Where can you find a bell

that will ring in your dreams?

– Pablo Neruda, from The Book of Questions, translated by William O’Daly

What is it about a question that can create a powerful pull in a poem? Is it the possibility of an answer that appeals to us? A question suggests our hope that knowledge or clarity exists somewhere: on the flip side of a flash card, by the end of a poem, from a book or sage or teacher or scientist, someone, who can explain. The speaker of a piece questions, and we question along with it.

Who are you and whom do you love?

What is the shape of your body?

Where did you come from / how did you arrive?

How will you begin?

– Bhanu Kapil Rider, from The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers

Under what circumstance, or circumstances, might you noodle for a catfish?

If you could trade out and be say, Godzilla, wouldn’t you jump on it, dear?

– Padgett Powell, from The Interrogative Mood: A Novel?

But even when we know we don’t have to answer, or that there’s no one easy reply, a question can still charm us with where it leads—a trying on of possibilities (like Neruda’s conjuring of a dream-bell simply by asking about it, or our new futures with Powell of catfish noodling or being Godzilla)—or a moment of reflection (like Rider’s open, ever opening, “How will you begin?”).

Sometimes a question holds the kernel of a new or newly recognized truth:

Or will life not be a fish

prepared to be a bird?

– Pablo Neruda, from The Book of Questions, translated by William O’Daly

Or is simply an acknowledgement of our own unknowing, large or small:

How many rhymes in a sonnet? Something you ate?

– Maura Stanton, from sonnet “Twenty Questions”

A question invites the process of active wondering into the moment of the poem, for both the speaker and for the reader. We see and sympathize with the poem struggling towards some larger or unresolved understanding. And maybe it is also the gesture of being asked that touches us? Even if the question isn’t personal, on some level we respond personally: thanks for asking. A question suggests listening, invites it. We listen along with the poet for the answer—into the implied silence that follows each question mark. We listen into the space where the poem is listening back to us: whether or not there’s an answer, we feel the poem’s presence at the other end of the line.

This is my fourth year working with WITS at Seattle’s Children’s Hospital, and it has been and continues to be an amazing, inspiring, and humbling experience. I feel so lucky to have this opportunity to work with these students each Thursday—along with the amazing Ann Teplick, my fellow WITS Writer-in-Residence at Children’s, who helps reach some other student populations at Children’s on Wednesdays. I mostly work one-on-one with longer term and palliative care patients, ranging from kindergarteners up to young adults in their early 20’s, who are for the most part stuck in their hospital rooms—bringing my heavy bag of poetry prompts, new notebooks, and writing encouragement to them door-to-door. Many of these young writers are fighting cancer, or have other diseases or conditions that require intense or ongoing medical treatment. I don’t always know—sometimes it comes up in our conversations, or in the writing—sometimes we talk and write about other things entirely. I leave it up to each student, what they feel like or feel up to on a given day, or we just see what comes up in the writing as it unfolds.

Needless to say, it can be a hard place for questions. (Perhaps why often being the least useful—or at least my own relationship to that question, applied to the big picture, has definitely changed since working here.) Yet the power of questions in poetry—their ability to listen to what we do not know, even what might be difficult to ask—as well as their potential for wonder, or even whimsy—still feels deeply useful to writing, even here, sometimes especially here.

As many fellow teaching artists can attest, Neruda’s The Book of Questions is a particularly great source of inspiration to writers of all ages for question poems. Here is one of my favorite poems inspired by Neruda’s examples, written by one of my students at Children’s:

Poem of Questions by Lizeth, Age 8

Where does the sun go before the moon comes out?

Does it go down the hill by the water?

How do you make the color brown

when you really need it?

How do you make a pen

that will write a letter

to my grandma in Mexico?

How does the snow

come out of the sky?

Does it make the sky feel cold?

How do teeth grow

and how do they decide

whether to become vampires?

How do batteries work?

Is their electricity fast

as a magnet?

How did they put the hook-line in

while I was asleep with medicine?

