Winners of the WITS ‘The Future’ Poetry Contest!

Congratulations to the winners and finalists of our second WITS Poetry Contest! Students were asked to submit a poem about ‘the future’, inspired by Al Gore’s upcoming talk on his new book, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change. Baylee Bonagofsky won the contest with her poem “Memories”. Millie Jones, Kiya Smith, Maggie Garetson, and Nathaniel Faustino were finalists. Read their outstanding poetry below!

Winner:

Baylee Bonagofsky

Children’s Hospital

Age 16

Memories

When I hear the bang of the bat making perfect connection with the ball,

I remember a time of no pain, where the only thing that mattered

was getting the win.

And I wonder if I will ever be able to step in the batter’s box

and face another pitcher.

And I wish more than anything that I will.

 

When I smell the grease of the freshly-cooked ballpark burgers,

I remember all the quick meals between games

that would leave you ready for the next.

And I wonder if I will ever taste a burger like I did

after a long game.

And I wish more than anything that I will.

 

When I see a girl walking around in tightly-fit baseball pants,

I remember the busy schedules and early mornings.

And I wonder if I will ever go to bed knowing the next day is a game day.

And I wish more than anything that I will.

 

When I taste the salt from sunflower seeds,

I remember the millions of bags of seeds bought throughout the years.

And I wonder if I will ever add another bag of seeds to the collection

piled in my bat bag.

And I wish more than anything that I will.

 

When I feel the thick red stitching of the ball,

I remember the countless hours playing catch.

And I wonder if I will ever feel the ball entering my mitt again.

And I wish more than anything that I will.

Finalists:

Millie Jones

Nathan Hale High School

Grade 9

I Am in the Dark

I am the space in-between the spaces,

The spaces where heads are rested,

A skinny mess,

Only just louder and more obnoxious than you.

 

Recording all and everything you said,

Typewriters and tempers and just till you realize,

You are no better,

No better than it all.

 

I broke a bone once,

And it cracked,

Cracked like thunder,

You are that thunder and I am the aftermath, 

The burned leaves and the silence.

 

So give me a moment,

To wallow in the silence,

Before you decide that you’re right.

 

I am my Mothers laugh,

You told me that,

But I’m more like you really,

I’m more like your fire and your fingers as they stroke your hair.

 

So don’t go,

Don’t go just yet,

I want to tell you everything I don’t want to tell you.

 

If I could ever make you happy,

Tell me,

Tell me twice,

I’d like to hear that.

 

Forget about leaving spaces,

Fill the page,

I mean,

You’re a writer right?

 

I scream that I’m the sunset,

Centre of the universe,

Of all of it.

 

Really though,

I’m dusty dusk,

You are the sun set,

All your energy and vigour depleting.

 

I’m not so big,

I’m kind of small,

But I’d build you house,

If you’d give me a door.

 

So give me a door ,

Give me a window,

An escape.

 

I am almost dark,

You are almost light,

You’d never admit it though,

Would you ?

Kiya Smith

McClure Middle School

Grade 6

The Future

Flying cars and homes

So much technology like

Robot dogs and cats

Maggie Garetson

McClure Middle School

Grade 6

The Future

The future holds the unimaginable
with flying houses
and unicorns for cars.
The future holds everyone’s sadness
so all that is left on Earth
is happiness.
What the future contains
is more than you can bear.
The world will be full of laughter
happiness and joy, in the air.

Nathaniel Faustino

Seattle Children’s Hospital

Age 11

A Recipe for a Calm Day

1 weekend

1 shining sun

2 cups of candy

1 TV

Me

1 bed

The sound of robins chirping

No hospital

Winners of the WITS Poetry Contest!

Congratulations to the winner and finalists of the WITS Poetry Contest in the “Origins” category! We had many wonderful submissions from WITS students of all ages. 11th grader Maga Barzallo Sockemtickem won the contest with her poem “Where I’m From”. Maga will read her poem to the audience at the Julie Otsuka lecture at Benaroya Hall this evening. Moneka LaFrombois, Faith Mulugeta, Ruby Strickland and Angie Flores were finalists. You can read the winning and finalist poems below.

Stay tuned for the announcement of the winners in the “Future” category, coming soon!

Winner:

Maga Barzallo Sockemtickem

Seattle Children’s Hospital

Grade 11

Where I’m From

 

I am from the beat

of drums, and songs

to be sung, beautiful rain,            

sparkling down

 I am from laughter,

 movies, a drip of water

 leaping high against

The slaughter.

 I come from cracked

 concrete, rose petals

 falling into the deep.

 I am from nights of

 weeping, tears of joy.

 I am from sighs of relief

 and disappointed moans.

 

I’ve seen the

 world, it’s in my grasp.

 I come from needles

and blood. I come from shortcuts,

 gangsters and thugs.

 I come from words and music,

 so sorely missed.

 Least of all,

 I am cancerous.

 

Tree climber, jump roper,

 skydiving, playing poker,

feel my feet against

 my land, holding the soil in my hand.

 

I’m from raised voices

and hard fights, I am

from those red & blue

lights.

 

Broken glass, keys

on the floor.

A lit TV dinner, too early at 4.

I am from white sheets,

white pillows, white blankets

and white rooms. Rooms

with a window, a window through.

