Urban Gateways Artists Wired

responses

I just came across this blog post I wrote a while back on another site. It's about a summer program in performance poetry I worked on a few years ago, and its impact on the 20 high school students we had the privilege to work with. I had forgotten that I wrote it, and was so glad to stumble across this again, as it captures specific details that I might have forgotten otherwise.

More than that, it captures some details about the students' response to me, and what a rare experience it is to hear so much about how your students are impacted by an art experience. It's a moment of how I was feeling in December of 2008 as an artist in education.

One note: the summer program with these kids that I mention took place at a central site during the summer, and consisted of students from various parts of the city. 

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December 5, 2008

Reasons to Believe

1. I posted some photos online from the high school poetry workshop I taught last summer, which continues to burn in my mind. I’m glad that I waited to post the photos until the cascade of other photos from the students were through, until they were well into their semesters at school, and maybe had forgotten some of the smaller moments. When I did this, T. posted a comment, to the effect of  “I’m literally in tears,” how much he missed everybody, and how “professional” he thought the class was compared some other folks he’s working with now. Never expected that. So amazed to know that his memory of how the group dynamic turned out is so rosy. It really did turn out pretty great at the end–the kids got past their differences and learned to work in spite of them. But woooooooo…we had our moments.
2. A day or two later, A. texted me to thank us for teaching the class, and to let me know that he had won a contest at some youth arts conference in Wisconsin with one of the poems that he’d written in our program over the summer.
3. Then T. sent me a message: I still think about u. U r the sun exploding in my soul. I ment to thank u b cuz I’m realizing how much of not only a better poet but person u molded me to b. Keep ur head up and wash your hair. (He’s referencing a line from “All She Wrote” by Harryette Mullen–”Wash your wet hair?”, a poem we read over the summer).
4. E. and I (as well as A. and I) have been braiding poetry back and forth, at their request, since the workshop ended. E. just asked if I would record some of the poems with him for his new album. I also found out that he started poetry braids with A., and another classmate of his.
5. I saw E. perform the other night, and he said, “Thanks for keeping me writing!” I–kind of flabbergasted–said, “No, thanks for keeping me writing!” He said that he misses poetry and hasn’t been getting enough.

It just never occurred to me what a lasting effect this workshop would have on the kids, kind of a ripple effect of new collaborations, new work, and relationships that are ongoing. I’m thankful that I get a little snapshot from them every once in a while of what’s going on (who’s been accepted to what college, who’s working on a student newspaper, who’s performing…). It isn’t often that, as a teacher, I get to see what my kids are like in the time after I’ve worked with them, and to even imagine whether the work has had any impact on them or not. I don’t flatter myself that I’ve played a vital part–the students I worked with last summer are really talented, full of initiative, and by and large extremely hard-working–they’ll find opportunities regardless. But just hearing from them and getting the thanks, knowing that they’re doing well, encourages me in the middle of what has been a long and challenging fall…the kids I have right now are fabulous, but there are so many of them. The poems are amazing, but I only have 40 minutes a pop, and I see about 180+ kids at each of the two schools where I’m a poet-in-residence.

I’m just glad to know it matters.

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[Rachel] I am child world

A while back, I did a couple of one-off workshops in poetry at Family Focus Oak Terrace at with a group of 2nd-4th graders. I shared the work of Krista Franklin with them and we talked about her intriguing pieces, what they brought up for us, and what kind of methods they might include. I then gave them clipped-out words, magazine pictures, and other goodies to play with and create their own poem/collages. One student stood out, especially to the teacher. Afterward the teacher spoke to me, saying that this student had been through some traumatic times, and about how it did his heart good to see Tyrek so merrily creating, coming through such a sad time. I had noticed how hard he'd worked on his piece, and with focus and joy, but I wouldn't have known anything was out of the ordinary unless the teacher had spoken to me.

"Take that with you and keep it," the teacher said, meaning this story, saying that we don't always have a chance to know whether we're having a positive impact or not. He kept telling me, just know that you did something good today, take that with you.

Revision, Un-boringed

I left my first day of my guest residency at Locke feeling successful with our first drafts. However, but as the second session approached, with that apprehensive, how's-it-going-to-turn-out kind of feeling. Like when you're making soup: you've got all your good soup ingredients, you get it boiling, and then you're not sure what to do to make it spectacular, to take it to the next level, to make it something other than water and veggies, to BRING IT ALL TOGETHER. You feel me?