Did it cut out a piece of my chest

to move past my neck

to my heart?

Such amazing questions! From the growing up and decision making of teeth, to the longing for her grandmother in Mexico felt through that missing pen, to the brave questions at the end speaking to the immediate, visceral mystery of her experience—we are offered a unique opportunity to share in this writer’s perspective.

And in this question poem by another student, the writer shares with us not only her delightful curiosity about the world at large, but also her sense of humor and wonder:

Will the world actually end in 2012 by volcanoes and earthquakes?

Why do monkeys like bananas? Do bananas hate monkeys?

How did my dad learn squirrel language?

What color were the dinosaurs?

When will robots be invented to do our chores?

What will my sea-monkeys look like?

from “Questions” by Heather (Age 10)

And in the following poem, this poet takes inspiration from both Neruda’s poems and the artwork of Chagall—bringing us into her experience of Chagall’s painting through her questions and speculations about it, creating an evocative ekphrastic poem that stands beautifully on its own:

Questions for Chagall by Julissa (Age 14)

Where does the tail end?

Is it a party?

Or is it just a date to see the sunset fall?

Is that a goat or a dog holding up an umbrella

so that the chickens don’t get wet?

Is it feeding its own baby?

Did the pair pick the fruit

and put it on top of the goat (or dog)?

They’re smiling, they’re happy,

you can see that.

And it seems like the couple

is almost about to kiss

because they are holding each other.

He’s looking at her, but where is she looking?

Somewhere else, but I don’t know where.

Even when a poem is not explicitly a question poem, I love when questions enter a piece of writing. One teen student at Children’s while writing a personification poem about the color pink suddenly asked: “Her secret? Her favorite color / is silver”—surprising and delighting us both.  A six-year-old poet verbally points to the picture she’s painting with her words: “See those houses? They’re windy.” Another student while writing a self-portrait poem thoughtfully paused to ask us about our life too: “Do you have a barbeque? Does your dad?”—shifting the portrait into a conversation and underscoring the poet’s own tenderness. And another young man, also inspired by Chagall, ends his descriptive poem with an intriguing query: “now why would a man / be jumping over a house in his white suit / as the goat is running / and the chimney is smoking / and the sky is dark?”

Something new opens up at these moments: we sense the poem, and our relationship with it, beginning to shift. And watch what happens when a question unexpectedly appears in this otherwise humorous poem about an invented constellation called “The Face”:

The Face by Nathaniel (Age 11)

Look for the three points to find the hair of The Face constellation.

Move 90 degrees to the east to find The Face’s nose.

Tilt your telescope down and you will find the open mouth of The Face.

Move 45 degrees below and you will find the neck.

People use the three points of The Face’s hair

to navigate through the woods.

The Face’s haircut inspires many people.

They feel hip. All ages of people can

be inspired by The Face’s hairstyle.

The Face appears on the day of October 21^st

and that is when the chrysanthemums bloom.

Have you seen a chrysanthemum before?

To describe the chrysanthemum

you will have to know the texture of the plant,

which is soft, and that they come in the colors

of red, yellow, white, and orange,

and that they are a beautiful plant.

When looking at The Face, everyone feels drowsy.

They fall asleep and have a dream –

a good dream.

Have you seen a chrysanthemum before? Suddenly the poem puts joking aside and looks directly at us. We have to pause: have we seen one? And if we have, have we fully considered its qualities, what is most essential to know about it? After the question, the poem’s descriptions then help us to look more closely—and at the same time shift the poem’s tone to a quieter, more reflective place; “The Face,” funny and hip, ends as blessing.

Last year I asked my student Maga to talk a bit about what writing meant to her, as part of an introduction to our Poetry Broadside Project (a collaboration between a selection of WITS student poets at Children’s and a master class of professional letterpress artists at the School of Visual Concepts, resulting each year in a beautifully rendered portfolio of prints of the students’ writing. In fact, we’re getting ready to debut the third volume of this SVC-Children’s letterpress project in May! And the broadsides will be displayed at SAL Poetry Series and WITS culminating events.)