I am from denial,

acceptance, and

anger too. I won’t

back down from you.

I am from stubbornness

and spitfire.

I am from refuse to give up.

I am not just cancerous.

 

You see all this

All things are true

I have my native blood

 

My life is not written in stone

It’s written in the sky, the breeze,

water and fire, the morning

There’s nothing you can take from me

as long as Earth is alive.

Finalists

Moneka LaFrombois

West Seattle High School

Grade 9

Origins

 

Midnight cheese cake,

Falling off bikes and ATVs,

Scraped knees,

Walking a mile with grandpa everyday

 Just to pick up the mail,

Cherry smoothies daily,

Waking up to smell of baking cookies and acrylic paints,

Growing older,

Moving into the city,

Learning manners,

Biting my principal,

Being told my name was wrong,

I still hold a grudge against that girl,

Going on to middle school was a mess,

It was easy to disappear,

I met a girl,

She was into fighting,

I got suspended for the first time,

For two things, vandalism and hitting a boy

At first I thought the girl had changed me, but then I started thinking

Maybe that was me, and I had always been like that,

Going to a different school then the girl,

I haven’t gotten into a fight yet this year.

Maybe going our separate ways was a good idea,

But I miss the way I felt with her,

I never had to be in control.

 

Faith Mulugeta

BF Day Elementary

4th Grade

 

Where I’m From

 

I am from coffee, raw meat

and spicy bread.

From tropical weather and

gelati and candy. I am from soccer

and running. From church and

celebrating Easter one week late.

I am from swimming,

love of laundry detergent

and yummy shoes.

I am from the army, Miranda, Coca Cola.

From injera.

I am from curly hair and braids.

This is where I’m from.

 

Ruby Strickland

BF Day Elementary

5th Grade

I am from the rain –

deep, and cold – but comforting

I am from the cello

my father loves to play.

I am from the sun

shining bright

behind me.

From the snow

that fell

when I was born

I am from the scent of the lotion

my mom always wears

I am from the mac and cheese

my little sister loves to eat

I am from the trees –

their long, welcoming limbs

holding on to me

I am from the key shaped doorbell

on the front of my house

I am from my favorite stuffed

animal from when I was 1. The one that

I thought was a pig – but is just a bear.

I am from the rain.

I am from the trees.

I am from the people

living

inside of me.

 

Angie Flores

Seattle Children’s Hospital

 

My Real Name

 

Today my name is Hot Chocolate with Whipped Cream and Chocolate Shavings

on a Winter’s Day

because I feel like it will be a good day.

 

Yesterday my name was Yellow Maple Leaf in the Wind

because I was lying on the couch watching T.V.

 

Tomorrow my name will be a Busy Bumble Bee in the Spring

because I will be going to many places like the grocery store and my aunt’s house.

 

My friends think my name is Silly Monkey

because I am full of life and spunky.

 

My family thinks my name is Bullet-Proof Glass

because of what I have to go through in the hospital.

 

My doctors think my name is Smiley

because every time I see them, I always have a smile on.

 

But secretly I know my name is like animals in their natural habitat

because I can do and be anything I want to be.

The Big Game

by Emily Bedard, Roosevelt High School

When you teach, you inevitably pass on the lessons of your teachers, sometimes so frequently that an idea starts to seem like your own. Then something triggers your memory of the person who gave you the gem when you were a student. When this happens, the insight itself becomes suddenly fresh and essential all over again, with a new naked importance.

The poet Jack Gilbert, who died at age 87 in California earlier this month, was my teacher for a single semester during my MFA at the University of Montana. Gilbert was impatient, crotchety, piercingly insightful, and fiercely dedicated to the craft of poetry. During one memorable workshop, he made the cranky pronouncement that if we, the students, weren’t going to go for the Big Game, well, then what was the point of us writing in the first place? He urged us either to write about death and love and passion and fury and loneliness, all the thorniest emotions, or to just admit we were artistic lightweights and go play badminton or something.

Years later, I do not give daily thought to Gilbert or to the hours I spent as his student, but I think about the Big Game all the time. In fact, I use that exact phrase every semester with my sophomore WITS classes at Roosevelt High. But I had, I must admit, sort of forgotten the source. When I saw Gilbert’s obituary last week, I knew I owed him a belated thank you.

In addition to saying thank you, it would also have been nice to tell Gilbert that the exciting thing about urging 15-year-olds to go after the big emotions and the complex ideas, is that they actually DO it.

They might do it by asking brutal questions, as Christian F. does here:

Ever walk down a hall

completely blind?

Ever swim 100 yards

without limbs?

Even though it doesn’t seem

so, I’m dead, but breathing.

They might do it by capturing the power of an everyday thing, as in this ode to red paint by Grace N.:

It has broken free from

Its cage

Time and time again

A crimson bull burning through Paris

A scarlet fox darting out of its hole

It consumes others

Like fire

Devouring the yellow to birth

A boiling orange

Or they might do it, as Mackenzie B. does here, while describing a strange night scene of horses caught in a struggle between dancing and dying:

Fragrant scents

Lead them

To battle

Like music.

 

In the vineyard

They dance

And die while

The moon is falling.

