I've been asked by the North Carolina Poetry Society, for the second year, to judge a poetry contest for young writers. I am to select three "winners" and three "honorable mentions" from a group of some 30 or 40 poems written by students in the 5th through the 9th grades.
The spread from 5th to 9th graders seems a little unwieldy to me--there's a world of difference between a 5th and a 9th grader. But, as my experience with writers of Wednesdays@One shows, you never know where the next good poem is going to come from, or from what level of experience. Besides, last year's competition produced quite a few surprises from kids you'd think are too young to write poetry as good as the poems I read.
So, I plowed into my assignment over the past two weeks with high hopes.
Sure enough, this year's group of young poets wrote some very fine poems, overall and all things considered. There are short lyrics and long narrative poems, personifications and apostrophes, rhyming verse and blank verse, hip-hoppy stuff and the more traditional metrical pieces. Some devised quick, two-beat lines, others let it all hang out with lines that unfurled across the page. Several students wrote concrete poetry!
I can honestly say that every effort was genuine, thoughtful, and indeed poetic, the product of artistic verbal choices confronted and made, as all good poems must be.
But alas, I have been invited to judge a contest with "winners" and "winners not acknowledged" (If a kid sits down to compose art from the material of language, she's a winner in my book!). I can't share my selections here, but I can tell you they are special poems. Several are beautiful lyrics that show a level of literariness I don't remember when I was a 5th or even a 9th grader. A few show great promise for more and better things to come . . . perhaps an inaugural poem at some future president's swearing in on the steps of the Capitol?
For the second year, I feel grateful to have the opportunity to witness what's being written by people much, much younger than I. It's a learning experience. I get to see what kids think poetry is, and what language is, for that matter. I get to watch as each writer encounters obvious problems of composition--word choice, line ending, opening and closing gambits, rhythm, sustaining an image, and all the other etceteras of poetry--and then finds solutions or, at least, chooses a path. I'm also grateful to have a little insight into how poetry is being taught in the classroom, even if I have to infer a good deal from what I've been reading. The fact that kids are still being encouraged to make art out of words is very, very reassuring to me, even if most of them grow up to be accountants or store managers.
This year's young poet contest comes with a theme: the environment. Most of the poems want us to know that the sky is falling, has already fallen . . . and that "polluters" are responsible. And when polluters are called out in many of these poems, they are invariably "them," never "me." The vision is so dark and apocalyptic that I couldn't help marking many a poem with "Who's teaching these kids this stuff?" The answer isn't simply their teachers, unless you include among that group the mainstream media, parents, civic leaders, the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense League, and Greta Thunberg. Not only are our children awash in a sea (literally) of plastic straws and leaked diesel fuel, but their smart phones, too. Which devices, ironically, contribute to the problem, no?
Does this mean I'd like to see some climate denial in the mix of these poems, to provide a more "balanced" view of our global predicament? Of course not! But what I 'd like to see more of is a call to action, a sense that ours is a world worth preserving, conserving, defending, making more habitable for all creatures great and small. I'd rest easier knowing that kids are being encouraged to develop a worldview that, bad as things are, something can, should, and must be done . . . and not by "them" but by "me." And I would have liked to see this sense in more than just one or two of the poems given to me by the Poetry Society.
As I say, the poems I've been reading for this year's young poet contest are quite good, each in its own way, sincerely written, "believed by" each writer, and a welcome addition to our poetic conversation. And it's never too late, Ms or Mr. Teacher. If you're reading this, I hope you give some extra thought to helping your charges get beyond the "disaster-denial" dichotomy of our current climate conversation, at least in their poetry, and give some thought to what "I," "we," all of us are going to do to make the world a better, healthier world. With a good turn of phrase, if possible.
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