By:Emily Craighead
In a textbook, poetry often seems stiff, the words awkward and the meaning difficult to penetrate.
Twelve Manville High School students drove a mile down the road to the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival at Duke Farms to discover an entirely new perspective on the world of poetry on Sept. 30.
In the mouth of the author, a poem can come to life, a phenomenon students experienced as they listened to Pulitzer Prize-winning poets read their works.
"They know how to put emphasis on certain parts," Nastazya Bolek said. "When you’re just reading it, you don’t always know how to do that."
Three students from Deborah Feeney’s 11th-grade English class shared how the festival changed the way they think about poetry.
Ema Yakobchuk, 17, Nastazya and Renee Oscilowski, both 16, couldn’t quite imagine a poet as a living, breathing human until they heard Paul Muldoon, Jane Hirschfield, Sandra Cisneros and Venus Khoury-Ghata in person.
While torrential rains turned the Great Lawn at Duke Farms into a muddy mess, the high school students gathered beneath tents, listening to poets share stories that made them human.
"We’ve learned about poets and how they lead their lives," said Nastazya, of North Street. "There are faces to their names."
Now, when she and her classmates read Emily Dickinson in English class, perhaps the lines won’t seem quite as distant or irrelevant.
"Even ones who had negative things to say (after the festival), they were thinking," Ms. Feeney said. "For that class, I’m going to have an easier time with poetry."
Ms. Feeney said she plans to include more modern works from poets such as Lucille Clifton when her students study poetry later this year.
Pulitzer Prize winner C.K. Williams told one group, "I figured I probably don’t have any talent, so the alternative was to work really hard."
That message resounded with Nastazya, who said she realized everyone has something to say.
"Everyone has poetry in them, even though it’s not always good," she said. "It inspires you to want to write."
It was at once reassuring to hear that even great poets struggle with their writing, and daunting to hear how much time they sometimes devote to one piece.
Renee of 11th Street said one poet told the audience he spent an entire year on one poem a commitment she could not imagine making to an English project.
Discovering poetry outside the classroom at the festival allowed students wander from tent to tent, listening to what interested them. At one time, they could choose between the Irishman Paul Muldoon, the Israeli Aharon Shabtai, or they could perform their own interpretations of Sylvia Plath, Gwendolyn Brooks or Cole Porter.
Ema discovered the range of subjects in poetry reaches far beyond life and death or love and heartbreak.
"It makes you think you can write about anything like a black chair, or even a pencil," said Ema, of Washington Avenue.
Even Ms. Feeney left the festival with a more open mind about poetry.
"Poetry’s not my strongest, but when I heard Sandra Cisneros, I had to have her poems," she said.
Though Manville was limited to sending 12 students to the festival, Ms. Feeney said because the high school filled all its slots this year, festival organizers will consider increasing that number for the next event in 2006.
They may not have become poets overnight, but both Ms. Feeney and her students have learned there are innumerable ways to appreciate poetry, and most of them don’t rely on a textbook and a teacher.
