I Want to Be a High School Poet: Reflections on a Poetry Contest

Zen Buddhists have something to teach a poet like me when they speak of cultivating “soshin,” the Japanese term meaning “beginner’s mind.” Such a mind approaches a particular discipline with fresh, eager eyes and without preconceptions. As the late Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki writes, “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind, there are very few.”

I have another way of putting it. I want to be a high school poet.

Like I used to be. I wrote poetry in high school. Some 50 years later, I have a master’s degree in creative writing, publication in numerous journals, and a book of poetry to my name. As someone who has published sonnets and sapphics as well as free verse, I could claim “expert” status. Yet I identify with high school students who dare to share their first poems with the world, and do so with the joy and excitement of beginners even though their craftsmanship often rivals that of older, published poets. 

At age 68, I can say I’m still in high school without fear of committing an utter hyperbole. Since 2013, I’ve had the honor of coordinating the annual high school contest of the St. Louis Poetry Center. My responsibilities begin with recruiting a judge. Our judges have been highly regarded poets from across the country such as Naomi Shihab Nye, Jericho Brown, and Maureen McLane.  

Next comes a publicity campaign to solicit entries—up to three poems apiece—from high school students within a 100-mile radius of St. Louis.  I write press releases for high school newspapers and mail out fliers to English teachers in more than 170 high schools.

I also step inside high school classrooms as one of several teaching artists who conduct poetry workshops under the auspices of the St. Louis Poetry Center. Besides drumming up interest in the contest, the workshops are valuable in their own right as educational experiences. I lead students in writing exercises that typically involve prompts. My favorite prompts are utensils—a butter knife, spoon and fork—that I place on each desk. I begin by asking students to describe, say, a spoon’s shape and texture. Its inscriptions. Its heft in the hand. The sound it makes when dropped on the floor. The reflections on its surface. 

Then I ask the students what memories and feelings come to mind when they consider one or another utensil. Such as: a meal at their beloved grandparents using the good silverware. Such as: the scalding heat of a dishwasher, something akin to torture for dirty utensils. 

Finally, I invite the students to forge all these observations into a poem that answers the question, “What would a fork tell a knife? Or spoon?” I challenge their imagination by asking them to assume the fork’s identity and speak in its voice.

The poems they proceed to write and read out loud explore territories that go far beyond food. The joy of the fork selected from the dark drawer, brought into the light. The frustrated romance of the fork and spoon, separated by a plate. The knife’s potential for violence as well as work. Students often tell me they’re surprised by what came out of them. When they say this, I know they’ve experienced the joy of creating a poem. 

After laying the groundwork for the contest, I wait for the entries, which are due by March 1. Most of the work arrives by email. Some poems come via snail mail. A few are scrawled in pencil or pen.

In late fall, entries sprinkle in. By late February, it’s a heavy rainfall. I read hundreds of poems during this stretch, reliving my own high school days of newly surging emotions, scholastic and romantic anxieties, skepticism about the societal order, and snark. When a poem strikes me as particularly well made and powerful, I will send back a brief note with a compliment.

In early March, my friend Nancy Pritchard, a fellow poet, sits down with me to evaluate the entries and pick 25 or so finalist poems to submit to our judge. This year’s judge was Marjorie Maddox, a creative-writing professor at Lock Haven University and the author of 11 collections of poetry for both youth and adults. If anyone shares the mission of the St. Louis Poetry Center to cultivate poets and an audience for their work, it’s Marjorie.

Once I get the results from the judges, I call the winners and honorable mentions to deliver the news.  It’s a privilege to deliver good news, especially when recipients let out a squeal or “Oh my God!”  They feel like a million dollars; I feel like a million dollars. The prize money in the contest is much, much less—$225 for first place—but it’s enough to make the point that an outstanding poem deserves as much acclaim as a football touchdown. I usually try to make a small joke during the phone conversation about how the poet might spend the loot. 

Traditionally, the contest culminates in an awards ceremony in which the students read their poem, receive their checks, and line up for photos.  Teachers, parents, siblings and friends swell the audience, and afterwards everyone chats during a cheese-and-crackers reception. This awards ceremony also features the winners of two contests for adult poets, some of whom have books to their credit.  I like this mingling of rookies and veterans. The students can study the published poets and imagine a similar future for themselves. And the published poets can be reminded of why they first chose to write, and reaffirm that choice.

We departed from this tradition in 2021. There was no awards ceremony, at least not in person. There were no classroom workshops either. The deadly Covid-19 pandemic, which has upended our nation and the world since the spring of 2020, also upended our contest. Indeed, we at the St Louis Poetry Center wondered whether high schoolers frazzled by virtual learning would take time to enter their work, and whether their equally frazzled teachers would encourage them to do so. Was this going to be a bad year for high school poetry?

It wasn’t. Almost 90 students in area schools on both sides of the Mississippi River as well as the Meramec and Missouri submitted poems to our 2021 contest. That tally was about 20 percent below what we normally receive, but way more than what we expected during a pandemic year. This strong flow of entries testifies to poetry’s vital place in our lives. Like other forms of art, it’s essential, more essential than masks and hand sanitizer. And poetry is compelling as well as essential. Poets are compelled to write, despite duress.  They might write their best work under duress. The poems selected for honors in 2021 support that argument. In my opinion, they rank among the finest we’ve ever showcased. 