 

Wounded silhouettes

Fall silently and

Without noise

They ascend.

I think Gilbert would be glad that someone—a lot of someones at Roosevelt High, anyway—can be trusted to take poetry so seriously.

He might not, however, be as pleased with something else my students do in their poems, and that is to be relentlessly, inventively funny. In another heated workshop on a snowy Missoula evening, Gilbert bitingly dismissed the purpose of humor in poetry. As I remember it, his stance was that poetry that aimed to be funny was a kind of simpering copout, a cowardly tap dance away from difficulty.

But here I part ways with my teacher and side with my students. That is one of the many gifts of the WITS program—seeing young people in the act of writing is a vital learning opportunity for the teacher, too. High school students can be startlingly funny, smartly funny, heartbreakingly funny on the page. And, I would argue, they need to be.

If you are a young person alive today, trying to sort out the weird, possibly bleak, inheritance your elders have shaped for you, you need to be able to lift the curtain on the ludicrous and flip sobriety upside down onto its careful comb-over.

As a writer, as a human, a sense of humor is going to give you a lot of mileage. It may, even, be one of the creatures clustered under the heading of the Big Game. And so we finish with this poem by Isaac M., written on love poem day and titled, perfectly, “Shazam.”

Oh Pumpkin, I wish I could say

that I love you with all my heart

but it’s so overused, such a cliché…I must

find a new organ to dedicate to you.

My mind you may find too small

to fit in. I lost my appendix when the tree

fell last summer. My spleen does something

important, I’m not sure what. Rooming with

mashed potatoes would suck, so my stomach

is out. My liver is ticklish, I donated

my extra kidney, stay OUT of my colon,

and be careful if you choose my lungs…

Why not just stay in my heart?

It’s worked so well for so long.

Getting Weird

by Rachel Kessler, Shorewood High School

Sometimes the trick is just to get the pen moving across the page.  I have many techniques, gleaned from other teaching artists such as Lynda Barry, that I use in my own writing practice.  The 10th graders I work with at Shorewood High School exhibited their nimble and original minds over the past two weeks as we made lists of objects, made lists of words describing those objects, then wrote self-portrait poems from all that list-making. By guiding them through a series of short list-making prompts with questions like “If you were a candy bar, what would you be?” (The best prompt to get reluctant writers minds moving, thanks to teaching artist Darwin Nordin), I command them to keep their pens moving, encouraging “First thought, best thought,” writing, keeping the prompts simple and short, listing 10 things, listing three describing words, list, list, list.

In my own notebooks, I make lists when I am stuck, or to avoid “real writing,” and have found that these lists sometimes turn themselves into poems. After wringing lists out of my students, I ask them use the describing words from their lists and build a list poem that begins with “I am.”

“Oh no!” many groan, “This is going to get weird!”  Exactly.

“I am cold and hard to fix, / sometimes the bitter one,” Linh writes.

I, like the boat and the ship,
float on a windy day
with the sound of ocean whispering,
telling me to stay.

I was worried that this leap into unusual figurative language would be a stretch for some of my students who are relatively new to the English language, but these students have the fearless, lyrical minds of poets. Then there is the student who must do things his own way, who does not write list poems, whose mind moves through his list of objects and finds a surreal narrative, such as Spencer:

The taste of licorice can lead to gagging, causing trepidation amongst consumers. Driving through a slick alley road in a wilting BMW, through endeavor after endeavor. Close the door with the key that does everything. No key leads to no car, the life of engines without a key is equivocal. Go in the store and ear through it. The pancakes and syrup are cathartic after an arduous day of work. Back home, basements fill with fog.

Drawing exercises keep our pens and minds moving.  We draw a continuous line tracing the contours of our faces without looking. Then we begin to color in spaces, layer and texture what was a Picasso-esque, stretched out face outline until it becomes a map. Writing about a place he sees in his face-map, Nebiyou paints a picture of where he’d like to be:

In my country, I am free.
I am surrounded by building
after building,
after building,
after building.
Very little wildlife surround me.
I am consumed by this Concrete Jungle.
The city sprawls for miles,
and miles,
and miles,
and miles.
Cold weather pierces my skin.
Loud pigeons defecate on your car.
And yet, New York City retains its charm.

The process of purposely “bad” drawing, describing oneself via objects ranging from weather systems to household tools, imagining hidden worlds in the new world of our faces, allows even the most reluctant writers to connect with the page. Michael, who spent my first visit to his class with his head on the desk, angrily refusing to engage in any way, could not resist the silliness of dreaming up his ideal place, McDarnia:

To get there you have to go to a McDonald’s, get access behind the counter, make your way to the freezer. Once you’re there, go past the pigs, break down the boxes of supplies… pull down a plastic bag, attach it to the ground and walls around you. Once you have done that, it should sparkle, just a little. That’s when you RIP through it into McDARNIA!

He proudly read his writing aloud, surprising his teacher and classmates.

We investigate the topography of our bodies, our lives, our experiences.  I ask students to sketch a scar they have. Then we write about what we see. Banna writes:

I have an invisible scar that cannot be seen,
it stays here inside my mind.
I got it from my dreams, insane.
It is there when I dream in the night…
it seems like it will never heal.
Like a bruise, my scar is inside.
How can I make it real?