More articulate and wise from experience than most writers at any age, Maga, now an 11^th grader, spoke to the power of questions, including those unspoken ones that drive her to write in the first place:

“When I write, I try to confront my thoughts. I ask, What do I think…really? I ask difficult questions, How do I ever go back to normal? Will my cancer come back? Will my friends who have cancer survive? Sometimes, I find that I know the answers already, it just took writing it out to realize it. I write what I can’t say out loud about my angers, fears, hopes…. I may not be in control of all that happens in my life, but I’m in control of my writing.”

Thank you, Maga—and to all my young WITS writers at Children’s—for your words, your poems, your bravery, and your questions.

“This thing I tell you is true; but it didn’t always happen to me.” –Dorothy Allison

When I was in elementary school, my sister and I had many, many jobs though we were never paid.  We never called it work, and it wasn’t for the money or the fame.  We never doubted our competency or complained about working weekends.  On any given day we were teachers, radio hosts, business women, zoo keepers, modern dancers, bankers as well as cat and dogs.  It was both a game and true life.

While I teach playwriting to 3^rd – 5^th graders at Sanislo Elementary, I’m more often the ring leader to a group of police officers, secret agents, librarians, ninjas, reporters as well as cats, dogs and gorillas.  I may guide them in the craft of playwriting, but their skill in storytelling is instinctive to the characters they invent.

Aran, a 3^rd grader, created Keiyome, a Samurai woman born in 1630 who lives in Kyota, Japan and lost a sibling in the war.  In class, Aran isn’t playing a character named Keiyome.  Aran is Keiyome.  When I wave my magic pencil, every student is transformed into a new set of characters with different voices, attitudes, names and jobs.  Keiyome has corrected me numerous times on how to pronounce her name.  Each character is real—though we know these are lives we’ll never live.

Sometimes my students write to discover their story.  Other times the story is discovered before the writing begins.  When the characters crafted by Aran, Cyntalia and Ava meet at hotel in Japan, adventure ensues complete with secrets and betrayal.   They ask me for feedback on their play, and I ask to look at the script.  Aran responds, “Well, it’s not written but we know all our lines, so we could act it out for you.”  For these students, writing is the capture tool to record the true lives of their alter-egos.

Morgan:             Miku, where’s my dinner?!

Miku:                  Coming, sir.

Keiyome:            Miku, is there a new guest?

Miku:                  Yes.

Morgan:             Is she a wealthy merchant’s daughter?

Keiyome:            No, I am a samurai woman!

(a short time passes)

Morgan:             Excuse me, do you think you could tell me a little about Japan?

Keiyome:            Why yes, but you mustn’t tell any other westerners the secrets of Japan.

Morgan:              Yes, yes!

My students believe they are the characters they create.  This is a gift.  To know a set of characters so intimately gives a playwright full capacity to understand the choices they make.  To embody a character also means you know his or her idiosyncrasies, a talent my 5^th graders have mastered.  Reehan and Ashley write about a singing librarian who is annoying a reader in the library.  Ellenor writes about a cat named Pink who decides to color her fur pink.  Dustin has developed Shanaynay and Bonqueque as characters with a distinct attitude and flair.

Research, fact-checking and accuracy is irrelevant to the creative spirit of our writing.  Our reality is what we say it is.  We know it’s a game (so it’s fun)—but it’s also very real.

Writing Poetry with Children and Teens at Seattle Children’s Hospital

by Ann Teplick

When I worry, I chew my fingernails, practice hanging spoons from my nose (I used to be the family champ), and wonder if I’m ever going to fall asleep again.

When I worry, the world drips from chartreuse to blasé, eggs taste like rust, and the day barks like the dog that cannot get the squirrel.

When I worry, I turn to poetry. To read and write it. The thankfulness of concision in a time when my mind can only handle baby steps of anything. It’s the way I access and express my jumble. Or just mess around with sound and rhythm. It’s the way I make sense of the world.

