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Bechtel Prize Essay: The tree project  

Looking for a poem to write? Maybe start by asking: What is a tree? “A tree is a lollipop of God!” and “A tree is a pigeon hotel” are just two possible answers to this question. Sam Swope was a writer-in-residence for two years with a group of children from 3^rd to 5^th grade. The students had immigrated to NYC from over 20 different countries and together they took on The Tree Project. In an attempt to cultivate their individual poetic passions, they were asked to write a list poem about trees. The responses the students gave during this project branched outwards and inwards in numerous directions, reflecting the relationship between their inner lives, outer lives and the stuff poems are made from. Sam Swope won the Bechtel Prize for this essay in 2004.  He remains dedicated and active in the engagement of children’s creativity; his book, “The Araboolies of Liberty Street” has been featured in numerous school plays and is even available in the form of an opera.

Check out our Digital Resource Center for this Bechtel-winning essay and many other great articles from our archives!

I Am New York, a poetry anthology about New York City, written by library workshop participants across the five boroughs, has been published and we're celebrating!  Here is part of our Brooklyn contingent:

Discussing the relationship between the dramatic monologue and poetry, Bob Hicok interrogates our assumptions about what constitutes “honesty” in narrative poetry, versus the simultaneous permission and assumption of “assumed identity” in dramatic monologue. “…it's hard not to think of all poems as dramatic monologues. By and large, we accept the notion of the self as a fiction, a construction that is not reliable, that shifts and which the individual, the self, offers with motives that vary. With this in mind, the dramatic monologue strikes me as honest about how much of this stuff is made up, how much we write what we want to write, how fundamentally we're constructing identities in our poems.” He discusses the poem as dramatic monologue as a forum for constructing identity, for filling the voids in our stories, for using language, as it is words and not the thing described itself as an inherent construction, explaining, “That may be the strongest impulse behind imagination: to construct the willed, the wanted world.”

If you're interested in discussing the use of “persona poems” and what constitutes an assumed character or identity in poetry and/or playwriting in your classroom, see the article in our Digital Resource Center titled "Other Bodies to Wear, Other Lives to Use: Bob Hicok on the Dramatic Monologue," by Daniel Godston, for Teachers & Writers Magazine. 

Teachers & Writers Magazine Spring Issue 
Writing Through Trauma, excerpt three

The spring issue of the magazine, out now, features a special section on Writing Through Trauma, in which writers in the schools from programs nationwide to describe their work with children and adults whose lives have been changed by violence, illness, the death of a loved one, or other tragedies. In the wake of the violence that occurred this past December at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, we asked these writers to offer their insights into how words can help comfort and heal in the face of grief.  Last week we posted a piece by teaching artist Autumn Hayes, from WITS Houston. In this third excerpt,  Peter Markus, from InsideOut Literary Arts Project of Detroit, describes how he helps his students translate grief into words.

Holding On, Letting Go , Making Use: Writing as Remembering

by Peter Markus

The act of remembering, I often tell my students, is most often an act of love. When someone we love leaves us, is taken from us—by the hand of God, or by a hand holding a gun—we can keep their spirit and story alive through the power of words. We can write them back into a world—the poem that the page can sometimes become—that we can hold forever in the palms of our own hands. Be empowered by that, I say. Reach back, with the pen in your hand, and hold on, as did Miguel Rodriguez, the young Detroit poet behind these words, when he wrote down what he could not otherwise get himself to say:

Crushed

Your hands
make a stone man
turn soft.

I am heavy
with the memory
of your touch.

When I invite students to write about loss, I let them know that no one in the room is exempt from the experience and the absence that remains in its wake. The older we get, the more we live and love, the more these losses accumulate. But as the poet Jack Gilbert wrote, he himself no stranger to love and the losses that come with it: “There will be music despite everything.”

Our purpose, as teaching artists in the schools, is to show students that there is a song to be sung. It may be out of sorrow, yes, but poetry allows us to celebrate what is lost even as we mourn.

As someone who believes that language has the power to restore and even redeem us, I encourage my students to reclaim that which has been taken away, to make use of experiences that can sometimes beat us and hold us down.

No one is fenced off from the violence that is our world. A mother is taken by a drunk driver. A brother meets with a bullet over a leather jacket. A classmate walks out of school on a Friday afternoon and doesn’t come back.  We use poems to tell these stories. We use stories to help us make sense. (more...)

Teachers & Writers Magazine Spring Issue 
Writing Through Trauma, excerpt two

The spring issue of the magazine is now out, and features a special section on Writing Through Trauma.  In this special section we asked writers in the schools from programs nationwide to describe their work with children and adults whose lives have been changed by violence, illness, the death of a loved one, or other tragedies. In the wake of the violence that occurred this past December at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, we asked these writers to offer their insights into how words can help comfort and heal in the face of grief.  Last week we posted a piece by T&W teaching artist David Surface on working with veterans in a writing workshop. In this second excerpt, teaching artist Autumn Hayes, from WITS Houston describes a lesson in which she had elementary school students write new year's wishes to the children of Newtown Connecticut.

Reaching for Others: Writing New Year’s Wishes to Newtown Students
by Autumn Hayes

But—how do I know what they want?” Armarde asked, his face a dervish of anxiety. “I really want them to like it.”

I couldn’t blame him. I was at Lockhart-Turner Elementary School in Houston, Texas, working with Armarde and his fellow fourth-graders on an understandably daunting task: each child was to write and illustrate a New Year’s wish for the students of Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Connecticut. The tragic shooting there was only six days behind them—fewer for students I’d already visited at Kelso Elementary—and I had made it clear that these wishes would be mailed out to real people in real pain.

The idea started this September, with an exhibit entitled “Dear John and Dominique: Letters and Drawings from the Menil Archives.” I work at the Menil with Writers in the Schools in Houston, Texas, and I was particularly struck by a series of hand-painted New Year's cards from artist Niki de Saint Phalle. The gorgeous, full-page artworks, splashed with whimsical watercolors, wished pleasures like “friendly monsters in your dreams,” and I knew—in a world of snark and online bullying—I wanted students to see and emulate such kindness, tenderness, and creativity.

Then Sandy Hook happened, and I faced the choice to: (a) pretend that this didn’t affect us and teach revision as planned, or (b) walk the walk and engage 160 children in the messiness of reaching for others. (more...)

Celebrate the long history of women and T&W with a look at this 2002 interview with T&W Board Co-Chair Nancy Larson Shapiro and the enormous impact she’s had on T&W.

In 1976, fresh from the Midwest, Nancy Larson joined the staff of the ten-year-old Teachers & Writers Collaborative and became its Director three years later. In the following interview, she offers insights gleaned from her long tenure and reflects on the educational trends, writing movements, and visionary teachers that have had an impact on the Collaborative.

This Interview, "A Different Measure", is available in the archive in our Digital Resource Center.

One of the staff's favorite office activities, changing the toner cartridge for the copy machine! This photo may need a new caption, any suggestions?

And if you see Amy (left) at AWP in Boston this week, be sure you say hello!