A WITS Summer

by Paige Lester, WITS Intern

On any given weekday October through June, one can pretty much guess correctly the happenings of the WITS program. Writers travel to schools, they teach creative writing, and students make imaginative pieces.

But in the summer—when school is out and the sun sometimes is, too—the WITS staff shifts its focus to a more behind-the-scenes project: the compilation and publication of the year-end anthology. This anthology, which compiles the top pieces of work from each school in the program, is one of the most essential parts of the WITS experience.  Year after year, students are drawn into the world of creative writing. As some discover their inner genius for the first time and others hone their already-established skills, thousands of poems, plays, memoirs, stories and comics are crafted. Giving the students the possibility of getting published only makes the WITS experience more real for them.

Considering that there are over 5,000 WITS students, it’s clear that we can’t publish each and every one of them. So, how do we narrow it down? The process can seem very straightforward, but it is also filled with tough decisions, editing quandaries, and a lot of searching for the perfect title. As the summer intern, I’ve learned exactly how fun it can be.

First and foremost, after the students have written their work, the writers in residence choose five to ten of the strongest pieces from their classrooms. These pieces are then sent to our office and read through, one by one, by the editors. Reading over the ones that are submitted is inevitably entertaining. Many students are not afraid of revealing their inner voices and truest selves. Overwhelmingly, the pieces that come in possess a very honest and heartfelt tone. Some express especially vulnerable emotions as they describe who they are via letters to their self or write poems about those closest to them. Some pieces (like a comic about falling into a vat of yogurt or a play about a magical tie) made me laugh out loud at my desk. Others use such unique word combinations and descriptions that I found myself repeating the phrases in my head and going over them again outside the office quite often.

While there is fun in reading over what the students have worked on during the past year, the process isn’t always so terribly easy. Sometimes permission forms necessary to publish someone under the age of 18 aren’t turned in by students who write really great work and we have to pass them over.

At the same time, choosing the best of the work with permissions can be overwhelming (in a good way) because of how strong all of the submissions are. After each of us read a school’s stack of pieces, we make a list of our personal favorites and then compare. These meetings are always fun as we can come together and talk about why we love certain pieces. Getting to have this discussion is definitely one of the best parts of the process because there are great reasons for wanting to publish all of our favorites. However, we know that it is not feasible to publish ten writers from a single school and so we must make difficult cuts. When a few hundred pieces become just over a hundred, though, we know our selection process is complete.

Once this is over, we realize the rewards of deliberation. Students receive acceptance letters in the mail and “proud mom” emails fill the inboxes of the WITS staff. We work with our designer, Golden Lasso, to design a beautiful book worthy of the writing within, and we choose a cover image—this year, it was a bright pink and chartreuse painting by local artist Ryan Molenkamp. And with the year-end reading only a month away we know that more celebration and empowerment is to come.

This year’s collection is entitled In the Sliver of a Second and it celebrates both the transience and permanence of the act of writing. Ideas come to us in moments, but once they are written down they can have impact for years to come. My experience at WITS reflects this. Though my two lovely months here have sadly slipped by, the students’ work is not likely to leave my mind anytime soon.

Sounds Like Bees

by Erin Malone, Whittier Elementary School

All of us have our favorite writing exercises, but after a while even those start to feel worn. Our students are always new, but it’s not enough to surprise only them with our assignments—to keep our spark, we need to invent and try fresh lessons that may work, or may not. (I love a good experiment, and just keep my fingers crossed that if it “fails”, it’s not on the day the principal is observing.)

In the flop category, I tried “Two Truths and a Lie” with my 5^th graders at Whittier Elementary School this spring. I said, “My mother was a rodeo queen”; “I was born with an extra finger”; “I have a friend who trains whales at Sea World.” They got to guess which was the lie, and then my assignment was to write around the lie so that it would seem true. Oh, I was telling some whoppers. They were laughing and yelling out and having a great time. Then I told them it was their turn. And unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, it seems most 5^th graders are very bad liars. “I have two cats”; “My dad works at Boeing”; “I like playing soccer.” The lie? Kid has just one cat.

Later on in the quarter, though, I had better luck with the “quiet game.” First I had the students go into the hallway and write down all the noises they heard. From this Sydney wrote:

School Sounds

 

The tap, tap, tap

Of a pencil goes rhythmically

 

Paper crumpling

One idea after another

Is thrown out

 

People cough

As doors slam

 

Mouths full of food

Chew constantly

 

Pencils scratch

As people laugh

 

In a way

It’s almost music

*

When we returned to the classroom, I told them to listen very carefully to a musical composition I had brought in: John Cage’s 4’33”. “I can’t hear anything,” they said. “Can you turn it up?” I assured them the volume was up. I went around the room with a hand-held speaker, putting it up to their ears. Slowly they began to get it: they were listening to “silence.” When someone in Cage’s recorded audience coughed, the student whose ear caught it smiled a big smile. When 4 minutes and 33 seconds had elapsed, I asked them what they’d heard. “Static,” and “vibration” were built up to become “waves,” “wind,” and “fuzzy under the ocean sounds.”

What is music? Can silence be music? Alec Y. raised his hand to say, “Are we having a philosophical discussion now?” (No pulling the wool over his eyes.