I write poetry with children and teens at Seattle Children’s hospital. It’s an honor I share with poet Sierra Nelson—she, on Thursdays in palliative care, and me on Wednesdays with the Education Department. It’s an incredible project that is growing to offer in-house readings, anthologies, and displays of poetry and art on the walls—quite the collaboration with teachers, teaching coaches, the art therapist, staff, and nurses.

My day at Children’s is spent in the hospital classroom; the inpatient psychiatric unit; and at the bedside of patients in dialysis, Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, and units that are home to those with many other medical conditions.

The children, teens, and I write about our lives. We believe in story—ours, and those of others. We believe we have important things to say, and that the world needs our voices. Our words are compelling, evocative, tender, and honest.

We write poems that explore hopes for the near and far future. Poems about love and heartbreak. Poems about our silly bones, what makes us laugh. The asparagus we would never eat. Our design for a perfect world. Blessings for those whom we love. Blessings for ourselves. We write poems about our names, our heritage, our secrets. Advice poems, such as how to deal with a kidney transplant. Sassy attitude poems. Poems about emotions and how they rock us off the planet. We personify ID bands and IVs. CT scans. Medicines and MRIs—which soothes the edge of their scariness. We write about our dogs, our kittens, our fuzzy slippers, and the first thing we’re going to eat when we finally go home. Pot roast. Spare ribs. Pizza. No tofu, please.

But back to Worry. Worry is palpable in each of the writers I work with. In some, it’s nested and hushed. In others, it’s on the batter’s plate, blistered and screaming to swing. We muster the courage to name them, and then we write them, these flutters of the unknown.

Facing the unknown, knowing there is so much that cannot be predicted, takes a lot of courage. At Seattle Children’s Hospital, courage is the pulse that out-strides the worry. It is muscled with resilience, and a model of inspiration that I often find hard to articulate.

Which brings me to the roles of worry and courage in the life of a teaching artist.  Many of the stories we hear are difficult, harsh, frightening, complex, and terribly sad. We’re human, we worry, we try to stand tall. We hope our facilitation of self-expression will brighten a light in someone’s life, in some way, of some voltage.

Below is a sampling of Worry and Courage poems from students at Seattle Children’s Hospital. I’ve peppered a few notes in-between—my observations, surprises, smiles, and remembrances.

I AM WORRIED ABOUT EVERYONE (an excerpt)

There’s a baby on the other side of the room

not even a week old

who is back in the hospital

right after being born.

He arrived five days ago.

His name is N.

His blood sugar is low.

The girl down the hall

has kidney problems, too,

and they want to move her biopsy

to when I’m scheduled for surgery tomorrow.

I’m mostly worried about the people here

at Seattle Children’s Hospital.

There are sick people,

a lot sicker than me.

Some might not ever get better.

It’s scary for them

and it’s also scary for me

because all the children here

have something wrong with them.

They are so, so sick

and they didn’t do anything to deserve it.

This middle-school writer was shy and barely audible, but showed no hesitation in expressing the weight on her mind.

COURAGE

A group poem by six middle-school writers

Courage has red curly hair

tied high in a ponytail.

She’s as strong as an oak tree.

She skips down the sidewalk

and jumps into puddles.

She wears red and white cotton

polka dot pajamas, and her eyes

are as green as mountains.

When Courage speaks, she says

“Hah! Walk tall! Continue

although it may be as hard

as a rock. Stay strong. Move on.

Keep moving forward.”

I love the wildness of the “red curly hair tied high in a ponytail.” I love how this group jumped into personification by using their imaginations. The jumping into puddles (maybe jumping into the unknown?), getting wet. And oh those polka dots.

COURAGE

Courage is wearing nothing

but his underwear to show his bravery.

Courage has rainbow-colored hair

because he isn’t afraid.

When Courage speaks, he says, “LOL.”

Courage is obsessed with talking fast.

As Courage looks you in the eye,

he says his feelings assertively.

