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My story, in relation to literature and writing, began when I was a little girl, obsessed with rhyming and listening to my mom reading novels out loud to me. I would ask what words mean and try to find new words to describe feelings and thoughts and to tell stories. I was in love with words, with making these things I saw around me that danced in my head breath on paper and become alive. I saw beauty in the things around me and found comfort in writing out what I saw and how it moved me.
In school I had few teachers who wanted to convey writing as an art, a gift and something free and unable to put in a box. When I reached high school, everything became formed and covered in right and wrong answers. I had a hard time interpreting poetry that was given to me in monotone voices and pop quizzes with multiple choice answers on what Dickinson and Whitman meant, precisely. I kept writing but was being taught poetry as a dying breed of expression. There were a few teachers over the years that understood its real meaning. For the most part I was seeing something that my instructors had no passion for, therefore I was unable to grasp the passion as a student. We were given prompts and told to copy the form exactly, rhyming where they rhymed, using the same amount of words in sentences. I see now that we were being ripped off the whole time. There was something unbelievably beautiful being hidden from us. We were never given the chance to say what we wanted, how we saw things, what life was to us. We were not given our own voices.
I spent my first two years of college at a branch of Kent State, which was a pleasant experience. My writing professors had us opening books that opened my eyes to aspects of the world and writing in relation to the world in a new way. My opinions were being taken as ones that meant something. This past fall I moved to Kent to finish up the remainder of my college years. When I realized poetry writing was being offered as a course I was thrilled. Maj Regain was the professor Poetry Writing 1. He spent the class periods sending energy through the room that I wasn’t used to experiencing. He read poems with life and showed me that this art that I was so in love with was indeed a thriving form of expression. I began to immerse myself in reading and writing poetry and found comfort , ideas and something almost musical in what I read and saw. I realized that poetry was not at all dying. It was like a secret universe that was free for the taking; I just needed to be shown the first star and I was hooked.
Maj suggested taking David Hassler’s Teaching Poetry in Schools Course. I will be forever grateful to him for showing me this beautiful opportunity. I had been given a gift, a voice, and now I was being given the chance to open young eyes to this new world I had found. David's enthusiasm was contagious and everyone in our class caught it immediately. We were being taught by example the craft of "charging the air" as David refers to it. We were shown that poetry is not something you "teach," as much as a door that you need to wiggle the knob right to open, and boom, there it is. We learned how to show our students how to take a thought and run with it. How it feels, tastes, smells- where it happened, the name of the grocery store, the color of our sister’s hair. David charged the air by throwing words into it that brought everyone in the room into a similar mind set. The pencils went wild. Imagination and honesty swirled all around.
I hoped more than anything that I would be able to portray the nourishment in poetry in a different way than it had been fed to me in my high school years. I remember my nerves being out of control as I walked into the first classroom on a Friday morning at 10:55. I was introduced as a "poet" from Kent State and the eyes staring at me took me as just that. The enthusiasm that I have witnessed coming out of kindergartners and highschool seniors (and every age in between) is still something I cannot wrap around my head and I don't thing I want to. Being able to introduce poetry for what it is and watch it being used as a tool of healing, of confession and of celebration is a gift that I will never be able to repay.
I have heard that once you enter the world of poetry; you are forever a wanderer, forever homeless. I can relate to this completely because I believe that once given the freedom to explore the galaxies and caves and relationships and questions of life through words, you are free to wander so much further. I also feel that finding the Wick Poetry Center and those involved in it has given me a home. It has proven to me the power of a voice and a line and a flower and a child. It has given me legitimacy in the fact that poetry is my greatest love and having the opportunity to bring this gift to the community has been epic in my life. It has touched me more deeply than almost anything I have ever experienced.
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