Composition depends upon the importance of listening. What is that in the space between words, between sounds? What happens if we become still enough to let the world move around us, instead of pushing into it? My students remind me to listen, and when I do, I’m rewarded. They are rich in surprises. Here are some of their poems from that day.

Silence

 

Silence is like

The grass and

Leaves having a

Conversation under

The night moon.

 

-Toby W.

 

Still

 

Silence sounds like

dust on the ground.

Silence sounds like

chipped paint on an old house.

Silence sounds like

a damp roof.

Rain clouds about to burst.

Silence sounds like

a call being declined.

Silence sounds like

a pigeon on a lamp post.

Silence sounds like bees.

Silence sounds like

an ocean coming ashore.

Silence sounds like

a fisherman catching a trout.

 

Silence sounds like a poem

being written.

Silence sounds like. . .

 

-Fiona N.

 

Stone River

 

Silence is like a stone river.

Fish sit,

Stuck in time.

A bear looks surprised

As his meal

Turns to stone.

And everything

Is silent.

 

-Ben W.

 

The Ocean Sky

 

Silence is like a bone pale night sky,

With a ribbon of a silver moon,

Shining over the sea,

With fish underneath, in the reef,

Twirling under the glossy light,

Close to the copper beach,

But dancing away at the last

Moment.

 

-Nicky L.

 

Silence Is Like

 

Silence is like a fish, when he blows

bubbles they float up and pop above the surface.

Silence is like secrets being held,

waiting to be told.

Silence is a flame, catching the sky on fire.

Silence is peace, when the war has stopped.

 

-Emily K.

 

What Difficult Things Sound Like

by Daemond Arrindell, Washington Middle School and Garfield High School

I’m a big fan of the work of Patricia Smith. An incredibly accomplished poet both on the page and on the stage, Patricia is especially well-known for her persona poems, where she takes on the voice of someone else and brings them to life through her own imagination. Two of her most famous are “Undertaker” and “Skinhead.” Both of these poems voice characters who are dealing with/facing violence in some capacity, whether it be the aftermath of violence or being violent oneself. Both poems give a powerful snapshot through the lens of a person whose voice is rarely heard. Teenagers are rarely heard from on serious matters such as violence, and many of them face it every day. When how they are affected by the violence they see or hear about is not voiced, an opportunity for healthy self-expression is lost.

In a book on poetry slam, I read about how Patricia stumbled into doing persona work with students of hers. She had a lesson planned out and no matter what she attempted she couldn’t drag her students’ attention away from a shooting that had happened in their neighborhood the night before. Patricia rolled with it beautifully. You have to meet the students where they are at if you want them to start reaching for higher levels. So Patricia asked them for their opinions on the subject at hand:

“How do you think the bullet felt?”
“What does the guy who has to clean up the blood from the crime scene have to say about the shooting?”
“What did the gun say when it was aimed at the boy?”

Suddenly, the students were faced with a way of expressing some of the more complex and intense emotions on the matter, and they had lots to say.

I have an exercise I love to do with my students called “Reverse Group Poem” that takes part of a statement such as “Poetry sounds like…” and requires the kids to finish the statement with whatever they see fit. I randomly call on them and everything they say is put on the board, and I do mean EVERYTHING. Silly, nonsensical as well as dramatic and serious. Including the “ummmm”s, the “can you come back to me”s and the giggles. All on the board. At the end the responses are read aloud in random or reverse order and somehow, without fail, a poem is created from their musings. Often we will come back to this exercise throughout a residency as a way to address a subject or topic (ex: Respect looks like… Abandonment feels like…Joy tastes like…) always focused more on description than definition. For whatever reason, violence and death had been coming up within the students writing in different capacities. I took a nod from Patricia and decided to meet the kids where they were at.

The prompt was really simple – “Death sounds like…” I had the students write for 15 minutes. And as morbid as the topic may seem at first glance, it was enlightening to read the results….

Death sounds like mumbles and prayers
an emergency room flooded with peopleeyes filled with worry and sorrow
suddenly you hear footsteps
Death sounds like
“May I have the family of “******” please?
Sounds like deep breaths and sweaty palms
it feels like the weight of the world balancing on your one heart
Death sounds like questions
-J.

Death sounds like the misty hallows night that calls malevolent creatures
Hearing it lowly whistling
as it strides across the dark plane leaving ice behind
Death sounds like a melody that comes as it pleases
like a flute being played to snatch your soul
-K.

Death sounds like a moment of silence, a bad dream, jail food
a long scary hall with no lights that never end
death sounds like the world coming to an end
like no emotions whatsoever
illnesses with no cure
death sounds like the screeching of chalkboards
buildings crumbling
black cats and bad luck
-M.

Death sounds like bullets flying and ripping through my torso
like young african american youth struggling to survive
on this place called earth where we have to be strong to survive
death sounds like a rapid heartbeat and doctors yelling “Leave the room”
death sounds like a shell once you put it to your ear
you feel free and tha’ts the only thing you can hear
-D.

Death sounds like a black box being closed
hard feet walking on autumn leaves
a door closing
never to be opened
tears falling
landing on soft green grass

Death sounds like
when the phone clicks
instead of a dial tone there is silence
something like wedding bells gone wrong

Death sounds like
long processions of cop cars
like the last page of a book being turned
-L.