I love this middle-school writer’s fast-talking Courage. Maybe fast is the device to out-race our fears? And the boldness of Courage to look you in the eye, fair and steady, and hold it there, unafraid to unleash emotions.

FEAR

A group poem by three high-school writers

The smells of fear—

A vat of blood.

A field of cow manure.

IV fluids and a hospital bed.

The sounds of fear—

Screams from people

realizing their nightmares

have come true.

A siren burning through the night.

Flesh being ripped apart

with a scalpel.

The sight of fear—

A collection of your worst fears

warped together.

A zombie cloaked in thunder.

I see fear as worry, on the front burner, on high. This group was not interested in holding anything back. I appreciated that. I see this poem as a wail—sirens, the action of a scalpel, thunder. I like the word “vat,” and the emotion evoked—the cringe—that walks in with the word “ripped.”  

THIS IS HOW TO BE BRAVE

A group poem by six middle and high-school writers

Try new things.

Don’t be afraid of changes.

Have strength when you’re afraid.

Focus through problems.

Don’t conform to others wishes, thoughts, or words.

Even when scared, keep trying.

Don’t run when you see a needle.

Eat lots of chocolate.

Swim in a bouquet of red roses.

Listen to Yo Yo Ma play a tango.

Stand up for the things you’re afraid of.

Turn on the light.

Go with it, don’t wait.

Fly to India alone.

Walk on the crowded streets

followed by beggars, visit the schools

where students do yoga for PE,

and think they’ve hit the lottery

when they are shown a picture book.

Anything chocolate and Yo Yo Ma for me. I love the notion of swimming in a bouquet of favorite flowers. And traveling across the world to India to get a taste of the lives of school children, their yoga practice.

THINGS I WORRY ABOUT

A group poem by two young elementary-school writers

I worry about doctor visits,

and falling into a bottomless trench.

Earwigs laying eggs in my ears.

Spiders that live in my ears.

Black widow spiders.

To calm myself, I think about my family.

I worry that I will be a frog,

or be homeless.

I don’t want to fall off a cliff.

Sometimes I worry about Vampire bats

that suck blood. And sharks.

Centipedes, grasshoppers, snakes.

Being eaten by an alligator, or a bear.

To calm myself, I ask for help to get rid

of the thing I am scared of.

I don’t like having bad dreams.

My worst nightmare is that I will stay little

when I grow up.

To calm myself, I read a good book.

I worry about being a vegetarian,

and about earthquakes.

I worry that my Hickman catheter

will get pulled out of my chest.

To calm myself, I take a deep breath.

We began this session thinking about worries and ways to calm our overactive brains. These two young poets, ages 7 and 8, egged each other on when they arrived at the bug department. For me, the thought of earwigs was enough. But crawling into ears and laying eggs? As much silliness as these two shared together, their worries were real. The poem that follows was written by the same two poets in their classroom with teacher Aileen Hammer. It’s the perfect complement to the poem above.

THIS IS WHAT IT MEANS TO BE BRAVE

To be unscared

To be strong

To take risks, even if they are scary

To be able to take chances

To just make a decision

To be a little crazy

Being willing to go into hot spaces and smoke

Being willing to do back pokes when you are asleep

Being willing to get poked when you are awake

Being willing to talk in front of the whole class

Being willing to do something for your brother or sister even if you’re scared

This is what is means to be brave.

“Be willing to go into hot spaces and smoke” is my favorite line. Along with “Being able to do  back pokes when you are asleep.” I think these two poets make a fine team. Don’t you?

Lately I wonder how much of teaching poetry has to do with creating the right conditions for students to wander, to stumble, to emerge from a poetry experience a little bolder and wide-eyed. “Always welcome distraction,” writes the poet Donald Revell. “Leave the window open. Answer the door. Catching the fragrance of a flower, go and find it.” In Seattle, a generous burst of sunlight recently turned a day into a holiday. Walking from Belltown to Capitol Hill, my feet chose a route studded with Vietnamese noodle shops. At nearly every turn, I felt overwhelmed by the fragrance of anise. Enormous cauldrons of broth simmering in kitchens outside of my sight, the scent of this star-shaped spice spilling into sidewalks, I recalled happy memories of my aunt’s cracked wheat sweetbread spiked with anise, sesame seed and cinnamon.

