This Time, “The Young” Speak – Katy Day
In my previous post, “Poetry for the Young (and the Young-Hearted)”, I promised you voices of our young poetry lovers.
First up is HoCoPoLitSo’s Student on Board Member, Katy Day. Katy is a student at University of Maryland, College Park who is studying English and Psychology. She has been a friend of HoCoPoLitSo’s since 2013. She made her Blackbird Poetry Festival debut in 2013. Billy Collins, who came to HCC to read at the 2014 Blackbird Poetry Festival, is an admirer of Katy’s poetry (as evidenced by the photo below). She is currently studying poetry with Stanley Plumly at College Park.
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- Student Katy Day taking a selfie with Billy Collins at Blackbird Poetry Festival 2014.
I asked Katy some questions to get her take on encountering poetry.
What do you get out of attending poetry and literary events?
All of my time studying literature and poetry hasn’t prepared me to fully articulate the degree to which attending poetry readings and other literary events have influenced my life. The first poetry reading I ever attended was the Blackbird Poetry Festival in 2013. I knew that I had discovered something great when I attended Blackbird that year. I felt like I belonged there and like I had finally found something that I really felt passionately about.
As a student and as a citizen of this world, what benefits do you see in reading and studying literature (especially poetry)?
Studying literature and poetry has expanded my mind. It has allowed me to discover who I am as a person by changing and building upon my thoughts and beliefs about the world.
What’s your favorite work of literature (a particular poem, poet, or novel maybe)?
I can’t choose a single favorite. I love poetry and literature for several different reasons and I think that different works of poetry and literature have enriched my life in different ways. I can read David Sedaris over and over again and still laugh until I’m crying and marvel over his perfected comedic timing. The more I learn about poetry and literature, the more particular my interests become also. I read Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm and was blown away by not only the anticipation of modernist literature in the experimental style of her writing, but also by her progressiveness, which I think even surpasses many of our contemporary thinkers. Oscar Wilde has also greatly influenced the way in which I consciously navigate and perceive the world.
Do you have any thoughts on what literary organizations like HoCoPoLitSo can do to engage young people?
This is a tough question. It’s hard to get people of any age interested in poetry. Billy Collins says that high school gives people “anti-poetry deflector shields.” Any time poetry is encountered, the automatic response is to avoid it. Becoming interested in poetry is like opening a set of nesting dolls. You have to begin with poems that speak to non-poetry adherents. Then, like the nesting dolls that become smaller and smaller, your interests become more and more refined as you explore various kinds of poetry. I think these anti-poetry deflector shields come from teachers who forgo the big nesting dolls and instead present their students with poems that require the refined interest that comes with exposure and extensive study. I gained this perspective through my experiences at Howard Community College and through attending HoCoPoLitSo events. HoCoPoLitSo has done an exceptional job in the past few years bringing poets to Howard County who excite young people and act as gateways into poetry.
Here’s at least one awesome young person in whose hands we can trust the future of poetry in Howard County and beyond.
-Laura Yoo
Member, HoCoPoLitSo Board of Directors
“Why poetry?”: Steven Leyva wins teachers’ hearts and minds
Steven Leyva
The Friday Professional Development Day for Howard County’s English and language arts middle and high school teachers was cold and damp, there was a car fire on Route 29 that jammed traffic for an hour, and teachers were rushing in late and texting their supervisors.
Steven Leyva had one hour to convince those teachers that poetry was worth teaching.
Leyva faced the auditorium of 220 educators and cleared his throat.
The power point he had prepared flashed the question: “Why Poetry?”
Leyva, sponsored by HoCoPoLitSo to give the teachers a poetry pep talk, passed around two sheets of paper, asking the teachers to write two collective poems. The first lines? “I know that poetry is not” and “Poetry has power.”
At first, some of the teachers were imitating their students — coughing, checking their phones, shuffling papers. But as Leyva explained that he edited the Little Patuxent Review, taught in the Baltimore City schools for years (a round of applause for that one), and was now a professor at the University of Baltimore, they quieted down.
Then a quote from Richard Howard appeared on the screen: “Verse reverses, prose proceeds.” Leyva started to talk about the “magical” things poetry can do: act as a force for healing, open up a student who is closed down, make connections between people, create empathy.
But everyone has to start as a novice, he says, even teachers.
“This is vital when we’re trying to engage students who may not be interested or receptive to poetry,” Leyva said. “It’s OK to be a beginner. You’re don’t have to be good at this right away.”
He read Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese,” and talked about letting the language wash over you as you read, about how meeting a poem is like meeting a new person because it’s both intimidating and exciting.
“It’s demanding, it’s hard, but that’s the beauty of it,” he said. “Some of them may have past negative experiences with poetry, they may have anxiety over misinterpreting.”
Too many classrooms treat poetry as a riddle to be solved, he said, “it must be an experience,” and then quoted one of his professors, “Art doesn’t need our judgment, it needs our attention.”
He asked for volunteers, and four teachers trooped up to the stage to read “Memory from Childhood” by Antonio Machado. The first teacher read the words of the poem. The second vocalized each piece of punctuation, “Comma!” or “Colon,” he boomed. The third said “line break” at each line break, and the fourth said “stanza break,” when the poem reached that point. If they messed up, as they did several times, they had to start again at the beginning, which drew hoots and laughter from their fellow teachers. The audience, he explained, had to recite the title and be the silence in the poem. That exercise, Leyva said, showed students that everything in the poem, even its white space, is put there on purpose, and needs a reader’s attention. “Everything matters,” he said.
By the time he had the teachers yelling out each personal pronoun (“Me!” and “My,” they chorused) in Lucille Clifton’s “Won’t You Celebrate with Me,” they were leaning forward in their chairs, more than interested.
And when a YouTube clip of “Direct Orders” by Anis Majgani wasn’t loud enough because of a sound system glitch, someone called out, “Read one of your poems!” Leyva did, reciting a poem about New Orleans, his hometown.
He went on to talk about form, rhyming (“you’re saying these two things belong together — “there’s a reason why wife, life and knife all rhyme,” he said), resources, and the skills that reading poetry can develop (qualitative judgment, empathy and imagination).
Teachers asked him about web sites and Split This Rock, stayed after to talk to him about submitting poetry to the Little Patuxent Review, and wrote down the TED talks and books he suggested. And a few gave him a standing ovation.
Jocelyn Hieatzman, a teacher at Oakland Mills High School, wrote afterward about the program, “I spend the next hour listening, and interacting, and awkwardly jumping onto the stage, and feeling chills and tears and ideas flow through me. I shout ‘N’Awleans’ and listen to spoken word from the Seattle Grand Slam poetry championship; I listen to Stephen Leyva recite his own poetry from memory like his life depended on it; I read through poems that touch on complex ideas and sadness and culture and race and identity and beauty. Suddenly, everything is important, everything has weight. I think of our students and their big emotions and secrets and ideas and gifts.
“There’s still a car fire snarling traffic on Rt. 29, and we are are still distracted and cold and worried about all the the things that middle and high school teachers worry about. But ‘we’ have become a ‘we’ and share a collective experience, and we dig deep, and we remember why we love to teach what we teach, and we carry this on. And we carry this on. And suddenly … everything is important, everything has weight.”
And those community poems? The ones Leyva asked the teachers to write, with each contributing a line? The paper filled up fast. The writing is tough to read, but the poems are published here, and like most poems, they’re worth reading.
— Susan Thornton Hobby
HoCoPoLitSo recording secretary
HoCoPoLitSo 