And while they had lots to say in response to the idea of Death, there were also some pretty passionate responses speaking to the value of life:

Irreplaceable
If death were to ttry to take my spot
I would tell him that I’m irreplaceable
Wonderful
One of a kind
That taking my life would be
Unreasonable
Pointless
A stupid decision
So Mr.Guythatsgoingtokillme,
Tell me a good reason why.
-M

My Life here is mine
mine to live
I have a dream to pursue
a heart to give, a smile to shine and brighten the world
time to spear, a generation to creat
an idea to give
a soul to cleanse
a god to thank
no it’s not my time
my bucket list to complete
what I have to say now?
Not now buddy.
Ill see you in 8 decades

–D.

Le Blob: Beyond Stick Figures

by Greg Stump, McClure Middle School & Room 9 Community School

For any writer or artist, deadlines can be a blessing and a curse: the same pressure that temporarily quiets internal second-guessing also encourages cutting corners when possible. One of the deadline-influenced characters I created for a weekly newspaper comic strip was a mostly-featureless, gumdrop-shaped mound of goo named The Blob. The primitive design of the character was hardly original; it looked roughly like the classic comic strip character The Schmoo (from Al Capp’s Li’l Abner), except that it had flippers instead of legs. But having such a quickly- and easily-drawn character in my ensemble cast meant that I could always come up with a Blob strip if I was pressed for time.

This year, as a WITS writer-in-residence at McClure middle school and Room 9 community school, I’m using what I learned as a cartoonist on deadline to help introduce students to the comics medium. Having my students create their own blob characters and stories has proved to be an effective method for getting them to practice a crucial aspect of comics creation: the ability to draw a character consistently, from a variety of angles and distances. The simpler a character is, the less an artist will struggle with representing it moving through space, and the more apt he or she will be to position the character in a way that’s appropriate to the scene and story.

Blobs, it turns out, are also a good tool for weaning students off of stick figures, which — despite their charms — are a bit limited as a tool for teaching comics. Meant to represent people, stick figures don’t much look like them, or different from each other. (Attempts at differentiating them by adding hair or glasses just look weird and distracting, to my eye). Blobs, on the other hand, are human-ish, rather than human, and it’s up to the creator to decide what kind of world the characters live in.

My counsel to students that lack confidence or experience with their drawing is that it’s no more difficult to draw an egg-shaped blob than a stick figure. Like a Mr. Potato Head toy, the character is mostly a blank slate, and the fun is in deciding what to add. It also satisfies the impulse to copy while simultaneously allowing for the opportunity to make a basic but personalized character. Of course, it may just be that my students seem to like the activity because they like the word “blob,” bookended as it is by satisfying “buh” sounds. So far this year, the blob characters I’ve encountered include “Blobbo,” “Da Blob,” and “Bob the Blob,” among many other others. If I had to pick a favorite, though, it just might be “Le Blob,” a beret-wearing, mustachioed blob of (apparently) Gallic lineage that was created by Room 9′s Jasper H., and is shown below.

Extra bonus: If you look closely at the following comic, you’ll notice that the character appears not only from the front but from the side and from the back, when it’s appropriate to the action, and at the end of the story — when it’s important for the reader to see the character fully ensconced on a island surrounded by the ocean — we see the character at its smallest (far-away) size. This is actually quite a challenge to do consistently with a complex character; with a blob, though, ce nest pas un problème.

Hemingway and 8th Graders

by Peter Mountford, Shorecrest High School and Blue Heron Middle School

Toward the end of 2011, I packed up a bag, bid sayonara to my wife and child, and headed off to Port Townsend for two weeks of intensive WITS-ing with 8^th graders at Blue Heron middle school. I was nervous – more nervous than I’ve been about teaching in years. Why? Because I’ve taught fiction writing to middle schoolers before, some years ago, and it was, to be perfectly honest, a little traumatizing.

There’s a reason that middle schools have a harder time recruiting teachers to their campuses than high schools and elementary schools. Picture a room packed full of 30+ hyperactive tweens—like howler monkeys with acne—you must immediately gain their respect and/or fear or they will wrest control of the room from you.  As the instructor, you have to either be a stoic task-master who strikes fear into their hearts, or you have to be so supernaturally likeable and effortlessly engaging on their wacky wavelength that they want to listen to you.

Now, I can’t pull off stern, it’s just not in me, so I try to be the likeable and engaging type instead, and I was fortunate in Blue Heron to be working with a fantastic and inspiring teacher, Kate Garfield, who had a compatible teaching persona (a black-belt in middle-school instruction, she somehow deployed a blend of the likeable and the stoic personas). Also, I was fortunate to find myself working with an unusually mature bunch of kids. They were okay enough with me to give me the benefit of the doubt.

At the end of the first week, we read the opening of Ernest Hemingway’s wildly disturbing story, “Indian Camp.” (NOTE: we stopped reading before it got to the nightmare-inducing parts.)  Hemingway, as most readers know, is famous for his iceberg theory: you show very little and it suggests a huge amount that’s unseen. It’s also known as subtext, and subtlety.

