I asked students to think about all that they had created. While I am not sure that Hattie Lockett and Sharlot Hall ever drew their impressions of Arizona on butcher paper, I do think that maybe they would have appreciated this activity. The students who visited the Poetry Center that day became "artists of place," "poets of the environment." I asked the students to think about what they had just accomplished. Before they left the Poetry Center, we rolled up their mural, and I invited them to keep working on it when they got back to school. "If you ever want to write a poem or a story, or if you ever want to draw a picture," I said, "think about the places that you live and work and play in." I would like to think that these first graders and Kindergartners understood my message: if you pay attention to the land that surrounds you, you will always have something to write about. Again, I'd like to think that Sharlot Hall and Hattie Lockett would appreciate this message.

Mongolian Poetry

2012-04-02T18:06:17Z

John Dwyer is a returned Peace Corps Volunteer and blogger for The Good Men Project. He currently resides in Washington, D.C.

When I went to Mongolia to teach English through Peace Corps, I knew I would come back with at least one more tattoo. The only question was what would be the subject or inspiration? The tattoo I had inked in college combined my faith, friends, and love of Romantic poetry, so the bar was set high for the next one. It took the entire two years of my service to settle that question.

    Asian tattoos are dangerous, and that has nothing to do with health regulations. In my travels, I have fallen in and out of love with Chinese characters, Cambodian script, and Japanese kanji. Seeing pictographs that are visual representations of ideas on a level beyond the Western alphabet, or letters that can be said to physically flow unlike the blocky typeset of the Romans, well, that's addictive to a writer. Asian alphabets also attract lonely high school boys, and frankly I would like to believe I put that phase firmly behind me. There are many reasons not to get the words for Warrior Poet inked on your body in Korean, and I would be remiss if I did not include the issue of verification. If you cannot read your own tattoo, maybe it deserves a second thought.

    Landing in Mongolia, Chinggis Khaan International Airport greets travelers with three entirely different alphabets. There is English using the Romanized alphabet, Mongolian using Russia's Cyrillic alphabet, and Mongolian again, this time using the traditional script. After decades of suppression by first the Chinese, and then the Russians, Mongolia's traditional script is making a comeback. The traditional script, originally developed by Chinngis (Genghis to the Western World) Khaan so that messengers could write it without having to get off their horses, slides vertically down the page instead of horizontally. It has the utilitarian grace of a hammer or perfectly balanced sword.

    It makes sense that many Peace Corps Volunteers are seduced by re-emerging alphabet. American arms and ribcages end up being permanently adorned by the alphabet, but I fought against it. In the community I lived in, I drilled my fourth and fifth graders daily with the ABC's. In my ger, the felt tent I called home, I tweaked tattoo designs based on the soyombo, Mongolia's national symbol that appears on everything from vodka to the flag. I intended to avoid letters completely when getting inked.

    After my first year of teaching, I took my design with me to the capital during summer break. I visited a tattoo artist that Volunteers favor because he studied in New York until his visa expired, and possibly a little longer. While holding the tattoo gun against my skin, he quizzed me on the soyombo's meaning. He nodded in approval while I showed off my knowledge about how the circle and crescent were the sun and moon, the vertical lines were for strength and vigilance against neighboring enemies, and the triple flame on top was borrowed from Buddhism. When I thought I had passed the test, I stopped and waited to hear about how well I had studied. However, instead of heaping on accolades, the artist said only: "It's also the letter A."

    Turns out the soyombo was the first letter in an alphabet created by Zanabazar, a Mongolian who is considered Asia's version of Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci. Now venerated as a saint, Zanabazar composed music, contemplated theology, and created an absurdly complex alphabet for Mongolian Buddhism. Look up the soyombo, ye Mighty, and despair at having to use an alphabet with such intricate letters.

    Once I realized that despite all my efforts, I had gotten a tattoo that used an alphabet I could not read, I decided to capitulate completely. Mongolian script looks awesome, so why resist the temptation? Yet, I retained one caveat - I wanted to be able to read my tattoo. I returned to my community with all the study materials I could find on learning Mongolian script.

    My two greatest resources were a half-transcribed copy of "The Secret History of the Mongols," and a collection of poems. The Secret History was a sizable work attributed to Chinggis Khaan, but would have been worthless to me without the poems which had an assortment of transcriptions for the phonetics, and translations into the Cyrillic alphabet or even occasionally into English.

