Sunday, February 27, 2000
Poems soothe teen souls
BY KAREN SAMPLES
The Cincinnati Enquirer
UNION — A poem has come over Sarah Whitley. She has to get it out. Gripping a stubby pencil, she leans into her notebook like a running back protecting the ball.
Around her is the rest of the poetry club at Ryle High School. Sarah is one of the shyest; other girls are playfully doing each other's hair.
In the back of the room, President Kellyn Chaffins talks poetry with a group of boys. Kellyn is bubbly and cute. The boys are rebellious types — one wears a T-shirt covered with skulls and zombies.
Poetry is everywhere these days, and everyone is doing it. The diversity of Ryle's 2-year-old club reflects a national phenomenon.
“It's amazing how many kids are kind of closet poets,” says English teacher Nancy Walton, who sponsors the club. “Often their ideas are very deep. You can see what's on their minds.”
Some students pen love poems and read them aloud to classmates. Others hide their work in dresser drawers and lockers.
Taylor Mackintosh, a junior, gets some of his best ideas while brushing his teeth. Mike Rains, a freshman, mines his dreams for inspiration.
Ms. Walton wasn't surprised when a student she barely knew handed her a sheaf of poems this year. They weren't written for any class. The student, Angel Herrmann, simply wanted a reader.
Angel has had a rough year. Over the summer, she moved from a small town in Owen County to live with her father in Colorado. When that fell through, she moved in with her grandparents in Union.
The culture shock was enormous. Ryle has 2,000 students. Angel's old school had 300.
“There, I was somebody,” the sophomore says, “and here that means nothing. It's like, gone, poof — I'm nobody now.”
To sort out her emotions, she writes poetry. It's a feverish, cathartic exercise: She neither pauses nor makes corrections later.
“Sometimes I don't understand myself, but that's the way I find out who I really am, is through my writing,” Angel says. “It's like an outburst of your emotions, all at once, in words.”
Many of Ryle's young authors caught the bug after reading poetry in school. They can name their favorite works: “A Red, Red Rose,” by Robert Burns, “The Raven” or “Annabelle Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe.
This fresh interest in poetry has infiltrated popular culture. There are poetry-publishing rockers, such as Jewel. This month on the television show Once and Again, two teen-agers kissed after discovering a mutual love of verse.
The Poetry Society of America is putting poems on buses and in subways. The American Academy of Poets has struck a deal with Loews movie theaters; in honor of National Poetry Month this April, poems will appear on 1,800 screens around the country.
Despite the mass-marketing, poetry's impact remains highly personal.
Robert Penn Warren, the famous Kentucky writer, once called most poems “fragmentary autobiography.” Among teen-age authors, they aren't so much fragments as exhaustive self-analyses.
Scott Thomas, a freshman, writes under the pseudonym “Thomas Scott” because he thinks it sounds more literary. Not long ago, he was shaken by an unexpected encounter with an old girlfriend.
This is what he said about it: “I guess I kind of liked her a lot, or something.”
This is what he wrote:
All this pain
All this suffering
For what
Just to love
Just to lose.
Breakups are a popular theme among students, but any topic is fair game. Last year, Ryle's poetry club members published an anthology of their work. It included poems about God, messy bedrooms and falling asleep to the sound of rain.
There were flashes of insight into other people's lives. Dann Richardson, for instance, wrote this of a man staggering down Bourbon Street:
Memories from a poverty stricken childhood
Whirl behind broken eyes
When he tapdanced on this street
With bottlecaps on his feet
Held in place by ribbons from the civil rights movement.
While some students play with descriptive verse, most stick to what they know. Buffeted by peer pressure, hormones and homework, they are drawn to dark themes: running away, wearing masks, feeling alone, surviving. They often write about love.
Sophomore Sarah Whitley has yet to read one of her poems aloud, because of her shyness. At the same time, she knows she would find support, even from the brooding rebels in the back.
Poetry is like that. It makes the writer vulnerable and the listener empathetic.
“We don't feel anyone should feel bad or shy or scared to share their poetry,” Sarah says. “We feel poetry should be for everyone.”
Karen Samples is Kentucky columnist for the Enquirer. Her column appears Thursdays and Sundays. She can be reached at 578-5584, or by e-mail at ksamples@enquirer.com.
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