Now, subtlety and subtext are not generally thought of as the centerpieces of middle schoolers’ personalities. But subtlety and the effective use of subtext are crucial for good literature, you need to leave some interpretive work to your reader, in fact quite a lot. So we read Hemingway and I told the kids that they would probably hate it.

They did:

At the lake shore there was another rowboat drawn up. The two Indians stood waiting.

Nick and his father got in the stern of the boat and the Indians shoved it off and one of them got in to row. Uncle George sat in the stern of the camp rowboat. The young Indian shoved the camp boat off and got in to row Uncle George.

The two boats started off in the dark. Nick heard the oarlocks of the other boat quite a way ahead of them in the mist. The Indians rowed with quick choppy strokes. Nick lay back with his father’s arm around him. It was cold on the water. The Indian who was rowing them was working very hard, but the other boat moved further ahead in the mist all the time.           

“Where are we going, Dad?” Nick asked.

“Over to the Indian camp. There is an Indian lady very sick.”

“Oh,” said Nick.

Oh, indeed!

They howled in protest at his Spartan style: the lack of adjectives, adverbs, the lack of description of emotions, thoughts, the lack of interiority. He’s all noun verb noun. And yet, somehow, his writing gathers an incredible emotional power, all subtextual, but it’s definitely there. So while my eighth graders did find Hemingway horrible, they also recognized that there was something going on there, something menacing and intriguing. They wanted to know what happened later in the story. I was as vague as possible.

Then I told them about Hemingway, the man. How he was mean to his various wives, treated his friends like garbage, punched out some innocent reviewer who disliked one of his books. As a person, he was certainly an oaf and maybe even a bit of a barbarian, but he ended up winning the Nobel Prize, the greatest prize in all of literature, and he substantially altered the way modern Americans write, and in his day he was about as famous and adored as George Clooney is today. My students seemed to respond to this. He was the stern task master, but he was also incredibly talented, which they appreciated.

By that Friday, my students had written a number of fragments of a short story.

This would be their first revision exercise. Their task was to “Hemingway-ize” one of the pieces they’d already written. That is, they were to read over the piece, and then re-write it, this time imitating Hemingway’s style: little or no adverbs, very few adjectives, very few thoughts for the characters. And absolutely no description of emotions, no emotional words.

Much groaning ensued, and I told them that I agreed with them that it was an awful way to write, that old man Hemingway was a brute and a thug, etc., but, I said, they should try this out. Just this once, just in case it worked.

The students, it turned out, loved writing like Hemingway. They stretched the assignment in strange and innovative ways, and they wrote like fiends, quickly filling page after page of their notebooks.

Here, is an example from Maggie E., a quiet girl who sat at the back of the room. She was working on a story about a delusional teenager named Bob whose closest friend is a manipulative and cruel imaginary bunny:
  The bunny and Bob were walking up a gravelly hill. The hill petered off into dead grass and dropped off into a cliff overlooking beachless water. There were grey clouds gathering as if the sky was getting ready to rain. The clouds reminded Bob of the bunny. Bob was average and unremarkable in almost every way. The bunny was about 2 feet tall, with grey white fur and grey eyes.
           “Looks like rain,” the bunny said. “Do you have an umbrella?”
           “No,” Bob said. “I like the rain.”
           The bunny said, “My fur gets matted in the rain.” They were now nearly at the top of the hill.

“Will I have to put you in the dryer?” Bob asked.
“No,” the bunny replied. “I dry off eventually.”

Just as they got to the top, it started to rain. Bob and the bunny walked for awhile in silence, then sat down at the edge of the cliff and dangled their feet over the edge. The ground had completely leveled off by then. Bob turned around as someone came out of the houses on the right side to take their trash out.  They ignored the bunny and Bob. The bunny didn’t bother to turn around; it stared straight ahead, looking at the water.

“Bunny,” Bob said.

“Yes?” the bunny replied.

“What are you looking at?”

The bunny didn’t answer. The bunny never called Bob by his name, nor did it talk much. The bunny never needed Bob for anything.

“Never mind,” Bob said. “Do you want to go home?”

“No,” the bunny said.

Formed From Form

by Matt Gano, The Center School & Ingraham High School

The formalists may argue that spoken word poetry is merely free verse with no structure, and that stylistically it is inferior to more traditional forms but what happens when you hybridize the passion of spoken word with the technicalities of a form poem?  

One of the major ideas that I promote to my students is that a spoken word poem should work in both realms: logical and translatable on the page and accessible and engaging from the stage.  This is the standard we work towards and within that a certain “form” poem has popped its little head right in the middle of our lessons.

The Sestina, with its repetition and 39-line structure lends itself perfectly to the realm of spoken word.  Proposing a complicated form like this to a class of teenage writers most certainly brings out the groans.  I get it though, when I was in school I actively avoided writing in form for fear that it would put my writing in a box, limit my voice, and detract from the flow and (attempts at) originality in my work. However, by taking the structure of the sestina and allowing for a little creative license, my students and I have found that the high form of the 12th century Troubadours can still throw it down.