I could hear the spectrum of experience in the faces of the students at Seattle’s Hutch School this past week as they sampled various spices and dried herbs I had emptied into plastic cups. The lovely Rachel Kessler has provided us WITS teachers with handy worksheets to summon the olfactory forces, in an event we like to call Smell-o-rama. I reminded the students that “smell” is typically the most neglected sense in writing, that it is one of the most powerful memory triggers that can lend to vivid images. One great thing about young students is that they are often jumping out of their seats wanting to share. Sometimes I wish I could call on all of them at once, because you want to catch that gust of wind before cinnamon is too easily connected to pie. The scent of cinnamon took Jake back to skydiving, connected Jenna to a power outage on her birthday. The smell of basil reminded Kasey of making a tree-house with his dad. Barbecue spice reminded Jake of an emergency hospital trip to mend the bloody finger of a family member. The aroma of pepper took Ryan “back to my house that has a two-moded hot tub.” Somehow the smell of garlic reminded Peyton of “flipping my four wheeler,” and the scent of dried rose petals reminded Jonny of “catching a new fish behind Mom’s garden.” Once a memory is surfaced, and perhaps recorded, it might be helpful to allow the path of a poem to sprout with as little interference as possible. I say: when the poem begins to happen, you have to get out of the way.

I also tell students that some researchers believe infants are born synesthetes, experiencing a smell when hearing the sound of their mother’s voice, for example. Neurological opinions aside, from a poetry practice perspective, it can be an exciting experiment. “The senses can and should intermingle,” Charles Baudelaire offered long ago. Inviting the idea of synesthesia in poetry classrooms is one of my favorite things: it makes it possible to offer Arthur Rimbaud’s “Voyelles” to a young student who has no trouble imagining that a vowel sound is experienced as red. “The sound of guitar smells of desert flowers, ” Princess writes.  “When I’m happy the world smells like roses, watermelon, rain, purple and pine air freshener,” writes Felicity while Bailey is content with “saltwater, wet grass, dew drops, chlorine, pineapple, arctic air, tulip buds.” Michael Ondaatje’s “Sweet Like a Crow,” a poem full of similes that merge the auditory and visual together in describing the voice of an eight-year-old girl, can be another great launching point. “When I’m happy the world smells like sweet sugar pouring,” Annika writes.

I’ve also been thinking about how to help a young poet move a poem along.

Trying to get places with my signature impaired sense of direction, I give in a lot to being lost, with only a vague idea of how to arrive somewhere. This has made for a lot of epic walks, filled with “wrong” turns that result in overhearing great bits of conversation, messages through flowers, faces, the hands of musicians. Other times walks ignite all kinds of anxieties, weather mishaps or tricky interactions. You may return home hungry and cold, peeling the sad lint from the eyes of strangers off your coat. You might find hives blooming on your arms from sampling shellfish and wish you’d never left the house.

But to send a student on an adventure in which they feel empowered, you might offer a form that might encourage freedom within restriction.  A simple assignment (feel free to try this on your own!) is to generate a list of ten words that serve as end-words for a ten-line poem. This word list might be inspired by your environment — for example, I once did this exercise with a group of students while walking through Seattle’s Conservatory, so the word lists were inspired by plants and light and humidity. You get the idea. Then you write a ten-line poem, allowing the subject to appear on its own, each end-word serving as a curve that offers a turn along the way. “Dreams bring summer’s bottom,” Annika writes in one such poem. I welcome being startled in this way. What’s invisible becomes visible, simply through your willingness to trust the process. This reminds me of a quote from John Ashbery, regarding a similar but more complex form that also works with a set of pre-determined end-words. The poet John Ashbery once told someone that “writing a sestina is like riding downhill on a bicycle and having the pedals push your feet. I wanted my feet to have been pushed into places they wouldn’t normally have taken.” A poetry instructor might be able to help a student with a brazen send-off.

