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Meeting June 14, 2008
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Poetry of the pavement
Saturday, June 14, 2008
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N. SCOTT TRIMBLE/The Columbian
Meg Farnis, 12, left, and Llerenda Lightner, 13, chalk out a theme poem on the subject of time. Vancouver School of Arts and Academics hosted its second annual sidewalk chalk poetry event Friday." border="0" width="250">
N. SCOTT TRIMBLE/The Columbian
Meg Farnis, 12, left, and Llerenda Lightner, 13, chalk out a theme poem on the subject of time. Vancouver School of Arts and Academics hosted its second annual sidewalk chalk poetry event Friday.
Related: » Chalk talk slideshow
By ISOLDE RAFTERY, Columbian staff writerMarilyn Moelhman was reading around midnight when she accidentally smushed a fly within the pages of her book. After killing it, a sense of dread and smallness consumed her.
“I felt really bad about it,” Marilyn, 12, said. “Because in the grand scheme of things, it probably affects as many things as me.”
Marilyn is a tiny, fast-talking sixth-grader at Vancouver School of Arts and Academics. On Friday, she was among a group of students writing poetry in chalk on the school’s sidewalks.
The annual poetry event, organized by English teacher Michael Carr, may look like a giddy exercise from the street. It involves, after all, rainbow-colored sidewalk chalk and an abundance of flip flops and cutoff shorts.
But walk through the school gates and to the main plaza, and watch students wrestle with metaphor and meaning.
Marilyn’s poetry, for example, questions whether humans or flies have a greater purpose of being other than just that: being.
“Really there’s no written rule about what we’re supposed to do — even the quest for happiness, that’s just to feel good,” Marilyn said. “And like, emos feel bad because they like feeling bad.”
Nearby, her identical twin sister Madison transcribed her own poem. Does her twin harbor transcendental thoughts?
“It’s not like I’m going to come down the stairs at breakfast and say, ‘Hey Maddie, did you think about the universe last night?’ ” Marilyn said. “I believe that she does, but we’re not telepathic.”
Christian Ivans, 14, wrote poignantly about depression. His poem begins:
Your soul
Bright and shining
Full of hope
No regrets,
Until your body
Is touched by something so dark
It creeps up your limbs.“My dad inspired this poem because he’s always depressed,” Christian said. “So it’s about overcoming depression.”
Christian doesn’t know where his father lives now, but he knows that his father had been adversely affected by the dreary Pacific Northwest.
“When you’re not depressed, everything is all right,” Christian said. “But when you’re depressed, you find sadness in everything and you do things you wouldn’t normally do.”
Across the courtyard, Lexi Peterson-Burge, 14, held fast to optimism. She blasted Z100, a popular music station, and wrote across her concrete space: “CANCER.”
When asked to elaborate, she said she was diagnosed with leukemia last August. Then she said: “It’s like, cancer, what?”
Meaning, cancer doesn’t faze her. But it got her down one day in class, so she wrote about it, but more specifically, other people’s pity.
“The reality is that people hear cancer and they think death,” Lexi said. “Though it’s a grim thought, it’s the truth. I was scared at first, but I didn’t want to show it, because my parents were sad enough.”
Give me this cancer
I will grab it by the horns and take it on
By the end of this year, it will be gone.Isolde Raftery can be reached at 360-735-4546 or isolde.raftery@columbian.com.
Minutes of Last Meeting
WWWC Business
MusicMakers Academy is our new meeting place beginning in September 13, 2008.
Thanks again for the work of Joan, Joan, Linda and Sue on the Celebration of the Arts in Manchester at MCC.
Summer meetings?
CPS Business
Important CPS stuff is that if you are a paid-up CPS member then if you submit a poem to LRR 2 by the end of this month you will be published. Since I am the editor of the volume you won't be overlooked. We will be checking each entry to make certain that submissions are from current members.
Long River Run IIa CPS members-only journal
Long River Run II is a poetry journal open only to CPS members. CPS members receive it for free. The reading period for Long River Run II is May 1-June 30. Please submit one poem, maximum of 40 lines, typed, single-spaced. Include your name in upper left corner, and under that please put your town (and state if you are not a Connecticut resident). Previously published okay, provide credits. Simultaneous submission okay, please notify if accepted elsewhere. Enclose SASE.
Upon notification of acceptance, poem must be submitted to a specified e-mail address exactly as you wish poem to appear.
Send submission to:
Long River Run II
CPS
PO Box 270554
W. Hartford, CT 06127
BRODINE/BRODINSKY POETRY COMPETITION
Open to all poets.
Submit poems: May 1-July 31 (postmark)
Prizes of $150, $100, and $50.
Send up to 3 unpublished poems, any form, 40 line limit each. Include two copies of each poem: one with complete contact info and one with NO contact info. Both copies should be marked Brodine/Brodinsky. Include SASE for results only (no poems will be returned). Winning poems must be submitted by disc or electronically following notification. Send fee of $10 for up to three poems; make check out to Connecticut Poetry Society. Prize winning poems will be published in Connecticut River Review.
Send submissions to Brodine/Brodinsky Poetry Contest, CPS, PO Box 270554, West Hartford, CT 06127
2008 Contest Judge: Maria Sassi Prize winning poet and playwright, writer, lecturer and teacher. She is the first Poet Laureate of West Hartford. Ms. Sassi has taught creative writing for nine years at The Hartford College for Women, University of Hartford. Her lecture, Our American Poet Laureates, has been presented at schools, libraries and literary organizations around Connecticut and New York. The first edition of her book of poems Rooted in Stars was selected for the permanent collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript library at Yale University.
Education
See article in news section
Assignment
Haiku
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