Tag Archives: poetry

Victor Hernández Cruz

“It is the job of writers to perceive and explain the truth. To get to the essence of things in this society is a monumental task of awareness.” – V. H. Cruz

Victor Hernández Cruz, born February 6, 1949 in Puerto Rico, grew up and went to school in Spanish Harlem New York. Cruz started writing at fifteen and his first chapbook, Papo Got His Gun! (Calle Once, 1966) was published when he was seventeen. His first collection, Snaps (Random House, 1969), was published three years later at the age of twenty. Cruz is known for blending English and Spanish into his spoken and written poetry (read about the Nuyorican Movement), and for writing about New York as a Puerto Rican. He writes as though he is a perpetual traveler, someone who has visited just long enough to feel at home in New York, California, Puerto Rico, Morocco, and Colorado.

When Urayoán Noel asked in an interview [published in the article “The Music That Is Yourself,” (T&W 38:2, 2007] about the effects of growing up with two languages, Cruz said, “It’s a limbo that I’ve learned to cultivate. I tell you, what’s more important is what I want to say. The question is, can I say it with more strength in English or in Spanish? I feel the subject itself, the content, will call forth the language it needs; the language chooses itself. …In my poetry I am also a student of history and, as I travel, I travel with that in mind. For me, traveling is just as important as investigation or reading texts because it’s seeing cultura viva (living culture)…You can see it in the kinds of food you eat, and in music influenced by this guitar or that melody.”  

In an interview with turnrow (2002), Cruz talked about how he became involved with Teachers & Writers Collaborative. “I met people [in 1968] who were important to me—Herbert Kohl, who I actually met in New York—he is an educator. … I met Ishmael Reed, the African-American novelist, who encouraged me and wrote about my early work. In California I was able to see New York from a distance, from a bird’s eye view. I usually write about places after I've left them.” In the interview with Urayoán Noel, Cruz elaborated on this:

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Visual Poems

 

Like most people, before I learned to read and write, I taught myself to draw. How easy to pick up a crayon, a magic marker, or a pencil, and make something—anything—on the page (or on the living room wall). As children, we confidently draw what we want to see and what we see, as we see it. Our drawings are not wrong, misspelled or illegible—and if they are illegible, it’s often the kind of illegibility that one reads as poetic, abstract, mysterious, and open to interpretation. Thankfully, we don’t need to speak an artist’s national tongue to read his visual work. Everyone is capable of reading a painting by Rothko or a sculpture by Brancusi, sans translation.

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The Power of Spoken Word Performance in the Classroom

It is fairly safe to say that not every student is immediately open to poetry.  Especially at first.  We’ve all had the experience of coming into a new classroom and, after explaining the basic tenet of most poetry residencies – writing and reading poetry – receiving blank stares or less than enthusiastic responses.

One effective way to hook students’ attention and interest is to listen to poets read their work or watch poets perform, not only on that first day, but throughout the residency.  And thanks to the Internet and modern technology, it is now relatively easy to do that in the classroom, even when an author visit is not possible.

Charles R. Smith’s “Allow Me to Introduce Myself” is full of rhythm and musicality as he describes his abilities on the basketball court.  Students literally dance in their seats listening to it and want to hear it again and again.  It’s a great example of the use of hyperbole, description and show don’t tell.        

Writer and actor Daniel Beaty’s piece “Knock, Knock” details his experience growing up with a father who was in prison for most of Beaty’s childhood.  Not only is the piece itself powerful, but Beaty’s performance of his monologue is completely engaging and inspiring.

By starting off with an activity that students most likely do in their spare time—listen to music, watch videos—it can help demystify poetry and make it more accessible, especially for reluctant readers and writers.  It truly brings the poet’s words to life, right there in the classroom, in a way that is otherwise impossible to replicate.  This also models for students the significance of reading their own work out loud.  How the best medium for their words, their stories, their voice is actually themselves.

-Susan Buttenwieser

Susan Buttenwieser is a prose writer and T&W teaching artist.  To read more about Susan, go here.

Anne Sexton

Passionate, confessional, inspired and distressed, Anne Sexton (1928-1974) contributed to Teachers & Writers as a poet-in-residence in 1967, the same year she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Live or Die (1966). Despite her critical and public acclaim, Sexton felt nervous as a teaching artist in the classroom much of the time, and she struggled with whether she could teach as an expert in her craft. One of her students wrote in a letter to Sexton [published in Journal of a Living Experiment (1979)], “If you think you are a failure to communicate with the kids you are wrong…If you think that you are a failure because you cannot find out what counts to us, you are also wrong…You made the students care.”

Sexton’s work as a writer in the schools followed not only her Pulitzer Prize, but also the publication of multiple collections of poetry and her collaboration with Maxine Kumin on four children’s books.  In her 1967 artist diary, which was published in a Journal of a Living Experiment, Sexton wrote, “I’m interested in what the kids like because I want to be more in touch with my real audience. I write for kids. People who grow up, half the time, most of the time, they forget how to feel.” Sexton’s diary entries are full of vivid descriptions of the kids, how they made her feel and how she and the classroom teacher, Bob Clawson, helped them to learn. She wrote, “The naughtiest kids are the ones with the most intelligence and the most creativity. They’re creating a scene in class and they can create a scene on paper just as well.”