Winner:

Baylee Bonagofsky

Children’s Hospital

Age 16

Memories

Finalists:

Millie Jones

Nathan Hale High School

Grade 9

I Am in the Dark

Kiya Smith

McClure Middle School

Grade 6

The Future

Maggie Garetson

McClure Middle School

Grade 6

The Future

Nathaniel Faustino

Seattle Children’s Hospital

Age 11

A Recipe for a Calm Day

“You have permission to write something that doesn’t make sense!”  This caveat for 9^th graders is both liberating and debilitating.  We are discussing Shakespeare and the evolution of the English language.  Shakespeare invented somewhere around 1700 words that we still use today.  He did this by changing nouns to adjectives and adjectives to verbs, by adding prefixes and suffixes to existing words, and by straight up just inventing his own ways of phrasing.  This mode of invention and manipulation of language is one of the aspects of writing that fuels my excitement as a writer, reader, and a teacher and something I feel is crucial for our developing young writers to understand.

Now when I say, “you have permission to writing something that doesn’t make sense,” the general response is a bouquet of wry smiles mixed with guffaws and bewilderment.  They say, “What do you mean it doesn’t have to make sense?”  Well, what I mean is, we don’t always have to write to convey a logical sense of meaning. We have this miraculous ability as humans to assign meaning to the abstract, to find form in something that is essentially formless.  The way we look at clouds, being able to read words that are missing a majority of the letters, assigning human characteristics to inanimate objects etc.  It is this powerful sense of imagination that also allows us to visualize and interpret metaphors and juxtaposition of phrase that might sound on the surface like they “don’t make sense” but in context, and for the sole purpose of affecting an idea, seemingly nonsensical metaphors can be a powerful tool for creating imagery.

Often, it is a challenge to pull really creative ideas out of the minds of high school students, so steering them in that direction and hoping for the best is sometimes all we can do.  But man is it gratifying when you get their best, especially when they do it unknowingly then realize later what amazing writing they’ve created!

I have borrowed a workshop from renowned poet Rachel McKibbons that sets up a word bank where unexpected metaphors and images can be generated by simply combing words.  We start with three columns on the page, the first column is a list of inanimate objects, the second column is a list of animals determined in relation to the inanimate objects, and the third column is a list of sounds or actions these animals make.  Students are giving a series of questions as writing prompts to write about their inner child, or their imagination, or their ego.  Since the subject of the poem lives in the imagination itself and is abstract, it is not out of the realm of possibility for the subject to be able to do silly or impossible things.

This lesson takes a fair amount of trust and established rapport in order for students to follow in the process.  The writing from this exercise comes out pretty weird, but in that awesome sort of weird way.  Without really knowing it, they are experimenting in surrealism, using synesthesia, and beginning to shape their style and voice.  The whole point is to push them over the edge and get them writing without boundaries with fully engaged imagination. This lesson can be challenging for young writers and I’ve had mixed results, but my 9^th graders at Ingraham are dang smart; here are a couple fantastic free-writing examples from today. I’ve highlighted some of my favorite images and stylistic choices with some side commentary:

She sits on a globe singing her pterodactyl song,

back-flipping from a chalkboard to a music stand,

on strong kangaroo legs.

She’s a tripping, tumbling songbird

            a ballpoint pen in her elephant trunk.

            She sails the sea on a rubber-duck boat,

            gliding through the water like a blue whale,

            scribbling her thoughts on a t-shirt’s hem. — (Love how unexpected this is!!)

            She has flamingo fingernail polish that squawks for attention, (YES!)

            a doll trailing from those rainbow fish fingers.

            She settles in a cardboard box,

            curled like a kitten,

            yawning a dinosaur roar.