Week 2 we planned to work on second drafts of our poems and stories, which we needed. And revision can be hard. And boring. I was yawning already.

I'll tell ya, it was actually a good spot to be in. As someone who often does one-off poetry lessons and never looks back, it was being an unusual luxury to stretch out, look again, and have another entire hour to work on the same pieces.

In the Humanities class, which was working on poems to use with their self-portraits, we took out "How to See Deer" from the last session. We hadn't really discussed the structure of the poem, mainly content, so we discussed the way the poet used line and stanza (namely enjambed tercets, three-line stanzas with sentences that wrap from one stanza to the next), then asked them to rewrite their own poems on an entirely new sheet of paper, experimenting with enjambment and some form of stanza choice (like tercets). I enccouraged them to make other changes as they went, but it wasn't really necessary as revision came naturally to the process of rewriting and giving structure to their poems.

The Science class wrote stories describing some task or challenge they'd overcome. I focused more on "How We Did It" by Muriel Rukeyser for this one. However, for the second session I started out first thing with brainstorming lists to help juice up the writing they'd already done, and maybe lend direction to those who were feeling at sea. For this I gave them a few seconds for each item, quick quick. First: write down a challenge or difficult moment that you have overcome in the past. Then something that you would like to accomplish in the future. Then, draw a line, new list. Then, I had them quickly generate a list of concrete things: the first color you think of, an inanimate object, a sound, an emotion, a "strong action word" ("A verb?" they asked. "Yes," I said...but I still like my way). Then the next step...you guessed it. Re-write your story on a new sheet of paper. Incorporate the things from your list into your story. You only get to throw away ONE. The goofy task of incorporating these intuitively generated items into their stories seemed to distract them from the--let's face it--hard and possibly tedious work of revising a story, with the added benefit of stretching them in new directions. For example, one boy created a recurring color theme of red, which turned an ordinary baseball story into a spellbinding and layered discovery.

Artwork and photos to come!

[Rachel] How we do it.

One day into a two-day gig at Locke Elementary as a guest artist, I've read the drafts that the two 6th-grade classrooms handed in. They have been reading novels about characters who overcome a lot of obstacles and challenges, so I tweaked an idea that I've been obsessed with lately in order to use it with them, which is the How-To poem. I am fascinated by the different ways that people articulate their unique processes of creation, survival, movement, and interaction with the world. I took two slightly different approaches. For each class, I gave the same handout, but focused on a different poem. With the science class, we discussed the narrative poem "How We Did It" by Muriel Rukeyser. I then asked them to write the story of a challenge or a "difficult moment" and how they got through it. With the humanities class, we discussed Philip Booth's "How to See Deer" and wrote a poem about something that they have learned how to do and explained how to do it, but in poem form. As to formal constraints, I didn't give them much more at this point. That's not my usual practice, but I figured that the next time we meet I can give them a technical challenge on the outset that will make revision a natural and fun course to take on Day 2.

Karen Light is the main artist on this year-long residency. She and I have worked together before on an after-school program, and I was excited when she called me to collaborate with her at Locke. Karen's working with several classes creating a variety of visual art projects about the themes brought up by the novels they've been reading, including Esperanza Rising. I am a guest artist for two weeks with two of her classes to generate writing that they can use with their art projects. I love visual art that incorporates text, and I'm always looking for ways to execute these ideas with students, so this was a really exciting project for me.

A little about Rachel.

I write poems, make lists, and cook things up, bringing it all to a low simmer, a stir with the wooden spoon here and there, a long wait for the meal, a house filling with the smell of what's being prepared.

For the past six years, I've been working in Chicago as a teaching artist through organizations like Urban Gateways, The Poetry Center of Chicago and Gallery 37, among others. I was the recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Award for excellence in teaching. I've performed poetry in events including The Reconstruction Room and Elbowing Off the Stage. I was a finalist for the 2009 Pocataligo Poetry Contest and my poems appear most recently in Buffalo Carp and The MacGuffin.

In my teaching practice, I spend time with people and share poems that I love with them, as we explore the effect of each piece, and work together to discover what has been done and how. Poems, being made of words, are rooted in the idea of communication, and a place where--among other things--poets can explore with freedom and speak the truth with frankness (not veiled by obscurity, as is so often the mistaken identity of poetry). We are always making observations about our daily world and connections between one moment and another, one image and another image. Poetry is about the practice of capturing these observations before they pass. Poetry is about making beauty out of what is in front of us.