“[Bob Clawson] said I was a poet and he a teacher, and we would keep journals and we’d like [the students] to do so if they would. One girl asked me what a journal was, was it a diary. I said yes, only longer and more truthful. I didn’t know.” Sexton was honest in the classroom and tried to teach her students by trying to learn who they were. She also struggled with poetry’s place in the classroom.  She mused, “Teaching them to be original, will it help them to get in to college? Is originality a commodity that’s useable?”

"I’m just a practicing writer. That doesn’t seem to affect [the students] too much,” Sexton
wrote in another journal entry, which was published in Anne Sexton: A Biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook (1991), “They’re not too surprised about my writing. I don’t think they’re impressed, which is all right with me. I don’t want to impress them. I want to stimulate them.”

-Sally Stark

Sally Stark held an internship at Teachers & Writers Collaborative last spring as a participant in the Coe College New York Term (www.coe.edu/newyorkterm).

Names

Maya: In Hebrew my name means water. In Hinduism, illusion. It is the NYC taxi driver’s favorite question. A familiar yawn in Israel and one letter away from Palestine. It means I know you from somewhere. Soft and sharp: the meeting of hair and metal comb.

Find me one person in the world who has nothing to say about her name. (Then find me a writer who doesn’t wish, longingly, to write like Sandra Cisneros.) Whether adored or despised, our names live with us. We cherish them, announce them proudly, turn away from them shamefully, shrug them away, change them, and twist them into nicknames. They are our identifiers and our travel companions. Points of mockery and praise, they make us cringe, stand tall, and perk our ears at their sound. 

The chapter “Names” in Sandra Cisneros’ House on Mango Street introduces us to Esperanza:

In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing.

The lesson is simple. Students read this short chapter and then explore their own names in a free-write. The narrator’s own playful and personal associations make it easy for students to dive into the deep waters of their own names. Without knowing Esperanza, we feel like we know her as we might an old friend, simply based on these vivid descriptions. And so we can get to know any young writer who takes the same plunge. Each voice, inevitably, sparkles.

-Maya Pindyck

Maya Pindyck is a poet and T&W teaching artist.  You can read more about Maya here.

Different
By Magda Chinea

My name is different and easy. It represents a shade of dark. Some people say it like it’s a long name. A lot of times, people say it wrong. Only Spanish people say it right. My name represents everything about me—from my head to my toes—from my outside to my insides. My name comes from a beautiful place that I wish to visit. My name is also a sort of mistake, but as much as people make fun of my name and mess it up, the more I like it. I love my name: Magda Luz Chinea, and I will never change it. It is the reflection in my mirror.

My Name
By Ashanti Garner

My name. It’s like a windy day or a huge black cloud. My name is like a question with no answer. I feel it’s pointless. I don’t know what it means, or hardly where it comes from, and I don’t really care. My mother named me. I don’t know what she was thinking. I wish I were Tiana or Emmanuella… 

FREE poetry workshops this August!

Beat the heat this August!  Attend a FREE T&W poetry workshop at your local NYC library!

With generous support from The Lily Auchincloss Foundation and The Lotos Foundation, T&W is partnering with the Brooklyn Public Library, the New York Public Library, and the Queens Library to offer free poetry workshops based on our 2008 A POEM AS BIG AS NEW YORK CITY project.

Through this initiative, thousands of young people in NYC schools and community centers took part in workshops in which they wrote poems about their experiences growing up in New York, imagining the city as its own poem character. The poems created were adapted into a single narrative by T&W writer Melanie Maria Goodreaux, A Poem as Big as New York City, which Universe (an imprint of Rizzoli) will publish as a hard-cover, illustrated children’s book in fall 2012. 

Our FREE one-hour poetry workshops will be held in select library branches on the following dates and times during August.  Come pay poetic tribute to our beloved city!

A POEM AS BIG AS NEW YORK CITY Summer Workshops: Dyker

School has been out for a month but T&W writers are still at work this summer in New York’s public libraries. From Coney Island, Brooklyn, to Castle Hill in the Bronx, poetry workshops based around T&W’s 2008 A POEM AS BIG AS NEW YORK CITY project are fully underway.

As a summer intern for T&W I attended two hour-long workshops led by seasoned T&W playwright and teaching artist Frank Ingrasciotta at the Dyker Library branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. Upon my first visit (which was Frank’s first workshop at the library), eight participants, some of whom are part of Dyker branch's "Teen Time," silently waited as Frank wrote his name on the small easel. Blank expressions were their only response. Reaching for the book Alphabet City, Frank told the participants that today they’d be using their spatial-reasoning skills. Alphabet City is an abstract picture book that explores the alphabet by identifying individual letters found in various urban objects. For example, the profile of a wooden-horse forms the letter "A," a fire escape forms the letter "Z," or if you rotate the book, it might be a capital "N." Frank flipped through the book, asking what letters the students could spot. The group was polite and reserved, raising their hands and patiently waiting to be called on to speak. Despite their initial restraint, gasps and smiles broke the silence as the objects became more abstract, and identifying a letter more like revealing a secret.  (more...)