    The poems also lead to one of my favorite English lessons for my 9th grade classes. I had originally asked some of the Mongolian teachers I was closest to for help learning the traditional script. I would sit in the teachers' room, writing and rewriting the alphabet, but could rarely entice anyone to do more than write their name for me. Honestly, I was often extremely angry that no one seemed willing to take the time to help me when I had moved all the way to Mongolia to teach English and live in a community that had literally no other Westerners. Later, I learned about the cultural suppression that only recently ended in the '90s, and felt quite embarrassed over my emotions. Many of my fellow teachers would not have had the opportunity to learn the alphabet that was their own cultural heritage until they were studying at the university, if at all.

    In the meantime, I figured that if the teachers wouldn't help me, maybe the students would. I noticed that as early as fifth grade they had textbooks with traditional writing in them. So I made a lesson around a short poem, White Mountains, which I had in Mongolian script and English translation. To be safe, I made the lesson for my oldest students, 9th grade. The poem itself is in the accompanying picture, and a brief summary of the lesson plan follows:

Alphabet song (5 min); my students were too cool to do their homework, but rarely too cool to sing.
Matching Alphabets (7 min); jumbled columns of Cyrillic and English alphabets were written on the board, students individually wrote them down and matched corresponding letters. The first student to finish correctly had the honor of showing off and matching the letters I had written on the board.
Translation of script to Cyrillic (10 min); to my students' endless amusement, I scratched the traditional script on the board and had individual students come up, correct my scrawls, and write English letters that made similar sounds.
Teacher aided translation into English (8 min); I actually had a student write the poem on the board for me in script, then as a class, we translated the poem into English.
Groups of four, each one picks a season (2 min); students arranged their desks into pods of four, and each group picks a paper at random from a pile. Each piece of paper has a season written on it.
Competition to brainstorm associations for the given season (8 min); each season had at least two groups working on it. After five minutes of brainstorming, the groups with the most words per season wrote their lists on the board. If the other groups had words missing from the list, they could add them afterwards.
Composition of weather/season poems; homework given for students to write their own poems. Since homework was rarely completed, it was an excuse to continue this lesson at a later point. On a review day, I could go over color and seasonal vocabulary and have students compose poems in class.

As a teacher, this lesson had everything I could desire. Most of the work, especially the writing, was done by the students, and it revolved around a subject I was interested in, poetry. My students were also extra excited by the chance to show off something they knew more about, Mongolian script. I even ended up borrowing one of the writing textbooks for a day, because as my student said, I obviously needed to study more than she did.

By my final summer in Mongolia, I could read almost as well as I could speak the language - which isn't saying much, but it was enough. I finished my soyombo with a healthy spattering of traditional script surrounding it. When people find out that my tattoo is in Mongolian, they inevitably ask what it says. I like to change to translation each time because it doesn't matter so much what it says as how it says it. Like a poem, I find it hard to argue that one interpretation is really more valid than another.

This Fortnight In Poetry Education: Poetry Out Loud, Video Performances, and Teaching Opportunities

2012-03-27T16:58:13Z

Hilary Gan is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Arizona, an Education Intern at The University of Arizona Poetry Center, and writer-in-residence at Hollinger Elementary.

I was lucky enough to be present for the Poetry Out Loud Southern Arizona Semi-finals competition--I even scored a seat by the outdoor propane heater for the last half. I am a fiction writer who knows very little about poetry and who tends to favor the out-of-vogue and terribly inappropriate narrative poetic stylings of Charles Bukowski. I like it when ugly language is repurposed into something beautiful, and I like finding beauty in grittiness.

My mother is an English teacher and says that the best poems for high schoolers are the old, tried-and-true sentimental poems: 'O Captain, My Captain!" and so forth. Sentimental rhymers were the poems most of the students chose to perform.

Robert Oliphant argues in his article "Speech, Hearing, and America's 100 Most Memorable Children's Poems" that the memorization of poetry helps children develop phonemic awareness, learn multiple connotations for words, and become "civilizationally literate." He goes on to explain that rhymes allow children to practice distinguishing between consonants, while literary devices use words in different contexts and allow students to expand their understanding of meaning, as well as expanding their vocabulary to include words that are uncommon in their neck of the woods.

