On March 15, Cameron Clarke, a senior from Dr. Ronald McNair Academic High School in Jersey City, was the runner-up in the New Jersey Poetry Out Loud state finals. CavanKerry Press is thrilled to award his teacher, Holly Smith, the inaugural scholarship to the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching. (Kavita Oza’s teacher was unable to attend the conference.) Here are Holly’s thoughts on Poetry Out Loud, Cameron and the scholarship.
-Teresa Carson
TERESA CARSON
How and why did you get involved with Poetry Out Loud?
HOLLY SMITH
I can’t recall how I heard of the program, but I stumbled upon it and it seemed like a project too interesting to pass up. The incredible fact that the materials and registration are free, and that it is a national program, also made it seem worth pursuing.
TERESA CARSON
How many Dr. Ronald E. McNair Academic High School students participated in POL? Tell me a bit about the students who participated.
HOLLY SMITH
It is always difficult to add another program into an already packed and time-crunched school year, so the past three years were all about building visibility, momentum, and student buy-in into the program. Our students are all college-bound, highly diverse in terms of family background and economic situations, and are eager to do extra-curriculars. The problem is they are so booked up, there is interest, but often the follow-through is harder to come by. The program has been small, with perhaps fewer than 10 students vying for Regionals. This year, we were able for the first time to get a school bus and were able to bring students to watch the competition. That alone has amped up interest, and now the students are keen to drive this process. We are planning on hosting a major school-level competition and also a District-level competition with the other 6 high schools in Jersey City. Because each school can send competitors, it allows us all to be a community and support each other. Having Cameron Clarke so visibly be successful and so publicly celebrated at MAHS and in the District has put POL on the next-level. The program has been modest. A few classroom teachers have had students memorize and present, and students who had independent interest to participate selected pieces on their own. Then we had an after-school competition with judges and only the students who were interested in competing. It was frankly structured more like an audition.
TERESA CARSON
What value is added to your students’ experience of poetry by participating in POL?
HOLLY SMITH
POL allows them to be self-directed and own the piece they select, while still providing that level of curated, quality poems. Students end up spending way more time browsing, reading, researching and thinking about poetry when forced to make their own choices, so they will end up reading more than if you had simply assigned them reading. It also lets them interact with a piece before a formal “teachery” reading is imposed on it. And as a teacher, it allows me to coach, rather than teach. There is no objective or test that circumscribes meaning. The meaning is in the performance.
TERESA CARSON
How did you help Cameron prepare for his performances at the school/regional/state level?
HOLLY SMITH
My sense of the competition is that being true to your own unique timbre and picking pieces that play to that quality is the way to go. And Cameron’s got some pipes on him. I can take little to no credit for Cameron’s success. Because our program is so small, Cameron committed to do the work because of his interest in performance. Because both our schedules were so tight, he did a few “check-ins” with me, first for me to see if he had come to an understanding of who the speaker of his piece was and what the poem meant. He had spent some time watching some of the POL videos on YouTube to get a feel of the style of performance. Then we did a few rehearsals (to which Cameron had come having memorized the lines quite early on) and calibrated choices he wanted to make. I tried to not insert my own history or interpretations with the pieces, and just tried to ask him questions as to why he was making choices, and how he thought that communicated the meaning.
TERESA CARSON
What were the highlights of your POL experience in your school, at the regional competition and at the state finals?
HOLLY SMITH
Selfishly, it is seeing the students really catch fire in excitement with both POL and this year’s first Poem In Your Pocket Day. There is a strong poetry nerd cohort growing, which is going to make building the program much easier! The other highlight is having the students (and not just my own students, but the wonderful competitors on the Regional and State levels) show me which pieces they relate to. I have already started to share and incorporate these “road-tested” works in the classroom. I tend to pick disciplines that there is no way one person can ever claim even a fraction of knowing the canon – film, literature, poetry. There is just so much out there and more being created constantly. So seeing students recite, and being exposed to new poems via guest poets reading, I build my store of teachable poems. (I loved Gary Whitehead’s “Glossary of Chickens”)
TERESA CARSON
What advice or thoughts would you offer teachers who want to get their students involved in POL?
HOLLY SMITH
I’d say, just say yes. Commit to bringing the program to your school. Let the students speak for themselves – it can be as simple as having a brief meeting and just screening some particularly good student pieces from YouTube, passing out some of the poems off the website and having students read some aloud, and giving them the POL website. Get buy-in from students FIRST, and they will drive the adults to want to participate in giving up class time, to volunteer to judge on school-level, etc. Put all your deadlines in your calendar as soon as you have them, and set your own internal deadlines (for classroom teachers, for school-level competition, for the competitors to have picked pieces, to be “off book”, etc.).
TERESA CARSON
Based on Cameron’s success at the state finals, you were awarded the scholarship, sponsored by CavanKerry Press, to the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching. How do you feel about winning this scholarship?
HOLLY SMITH
It is like finding a puzzle piece under the couch I was not aware I was missing. I was unfamiliar with the conference, so I got to be tapped on the shoulder and pointed towards this whole world of things that dovetail with things that I do on a modest scale, or would like to do, as a teacher and human being. I like conferences that remind a teacher the flow and energy of being a student, let you encounter a work with fresh eyes, and be given structure and space to write. It lets you carve out time to focus on activities that are integral to being a good teacher – but that usually get short shrift because the very real impossibility of what teachers are asked to do on a daily basis. And you get to do this with colleagues who are committed to the same project. I do identify as a writer, and perhaps more specifically as an amateur poet, however the demands of earning a paycheck and working in public education give me copious excuses as to why I have no chapbook of my own.
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