            She swings from a guitar-strap vine,

            feeling like an octopus bouncing through the water,

            She’s the only one who can pounce on an idea,

            the way a cobra strikes,

            or a kingfisher grabs its prey.

            She died and was born again,

            surging from the depths of the ocean,

            leaping like a dolphin for air,

            pulling me home like a horse with a chariot.

                                                            – Sofia T.,  Ingraham High School

            My inner child’s hair flops in the wind

like a skipping wedding dress bathing in the ivory fur  —-(Great clarity!!)

on a summer night.   Her hands tremble, although small,

like the clutching orangutan-panda eating his favorite lion meal. 

Her legs smell like a walking gold chain —- (Fantastic!)

thrusting diamond earrings along with him.

Her eyes are blond like Ellie’s hair but ginger like Allison’s… 

                                                            – Noor, Ingraham High School

My inner child festers in the drama

and trauma of cackling lockets. 

She flaps narwhal-nose-petals in my screaming crow heart.

She smiles her sweet sunset smile at the fawning lamb

canoodling next to my frontal lobe and howls

an agonizing witch-whimper at the Twin Towers of the world.  —- (What?!!!)

My inner child catches blood-splattered snowflakes

in her mouth and absorbs them like moaning dewdrops into her soul. 

She puts the sunrise into the giraffe’s eyes.   —- (GREAT phrasing!!) 

The sparkling sapphire into the crow’s soul.  My inner child is dying

to reach out her soft peanut butter hands and caress the raw,

rainbow scars on the side of your face. 

Her sweet blonde hair, wispy like a passing cloud

carried away by life’s whirling wind,

curls around your rotting lungs and cushions

your aching purple feet.  A moose stretching

its claws across a black keyboard.  — (What a cool and bizarre image to end with!!)

                                                                        Jaime B., Ingraham High School

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

Winner:

Maga Barzallo Sockemtickem

Seattle Children’s Hospital

Grade 11

Finalists

Moneka LaFrombois

West Seattle High School

Grade 9

Faith Mulugeta

BF Day Elementary

4th Grade

Ruby Strickland

BF Day Elementary

5th Grade

Angie Flores

Seattle Children’s Hospital

This is fifth grade, but it could as easily be ninth when I ask for verbs. Under breath, behind hand murmur. “What’s a verb?”

“Something you do,” I say. “If you can add an –ing to the end, you’ve probably got a verb.”

“Quickly?” somebody suggests.

“Close,” I say. As a teaching writer, you’ve been here, and it isn’t fun.

It’s the first week back from winter break, as I pass each fifth grader a page torn from a garage sale recipe book.  There are murmurs, but the content is brought on by recipes for popcorn balls, gumbo, curried broccoli, snickerdoodles, or lamb stew. I give them a couple of minutes to enjoy, before laying out the plan for the hour. We’re going to write poems for a healthy planet using the recipe form, but first we’ll mine these pages for recipe action words.

Kids circle verbs, then copy several to the lists on their pages. I used to begin with a group brainstorm after the circling, but have decided to go with the more individual activity in this extremely chatty class. Heading to school, I heard an NPR commentator state that the brainstorming model we thought was so productive, may not be so. I felt better about my choice.  After a few minutes, I call for verbs to put on the example list I’ve put under the smart camera. “Grind, drizzle, preheat, combine, add, whisk, blend, cover, knead…” run down the left margin.

Lists complete, we segue to possible ingredients to bring together for a healthy planet. Not, as on the food recipes before them, baking soda or cube steak, but inner qualities of mind together with the physical make-up of the earth. I emphasize the abstract qualities, since I realize it’s difficult for most ten and eleven year-olds to juggle both sets of requirements. A sample ingredient list includes “compassion, trust, empathy, green trees, leadership, helium, pizzazz, teamwork, freedom and destiny.”

Do these lists quicken your heartbeat? They do mine, and the kids seemed awakened by these words we’d pulled together, too. Afterwards, reading the poems was even better soul food in this night-heavy month of January. Here is a sampling:

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:

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

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:

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.”

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 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?