So it appears that the students who are going on to the State Competition on Thursday, March 29 in Phoenix (Joshua Furtado, Cassandra Valadez, and Mark Anthony Niadas) were the students who gleaned these lessons well enough to express their poems with the full force of their own personality.

Two out of three of the winners were actors in their school drama clubs, and it showed. What made them stand out was their treatment of the poem like a conversation. They let sentences and meaning dictate their delivery, rather than the rhymes; they recognized and allowed the humor of their pieces into their performances, and it was clear that somehow they related deeply to their poems in unique ways, which brought hidden meanings to light. They had distinguished their phonemes to the point that they could choose to ignore or emphasize them. They had understood multiple connotations so well that they could express them with the tone of their voices. And they had understood the purpose of the poem so well that they could take, say, a 19th century poem written by a guy in Massachusetts and perform it in Tucson, Arizona with all of the emotion of the original and some besides. In short, they had learned their poems.

So if you would like to see what an arts education really does for our students, please think about attending the State Finals Competition, held here:

Thursday, March 29, 2012
7:00pm - 9:30pm
Phoenix Center for the Arts
1202 North 3rd Street
Phoenix, AZ 85004

And in other poetry-related news this month, check out the links below:

The U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan blogged about the importance of arts in the schools: http://www.ed.gov/blog/2012/03/it%e2%80%99s-march-do-you-know-how-strong-your-schools%e2%80%99-arts-programs-are/

The New York Public Library offers its summer seminar program for teachers in conjunction with The Cullman Center Institute for Teachers: http://www.nypl.org/events/cullman-institute-teachers

And Reddit has an official "literature channel" for videos of performances thanks to Miracle Jones: http://www.reddit.com/r/litvideos/

Elijah

2012-03-19T16:46:09Z

Rita Oldham is a senior at the University of Arizona, majoring in Education.

My mom was a teacher, and she would often come home from school with stories to tell. Listening to her made me feel as if I was watching a TV series. I grew to love the unique characters that filled her classroom, and I felt that I knew each one as if they were my closest friend. Yet, I rarely met them. They were simply a figure of my imagination, an idea of what I hoped them to be. Each student was different in their own way, and had their own struggles and triumphs, yet each touched my mom's heart. Somehow, despite the craziness of each day, my mom would come home inspired and reassured that she was in the right place in her life. I was in awe.

Years later, I was interning at an elementary school and I was...in agony. I wasn't sure where my mom's angel of inspiration had come from, but it was definitely not with me. Kids were flying from wall to wall. I had to jump from desk to desk, dodging the bullets of pens and pencils. I was anything but inspired. I came home exasperated, distressed, and plagued with emotional and mental fatigue. I whimpered to my mom, "I thought you said teaching was rewarding, invigorating, and life-changing. You never told me it was a fight for survival...literally!" My mom smiled at my statement, oblivious to my serious undertone. She only replied, "Stop looking for a moment of reward. The prize comes when you least expect it." And, as always, my mom was right.

It was a Saturday morning in beautiful Tucson, Arizona. I was fulfilling the requirement of an assignment by donating a few hours of my time at the university's Poetry Center. It was Family Day, and children ran down the book-filled halls with their parents not too far behind them. I was on craft patrol, bracing myself for waves of children to engulf the table I was at to cut, color, and glue to their little heart's content. In honor of the "Speak Peace" exhibit that was on display, we were encouraging students to write their dreams and ideas of peace onto colorful strips of paper that would then become a chain connecting the vision of one child to another. Older kids wrote; younger kids drew. Either way, paper and markers skid across the table like a plate on ice.

At one point, a little voice peeped up behind me and I turned to see a little boy with blond hair, and sky blue eyes. In the kindest manner fathomable, he asked, "Please miss, can I join?" I kneeled down to the polite child and asked him what his name was. He slowly yet steadily replied, "My name's Elijah. I'm 5. How old are you?" I smiled and answered and invited him to sit next to me. As if shocked to be invited, Elijah said, "Ooooh thank you so much!" It reminded me of a Shirley Temple classic where the orphan finds her family. I gently pushed him towards the table and briefly explained the purpose of our project. Instead of the paper chain slips that I handed him, the little boy grabbed a plain white piece of paper and a blue marker. He began to look at me, then look down at his paper, then look at me again, and make a few marks on the page. When he was done, he exclaimed with a burst of excitement, "It's you and me!" I looked at his paper and sure enough, there was a spitting image of myself. I had two stringy legs, a lopsided head, a smile that overtook a crooked face, and a blue skinny body with no clothes. Next to me stood a smaller version of that image, presumably the artist himself. His tree-branch arms extended upwards, connecting with my own tree branches. "See?" he asked. "We're friends!"