FREE T&W Summer Poetry Workshops in NYC libraries!

T&W is pleased to offer FREE poetry workshops for children and teens this summer!

With generous support from The Lily Auchincloss Foundation and The Lotos Foundation, T&W is partnering with the Brooklyn Public Library, the New York Public Library, and the Queens Library to offer poetry workshops based on our 2008 A Poem as Big as New York City project.

Through this initiative, thousands of young people in NYC schools and community centers took part in workshops in which they wrote poems about their experiences growing up in New York, imagining the city as its own poem character. The poems created were adapted into a single narrative by T&W writer Melanie Maria Goodreaux, A Poem as Big as New York City, which Universe Publishing (an imprint of Rizzoli) will publish as a hard-cover, illustrated children’s book in fall 2012. 

Our FREE one-hour poetry workshops will be held in select library branches on the following dates and times.  Come pay poetic tribute to our beloved city!

In early 2013, T&W will prepare an anthology of poetry created during the branch-based workshops for publication in April 2013—National Poetry Month. We hope to provide copies of the anthology to all program participants, with several copies for each host library branch.

STAY TUNED FOR MORE FREE LIBRARY WORKSHOPS IN THE FALL!

Kenneth Koch

Kenneth Koch (1925-2002) is often linked to the founding of the New York School poets in the 1950s, a group that includes John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Barbara Guest. The seemingly spontaneous, cosmopolitan and exuberant poetry he wrote helped define not only characteristics of the New York School, but Koch’s work in New York City public schools.

“I was onto this new way of writing that I could tell people about, and help them to write, give them feelings of power, confidence, excitement,” Koch told Teachers & Writers Collaborative in an interview. Often, getting students to feel this excitement involved opening them up to poetry in the first place, which initially proved difficult.  "A lot of the best writers in that school already hated poetry,” Koch said, when talking about his work at P.S. 61, where he started teaching in 1968. He blamed some of this hatred on what he called “essay-poems,” poetry that was overly academic and that contained obligatory allusions to figures like Helen of Troy or Cuchulain. Koch wanted to make language fresh and concrete for his students. (more...)

Three Classroom Writing Exercises for National Poetry Month

April brings us National Poetry Month,and to mark the
occasion the spring Issue of Teachers & Writers Magazine 
features three exciting new exercises for bringing poetry 
to the elementary, middle, and high school classroom.
Written by experienced teaching artists, these exercises offer suggestions for using contemporary poems to inspire fresh writing from students. This week we feature Sarah Dohrmann's exercise, inspired by Ross Gay's poem, "The Truth."

Three Classroom Writing Exercises for National Poetry Month
Three:

Because Poems:Teaching Ross Gay's "The Truth"
to Middle and High School Students

Sarah Dohrmann

At the age of 14 my first “real” job was at Wendy’s. I worked the potato ovens for several weeks until I burned my hand badly. I was then switched over to cashier, but when my drawer was forty bucks short one day, I was demoted to sweeping up the dining area. This presented another problem in the form of a school nemesis who’d come into the restaurant, order French fries, sit in the dining room, and toss her fries one-by-one onto the floor so she could watch me sweep each one with a broom into a long-handled dustpan that I could never seem to hold right.

At the same time I worked at Wendy’s, my family was about nine years into a disperate attempt to patch itself together after my mother’s death. The patching process is still underway these thirty-odd years later, because recovery is slow when no one talks about loss. We prefer to mime our way through innuendo and pain, making our non-actions as weighted and important as anything we might actually say or do.

Perhaps it’s my personal background, then, that first drew me to Ross Gay’s poem “The Truth”, which appears in his first collection, called Against Which:

The Truth

          Ross Gay

Because he was 38, because this
was his second job, because
he had two daughters, because his hands
looked like my father’s, because at 7
he would walk to the furniture warehouse,
unload trucks ‘til 3 AM, because I
was fourteen and training him, because he made
$3.75 an hour, because he had a wife
to look in the face, because
he acted like he respected me,
because he was sick and would not call out
I didn’t blink when the water
dropped from his nose
into the onion’s perfectly circular
mouth on the Whopper Jr.
I coached him through preparing.
I did not blink.
Tell me this didn’t happen.
I dare you.

(From Against Which by Ross Gay (CavanKerry Press, Ltd. 2006). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Like all poems we choose to teach, Gay’s poem moved me. It moved me not because of what the narrator chooses to do, but because of what he chooses not to do. I liked that it is a humble reflection, and that the narrator made a choice that others may not approve of. And I liked the repetition of the word “because,” how it lilted me along until I came to a full-stop of truth. Naturally I also liked that the narrator is fourteen years old, working at a fast food restaurant just like I once did—only this narrator is the better version of me, the less narcissistic one capable of thinking beyond his own discomforts while he works at a job he probably doesn’t love. (more...)