Poetry is all about playing, and patience
by Kirsten Ogden

In the mail this weekend came my copy of the California Poets in the Schools Statewide Anthology for 2007: My Song is the Light. Edited by Mary Lee Gowland, the anthology showcases the work of California students in K-12 served by poet-teachers from CPITS over the past year. What I love the most about getting this anthology every year is that it gives me hope. How could I not feel hope when students are writing lines like these by Second grader Lauren Raith, from her poem My Hands Are Everything:

My hands are sewing the big blue blanket above you
My hands hold the Earth so it does not fall

In the Foreword to the anthology, Philip Levine notes these same lines, and writes about the importance of teaching poetry by sharing how he came to believe, after a time, that teaching people to write poetry is possible, if teachers allow them to play, and impart patience. He says “there were two essential things I could do for the truly gifted: get out of their way, and help them discover the poetry they were preparing to write.” His foreword sets the tone for a delicious collection of poems that almost didn’t happen.

Fighting a serious underfunding problem, CPITS went through a tough couple of years in 2006 and 2007, restructuring the organization and seeking new volunteers for staff positions in an effort to keep the Bay Area office open. Always an organization built on volunteers committed to keeping poetry alive in the schools and to finding job opportunities for poets, CPITS began in 1964 as the Pegasus Project at San Francisco State University, and then went statewide in the 1970’s. Initial funding came from the NEA and state grants, along with support from donors. Despite its popularity, however, it still has difficulty raising the funds to present poetry workshops and support poets, and more importantly, raising the public profile of the organization. Unlike the Poetry Out Loud project, CPITS doesn’t have such a large backing or such a well-financed publicity campaign, despite Poet-Teachers in CPITS having conducted poetry-out-loud-type projects long before the official creation of the current program. CPITS keeps going, though, with committed teachers sometimes working for free building a foundation of K-12 poets and teachers in various school districts, sponsoring contests and an anthology to foster the reading of poems, and plugging away in the classrooms of California to help students see the value of reading and writing poems.

CPITS prides itself on attracting high quality teachers with graduate degrees and with publications, who first intern with an established poet for 10 workshop sessions before setting up their own workshop sessions. CPITS gave me my first job teaching poetry when I was fresh out of the University of Alaska with my MFA. I was lucky enough to connect with Shelley Savren, a long-time poet-teacher in the Oxnard area just north of Los Angeles County, Adele Slaughter, an exceptional poet in Los Angeles, and Don Campbell, a southland staple who has since left CPITS to form his own organization, WordProcessPoets. I remember staying up late the night before my first “student-teaching” assignment with Shelly, preparing materials for my lesson. My boyfriend and I were hand-painting color cards to give to the students. Although I’d taught at the college level during my graduate years, the 4th graders I’d be teaching for my student-teaching exercise with Shelly were a whole new ballgame. My lesson on colors as inspiration for poems was a big hit. I remember this line from one student’s poem about purple:

Purple is under my mother’s wings to help me fall asleep under the purple sky

A fourth grader! I thought that was beautiful.

Now, as one of the Area Coordinators for CPITS in Los Angeles, I continue teaching in the schools and also try to recruit and train other poets to work with CPITS. Each year, these poets, along with seasoned CPITS poets, collect the best of the best from student work and submit these pieces for the yearly anthology. My Song is the Light is the culmination of this project. The title of the anthology comes from this poem by Third Grader Logan Florez, out of Liberty School in Sonoma county. His teacher, Laura Berg, brought in CPITS teacher Molly Albract-Sierra to conduct poetry classes, and Logan wrote this:

MY SONG IS THE LIGHT

My song is the light
of the setting sun
reflecting in the gold lake
of imagination
in the evening sky.
My life is the poem
of green raindrops
echoing through the forest
of musical dreams and peace.
My imagination is a summer hill
of emerald green dragon fire
on the moonlit sea of dreams.

Ninth grader Megan Le of Lowell High School wrote these lines in her poem I Come From A Fire Breathing Dragon:

Now silence fills the house
with only the clanking of wooden chopsticks
Maybe some coffee if enough money was saved
Someday when the fight is over between brother and brother
We will return home and be able to rest our heads

What I love most about the poems produced by students through the CPITS project is how unself-conscious the students are with their words. They just write. They muse, they think, they imagine, they wander, and then they just write it. Levine notes that this type of play can be taught in partnership with patience, giving the students a writing process upon which they can build: “I’ve come to believe that patience is an essential possession of the mature writer, a habit of character essential to anyone dedicated to this art. Patiences was something I did not have as a young poet. I learned it; I learned it slowly–”

Levine’s wisdom is echoed in the words of seasoned CPITS poets. In the back of the anthology, poems by poet-teachers are included, along with lesson plans and essays about teaching poetry. Brandon Cesmat’s offering, The Pitch and Tuning of Poems: Poetry Out Loud, asserts that reading poems by experienced poets out loud does invite original poems from students. A former CPITS president, Cesmat is widely respected across California as a poetry-advocate, an outstanding teacher, and a top-notch writer and performer. His most important assertion in this essay speaks to the lack of experiential writing in the language arts curriculum in Calfornia. Cesmat says, “if we can get the language arts standards to establish officially that making metaphors is at least as important as analyzing them, we might really have something.” I don’t think he’s alone there. Despite the evidence in the CPITS anthology and the testimonials from classroom teachers that writing poems improves analytical skills, hones critical reading, and invites higher-order language functions for our students, the public school government-administrators continue to push testing outcomes as dictates for classroom curriculum and pedagogy strategies. Until this trend changes, poets will have to keep plugging away–teaching play and patience in CPITS workshops. The rewards are many, however, as evidenced by poet-teacher Perie Longo’s anthology poem "the end":

small children, when they write
their small poems with great effort,
their d’s and b’s blurring
either side of the stem,

always write “the end”
when they’re finished
(done with the task. no more
to say).

The world becomes word
wobbling along with its smudges.

My bog has a tail
like a propeller. the end

My bad is always sleeping
on the sofa–
the END

Pedro smiles my last day,
the skin on your wrist
is soft like a petal,

his goodbye on my wrist I will take
to the grave.

Till then, I’m happy in this word
with my little guru and his friends

who treat the end
as common as something that comes
before something else–

recess or lunch,
running into your mother’s arms,

waking up your bad and the bog
with its propeller tail.

Please Note: Due to web-formatting restrictions, some of the spacing of the above poem is not rendered as the poet wished. Read the original by purchasing your own copy of a CPITS Anthology.

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