Elijah handed me the marker and asked me to write his name above his figure. As I did, I asked him what school he went to. He said that he goes to school with his mommy, and he turned and pointed to a woman behind him. She was petite and young, and was pushing an even younger child in her stroller with one hand while holding onto her pregnant belly in the other. I tilted my head with curiosity and she explained that Elijah and his sister were home-schooled. I commended her for her beautiful family and to my amazement, her eldest child chimed in, "No, YOU are beautiful!" I was astonished. Sitting before me was a stranger 3 foot tall with a heart the size of a giant. He didn't care that he only just met me. He didn't care that he didn't know me. And he didn't care that I was four times his age. To Elijah, I was his new beautiful friend.

Before finishing his drawings, he and I drew a picture of his younger sister, and his baby brother that was on his way. He even cheerfully invited me to his house later that day so we could play with his trucks and puzzles. Out of all the children I had met that day, I was truly sad to see him leave. No one else had his spunky personality, his regal manners, and his superb drawing skills. No one else made me smile like Elijah did. He taught me the meaning of true happiness.

I realize now that that little boy was the reward my mother found every day in her teaching career. It isn't the profound statements, or the excellent grades, or even the stories each student creates with their lives. It's an unexplainable joy that you receive through their simple smile. It's the unfathomable inspiration you feel when you're with them. Time stops, and suddenly, nothing is important. It's the little things that make our lives valuable. For my mom, it was a classroom filled with students. For me, it was a little blond boy by the name of Elijah.

Review of Paul Guest's My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge

2012-03-13T17:56:44Z

It takes a certain attuned perspective to see "a strange maroon pelt" where a "vinyl coat in the car door" really is. Or "red math" for a digital clock. It is this propensity for the eerie everyday that lends Paul Guest's poetry a special slant. His most recent collection of poetry, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, offers a dark look at everything from coupons and monsters to the etymology of galoshes.

Though most of what you'll find written about Guest and his poetry pushes the sad fact of his permanent childhood paralysis as a sort of map key to his writing, such singular pointing misses a wealth of nuance. Namely, it misses Guest's ability to take imaginative jaunts to a refreshing - if absurd - extreme, which cannot be narrowly attributed to what the book jacket calls "a life forever altered."Neither can the specific but applicable shards of historical knowledge be named symptoms of tragedy; lines like "better to cover you / beside the eastern sea / with lapidary jade / fat emperors ate hoping not to die" pile in like trivia into a treasure box.

Still, without the knowledge of Guest's paralysis, it would be harder to forgive his compulsion to throw barriers up in the midst of otherwise universal poems. The opening poem, "User's Guide to Physical Debilitation" sees "witch's brews of resentment," "extreme atrophy," and "the gradual, bittersweet loss / of every God damned thing you ever loved" over the course of two melodramatic pages. This is not to say that a predicament such as Guest's is undeserving of empathy; rather, reader discomfort arises from the hunch that to nod with his lament is to kowtow to pity in a situation where marveling at his inventive language would be worth more to everyone involved.

Remarkably, between the near-surreal portraits and heavy references to a paralyzed life, you don't get the feeling you've fallen down the rabbit hole into Guest's own world. Indeed, you'd be hard-pressed to pinpoint anyone to whom such elegant distortions and crystalline phrase twists might belong. The portrait rather seems to be about the world at (very) large.

by Christy Delahanty

The Poetry Experience

2012-03-05T18:55:58Z

Justin Gordon is a senior at the University of Arizona, majoring in Creative Writing.

On Saturday, I came to work an hour late. My manager asked me why I was so late, and I said, "I'm sorry, I was volunteering at the Poetry Center." His response was, "There's a center for poetry?" This had not been the first time I had received that response, and it probably won't be the last. As an English major, I have read many different poets, but most people hardly ever focus on poetry. Some even go as far as saying poetry is a dead art, but what I saw at the Poetry Center today proved that poetry is still alive, and will continue to grow for future generations. There are people out there who still see the importance of poetry, and they want to spread their vision to the next generation. The biggest problem with poetry is that most people are ill-informed on the subject. Most people hear the word poetry, and think of rhyming and exalted speech, but poetry is so much more than this, and it is through events, like Family Days at the Poetry Center, that teach the public about poetry.