When teaching sestina I like to show some current examples of how poets use this form but still implement their own style and voice.  My favorite poem to show off is “Santayana The Muralist” by John Murrillo. Murrillo does a great job of re-incarnating his six repeated words all the way through the poem.  He is careful to assign different meaning each time they resurface while also allowing for subtle changes. This creates an awesome example of how to bend the rules.  

Our lesson starts with a brainstorm about a time in which we met someone or witnessed a powerful event that has left a lasting impression.  I have each student make a list of words that correlate with the event.  I encourage them to list as many words as possible that come to mind, (nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives etc.).  It is from this list that we whittle down to the six words that will be used in our “lexical repetition” as they call it.  When writing the poem I give them permission to take some creative license with their repeated words to enhance variance.  We talk about bending the rules like allowing some of their six words to change as long as they hold similar sounds.  For example, the word “festival” might transform into “fester” or “festivities” or even “pheasant.”  

I have been continuously impressed with the poems that have taken shape from this lesson. I think there is something really empowering about giving a young writer strict parameters then telling them they have license to color outside the lines as long as their intention is clear. We have had some great examples of “spoken word” sestinas and powerful performances from these workshops.  

Here are two great examples from 1st semester Poetry 1 at The Center School.  One stays close to the form, the other is a cool example of using the form but at the same time rebelling against it entirely:  

“Golden Boy” by KS

You should not reap what you do not sow,
else you find yourself encased in iron
cuffs which will sit heavier on your wrists than any crown
you’ve ever worn. You cannot cast them down as a gauntlet
and take that sorrowful oath
to defend others with your sword.

However, you haven’t the strend to lift that sword;
Nor to play the coin you owe
to those that hold you to your oath,
your fealty, which to you, bends like cheap iron
forged by a thin, gaunt
man, while the true masters craft crowns.

A crown
that you haven’t the right to wear when you cannot even strike down a swordsman
as he strips you of you pride in gallant
swings. You do not win fights with the elegance with which women sew,
their own weapons naught but needles; no cast in irons,
but in simple stainless steel, cloth with string more binding than oaths.

You are responsible for your own stunted growth
with that blind devotion to thoughts known to be renown
thoughts that you cannot achieve while cast in iron.
Where is your sword
now? Are those sins you’ve sown
enough to cause you sleepless nights where your dreams have been haunted

It is you, who the ghosts of your past hunt
All for your broken oath
and the wrongful lords you’ve let to overthrow,
infecting our citadel like rust infects old crowns
and rotting ways like thousand year old swords
even when forged in the finest of iron.

You wish to dress yourself ironclad
defenses made to look like gold; gold buckle gold clasp, and even gauntlets
made of gold, gold inlaid with studded silver for your sword
As if the worth of your armor could distract from both
your sullied virtue and that crown
that you wear were made up of such a heavenly glow

that fools would forget that iron is not the gold worthy of buying oaths,
that you cannot throw down a gauntlet in hopes of picking up a crown
and that your sword is of little use for when the seeds are ripe and ready to sow.

“The Art of Learning to Fly” by SA

There’s a secret in flying,
inhaling the absence of oxygen like stories.
Haven’t you ever wondered why it’s so hazy out of the window of an airplane? it’s
because trapped
up there, in between world and space, there is history,
thick clouds of ancestory, the memory of a grandfather,
and the clouds make shapes like headstones.
To pass the time, you’ll need strength.

It looks like a woman, softened and bowing with age, but its name is stength.
White hair flying
and stooped with the weight of a broken back and a headstone
tied to her conscience like the weight of lost generation, stories
of the family that came from her grandfather’s
land that he left for America to build bridges and indelible history.

I dream in green sometimes because it is my history.
A past of thick accents and Catholocism that gives me the strength
of past grandfathers
with arms of steel, pints flying
through air stale with stories
and tales, though ones that always seem to end under headstones.

We talked about headstones
my grandma and I, about history
stories
and pure strength
that depending on how you see it, either rots away beneath them or flies
up into the ageless blue of the sky. A believer my Grandfather.

My grandfather.
We buried him on a Wednesday in the cold, but sill he had no headstone.
My grandma felt sad that he had lived with recognition but lay marked with none,
clipping his flying
white-winged history
scratching out a check for that kind of thing takes a different kind of strength.

We always tell stories.

So many they seem to fill up every level of the skyscraper we keep them in,
story after story, but if you look close, the same face peers out of every window,
my grandfather.
My grandma,
eight aunts
nine uncles
34 cousins
my family, held close by his blue-eyed strength.
I stood up front near the casket after the funeral,
brushing shoulders with my grandma, both of us
rigid like marble headstones,
accepting hugs and pity, listening to people tell
of the times my grandfather gave them a business
loan when no one else held enough trust, bailed them out of jail
or a rough spot, put them through rehad so they could support
their family again. I tucked these echoes of kindness
in the empty gaps between my ribs
so I could be a little closer to his history,
to dying, to flying.

I listen to the stories in my head at night, sometimes, think of the lonely
Lost Nation, Iowa cemetery that my grandpa
once used to cut through on his way to school,
and now conceals his body and displays his headstone
I think about how I walk into a room smell my grandpa’s
cologne and know he’s there for me, that he’ll always be a part of my history,
and will give me strength to live my life
one day look up into the wild expansive blue sky
and shake the dusty darkness out of my own set of wings to fly.