The Family Days events at the Poetry Center are good for all ages. There are writing activities run by local writers for the children, and a large library of poetry for the adults. People have told me, "I don't like poetry," to which I reply, "You just haven't found the right poem yet." The Poetry Center has something for everyone. Poetry is powerful, and the children realize this especially.

The children that come to these activities have a blast. There are many children who will say, "I don't like to write," but there isn't one child that will say, "I don't like to pretend or imagine." This is why Family Days are important; it allows children to express themselves on paper in a friendly writing community. The child that learns to appreciate writing is given a tremendous gift; they have an outlet that will always be there. At Family Days, the children can write and submit their work to the Poetry Center anthology, dance to their favorite poems, sing along with local song writers, and let their imaginations run free.

Just Paper and a Pencil

2012-02-27T19:59:36Z

Sarah Minor is an MFA candidate in non-fiction at the University of Arizona, and writer-in-residence at Corbett Elementary.

On a warm Saturday morning this September I headed to the Poetry Center to lead my first Family Day activity. The event fell during the Poetry Center's Speak Peace exhibit and we had planned peace themed activities combining visual art and writing for the families to participate in. Having only worked with high school and college-aged students before I was, of course, terrified of young children. Not young children exactly, but the idea of inspiring young children to sit down and write, to come up with a message about peace--an topic adults have a hard time discussing--all while overcoming the limits of spelling and handwriting. What if the activity was too simple? What if they grew bored quickly or couldn't sit still? And how old were third graders again?

As I fanned out the flat rainbow of construction paper across the long worktable between the PC's tall bookshelves, I thought about how my own 5^th grade paper folding skills were a little rusty, and how all the peace messages I could come up with seemed used, cliché. My activity involved the kids writing messages for peace on construction paper and either folding the paper into a crane, or stringing it up as a peace flag for display.

I was sitting alongside a group of pre-K students drawing peace pictures for flags when a small shoulder bumped mine. A little brunette girl wielding a blue crayon stretched out her arm to plop a bright pink sheet down in front of me. "Can you help me write a story?" she said. I paused in surprise, and then "Heck Yes!" said my brain and "Of course!" said my mouth. A story? And all it took was a pencil and some colorful paper? Could it always be this easy to inspire a child to jump into the writing process? I suspected not.

Like me, the little girl had just moved to Tucson and was missing her best friend from back home. She wanted to write a story about them playing together and going on a walk through the desert. She wove the story quickly aloud, animating with her hands and dictating as I wrote. With very few prompting questions, soon she and her friend were walking down a path with their dogs and had come across a snake! "That one happened for real," she told me of her encounter with an animal from her new desert home.

Across the table from us, her audible tale had excited some other visitors, who were telling each other a story about princesses and creating "peace crowns" out of construction paper. "The Queen of Peace," said one as she slipped pointed yellow circlet with a peace sign in the center through her ponytail. "And I'm the Princess," responded the other. Next door at the table, a little boy was drawing "Peace Robots" complete with messages for his chain of flags.

I read the little girl's story aloud and she smiled, pulling the paper from my hands to begin work on an illustration. I had somehow looked up to find myself surrounded by inspired writers working excitedly. They had each found their own way around any writing limitations, and were lost in peace-based imagination, all without detailed instruction or the folding of a single crane.

I guess the lesson here is not just to be able to adapt a lesson and forgo structure, but to trust in the creative energy inside the youngest of writers, and to look forward to those you hope to inspire, inspiring you in return.

Rodari's Cards of Propp: How to Invite Race Discussion in the Classroom

2012-02-21T08:04:55Z

Lisa Levine is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Arizona, and writer-in-residence at Sam Hughes Elementary School.

In a Difference and Equality brown bag this fall, two writers brought up the issue of silence. One of the writers described an entire undergraduate class in which the students analyzed a novel (whose title I have forgotten, I'm sorry to admit) known for being, among other things, about the themes of race and identity. The students, she said, got through a full hour of discussion in which no one ever mentioned the subject. In an era where the classroom is a relatively safe place to study the murky waters of race and identity, why aren't students willing to drink?

My belief is that our core values of equality and equity have become an undiscussed assumption, rather than a articulated aspect of life. As a result, kids are growing up into a society where commercial institutions - media, in particular - expresses ethnic identity more clearly than do individuals. In the rush to master equality, Americans have lost touch with the language of lineage, heritage and ethnicity. Gianni Rodari's writing exercises can work on a foundational level to combat, in early childhood, our uncertainty about how to address inequality or simple difference. Rodari flips the script on storytelling with precise, almost mathematical prompts that lead kids through rewriting, re-envisioning, retelling the assumptive, intellectual stories and even language they employ.

Rodari's fairy tale prompts are an overt opportunity to teach kids how to slice their world into an honest statement of individualism, based a tradition as treasured as ones' own, private lineage. Rodari isn't dismissing tradition; instead, he dismantles the fairy tale and uses its components to offer a rewriting opportunity. His prompt "The Cards of Propp" is, to me, a tool with vast potential; how teaching artists and students use it will depend on the individual. I see the breakdown of steps and reformation of the fairy tale as a revolution, or the seeds of a revolution: teach kids the accepted norms of their society are constructed by people not unlike them, just from other eras, and you teach them to be able to construct their own norms. This is not to say that every micro-society is in need of revolution, or that every kid will think for him or herself after writing from a "Cards of Propp" style prompt. However, inculcating the possibility that students can learn the rules of their world with the intent of making and living by rules of their own is, I think, inherent in this and many of Rodari's classroom exercises.

Applying the break-into-component-parts process to a stereotype could be a powerful exercise for 8-12^th grade writing students. For example, let's look at the stereotype of the "dumb blonde" from which so many jokes stem. Unlike fairy tales, stereotypes operate on simple reasoning, so the steps would be simple. The stereotype might be broken out into the following steps:

1. The stereotyped individual is identified by a single physical characteristic.

2. The physical characteristic is attached to a perjorative adjective.

3. The perjorative adjective plus physical characteristic are consolidated to connotate a single, unified meaning, operating as one idea.

In a classroom exercise designed to undermine stereotyping based on race, the steps could be used to describe a purple person, a man with three ears, or some other fantastical physical characteristic. The students would then agree upon an adjective to describe the person. Here, teachers might encounter a tricky moment; what if students produce a perjorative or simple adjective? I don't think such a gesture should be censored, rather; I think teachers should follow the thought to arrive at a specific, complex and defendable adjective. Often opening up the thought process behind a negative statement will lead to a deeper understanding. I do not advocate for teachers to tell students they have to produce a positive adjective - I think the nature of the game will lead to interesting results. The final step will be to discuss the meaning connotated by the "angry purple girl" or the "quiet, three-eared guy" - what does describing a person in this simple way connotate about them? Is it effective, ineffective; what does such a description add to the conversation about each other?

An extension of this activity to try with classes that are willing to think further is to write jokes about the made-up stereotypes; one idea is to create a class stereotype and make an agreed-upon joke about the character who ensues. However, not every class will be ready to think about stereotyping on a mature level, so the joke extension would have to be implemented with caution so as not to become the type of thinking it's designed to undermine.

This week, I participated in two classes where fiction with thematic content about Mexico, America and the relationship between the two countries was evident in the stories we read. Perhaps I'm over-critical of my colleagues, but my read of the class discussion was that only a person of Mexican heritage seemed at ease speaking about that part of the work. Representative voice is invaluable, and creative writing programs should be avid about ensuring a multiplicity of voices in the classroom, but I believe it a failure of the intellect for people who aren't of a race, ethnicity or nationality to keep their silence on meaningful thematic content that happens to deal with nationality, race, identity (or other potential hot-button topics). Among intellectuals, it's the silence that's killing our relevance, not the mistakes we make when we do speak. We need to re-learn the language of a conversation about equality that, in our time, has not lost its relevance to education.

A Review of The Kingdom of Ordinary Time by Marie Howe

2012-02-13T21:03:59Z

Marie Howe is an American Poet and a professor at Sarah Lawrence College and New York University. Howe was a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, and has also received the National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in 1992 and the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998. Her works have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, The Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review.

She will be reading at the UA Poetry Center on Thursday, February 16.

Howe's latest book, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, merges the metaphysical onto everyday life and examines the presence of the sacred in "ordinary time," where "One loaf = one loaf. One fish = one fish." By doing this, Howe reshapes the way we look at the biblical ideas that are common to many of us. She owHoweslkfjslkfdjslkjflskjfre-illustrates the idea of unconditional love in "How You Can't Move Moonlight" and portrays a more tangible faith in "The Snow Storm." Ultimately The Kingdom of Ordinary Time asks, where is the kingdom of God on earth? What is holy? And who is a part of God's kingdom?

Beyond the religious thematics that are at play, Howe's work creates introspection. Poems such as "Would You Rather" and "What We Would Give Up" have a way of prompting a reflective pause, making the reader question their own hypothetical choices. "Would You Rather" presents a violent and disturbing scenario, and then ends the poems with "Would you rather be the woman? Or one of the soldiers? The baby? Or the soldier who shot and bayoneted the baby when he got there?" In the poem "What We Would Give Up," Howe poses the question, "What would we be willing to give up to equalize the wealth in the world?" She concludes that giving up hair dye might be too hard.

Overall, Marie Howe's poems are accessible in a way that poetry newcomers can both appreciate and understand her poems while receiving inspiration to write poetry themselves.

Erin Liskiewicz is the marketing and publicity intern at the UA Poetry Center, and a creative writing senior at the University of Arizona, specializing in nonfiction. She will be graduating this spring.

Check out Marie Howe and The Kingdom of Ordinary Time on Youtube.com :

"What We Would Give Up" (Poems begins around 1:02) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppngs0fw5as&feature=related

"Star Market" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSffAewEhGI

"Government" and "The Spell" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_vl3DYkt3w&NR=1

"Prayer" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBLrCEeIZ-Y&feature=related

Poems from December Family Days

2012-02-06T18:13:29Z

Captain Hook

must be careful

when he looks

at a book.

-Porter, 5 1/2

Love that monsoon like lightning likes to

flash, love that monsoon like a flower likes to

grow, love to call it in the summer.

"It's time to rain, monsoon."

-Liam McGrath, inspired by Walter D. Mieres

Blue is the sound of rain. Ag is

the sound of a tired rock. My

favorite sound is Zoom and

the ocean's favorite music

is rock 'n' roll.

-Lily McGrath

Snow, snow, wonderful

snow. Listen to the silence

of the wonderful snow

falling over the town,

over the icy pond, on the

mountains over the valley,

between midnight and

daylight. Little tiny icy gems

glitter falling from the sky.

-Molly Lawrence

Jeffrey Yang: Global Juxtaposition

2012-02-01T00:26:38Z

Jeffrey Yang is a poet and editor at New Directions Publishing. He received the 2009 PEN/Osterweil Award for his poetry collection, An Aquarium, and will be reading at the Poetry Center on Thursday, February 2.

Jeffrey Yang's An Aquarium makes use of facts, etymologies, and politics from around the globe to create a fairly realistic two-dimensional version of the book's namesake. Using an alphabetical list of fish and characters such as Aristotle, Google, and the United States, Yang structures a criticism of the worst parts of human nature on a global scale. In the context of the idea of an aquarium, the metaphor of that policy as an aquarium's acquisition of foreign and endangered species for academic benefit is not lost, and is at its clearest in the final poem, "Zooxanthellae," where Yang describes the atomic tests done in Bikini Atoll in the 1940s by the United States, and the subsequent studies done on those exposed to the radiation:

"In the following years, doctors from the Brookhaven National Laboratory, run by the U.S. department of energy, carefully documented the 'most valuable ecological radiation study on human beings....'"

Yang also discusses the scientific benefit of these nuclear tests in the field of ecology, with the discovery of a type of algae called zooxanthellae, which has a mutualistic relationship with coral and which Yang juxtaposes with the political relationship of the United States with other cultures.

The idea of a politician as morally repugnant and opposite the mutualists found in nature echoes throughout this collection. There is an entire entry dedicated to Aristotle, ending in the lines:

"For not understanding tide's/motion, Aristotle recognized/the imbecility of reason."

These lines begin the book-long theme of juxtaposing the razor edge of human development and the symbiotic balance often found in the oceans, as well as the trade-off between scientific gains and the sacrifice of beauty and morality. This juxtaposition is heightened by Yang's repeated homage to the ancients in both Eastern and Western cultures, scattered throughout the poems.