It wasn’t only the pandemic that created cauldron conditions for poetry. The murder of George Floyd last year, captured on video, and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that followed roused the nation’s conscience about racial injustice. A sociopathic president continued to dishonor the nation’s founding principles and stoked hatred, division, and ultimately, insurrection. Meanwhile forests burned and the sea rose as our climate kept changing ever so slowly for the worse. 

The poems we received from high school students in our 2021 contest reflected a world roiled by not just the usual romantic break-ups and coming of age, but also massive societal tremors. In her first place poem titled “Partition as Narrated by an American Daughter,” Oviya Srihari wrote poignantly about violent division, not in this country, but in the land of her grandparents’ birth as it split into the nations of India and Pakistan in 1947:

“1947 lives in their blood / like America lives in / mine /
i cannot claim my grandparents’ suffering when my tongue
no longer bleeds the same color / no longer shapes the same sounds
/ no longer knows how to speak to them
/ long distance / longer time since i love you /”

Grace Ruo, our second-place winner, also  wrote about the making of identity in her poem titled “African in America.” Born in Kenya, Grace describes how African-Americans and African immigrants alike encounter racism despite their differences and sometimes antagonism: 

“Girls with skin the same shade
Of don’t belong
As they made a mockery of my mother tongue.

We made enemies of each other as if our family trees didn’t share

the same roots.

As if America didn’t wish to make strange fruits of us.”

In a poem titled “Building Sandcastles” that won third place for Cedric Bruges, an innocuous beach pastime gives rise to another picture of dystopia: 

“…you forget that the realm you tediously labored for
will soon crumble and be swept away by a casual wave
of nature’s hand, stepped on by strangers as an afterthought,
and you will have to leave it as the night approaches.”

Winners and honorable mentions reported on what it’s like to live right now on uneasy Earth, and did so with verve, wit and heart. These young writers make me confident that poetry will be in good hands as long as they write.  And their work inspires me to be just as daring, just as lyrical, just as funny, and just as bone-blunt honest in my own writing. 

I benefited from a dose of beginner’s-mind wisdom during an online awards ceremony we conducted last month. I asked the contestants what they had learned about poetry—and the process of writing it—over the last year. Rachael Voss, who received an honorable mention for her poem “Moonshine Boy,” had this to say. It’s worth remembering as human society continues to shudder.

“I’ve learned that when it comes to writing poetry, the process is imperfect, which is very similar to the process of creating an amazing country like this one, which  is imperfect and very chaotic sometimes and frustrating. I’ve applied that to my poetry and realized that if it’s not flowing, that’s okay, that’s usually how you get to a good end result.”

Now, onto the 2022 contest, and more soshin.

Book Review: Inside Out Is a Poetry Collection That Shows—Not Tells—You How to Write Poetry

Imagine taking a dance class in which your spend the first three weeks at a desk hearing lectures. Here’s how to do the jitterbug. Here’s how to do the waltz. Hold your partner like this. Put your left foot there, and do this with your right foot, just like the diagram says. You take notes, yawn, and glance at the attractive classmate sitting across from you, who is glancing back. You haven’t moved a muscle all morning…

No, no, no, you say. From the very start, the dance class belongs on the dance floor, where the teacher demonstrates the jitterbug, the waltz, the samba, with a partner to the beat of the music. Hey, this looks like fun. I think I can do that.  I am going to do that.

The preceding thought experiment illustrates the pedagogy of Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems with Insider Exercises by poet Marjorie Maddox. A professor of English and creative writing at Lock Haven University, Maddox gives readers 27 poems embodying and illuminating different aspects of the craft that prove showing is better than telling. They’re written with the light-heartedness and verve of a catchy tune that pulls you out on the dance floor. Inside Out is a book that would rev up a high school English class, or the daily writing session of a lone poet. The exercises at the book’s end, which provide additional guidance and needed structure for the learning process, are just as high-spirited and inviting.

As you might expect, the line-up of poems includes those about poetic forms—two witty sonnets on how to write sonnets, an especially masterful sestina on sestinas, and a couplet etude (“Poetic twins all dressed in rhyme/stroll side-by-side in two straight lines”), for example. However, Maddox wisely leads off with poems that go to the heart of poetry, no matter how it’s packaged. The first poem, “How to See a Poem,” celebrates imagination. “Close your eyes,” we’re instructed right off the bat. “Just keep not/looking into what’s expected/until you’re free to see/with vision that’s beyond/the ordinary.”

The poems that follow tell us how to hear, taste, smell, and touch a poem (“There’s a peppermint odor to odes,” for example). In other words, write poetry grounded in our senses. “Tug of War between Concrete and Abstract” rightfully warns us not to stray from our nerve endings (“Abstract wears gloves and pulls limply”).

Other poems on craft basics such as similes and metaphors, personification, enjambment, and onomatopoeia give an aspiring poet plenty of moves whether he or she is dancing a sonnet or free verse. Who knew that a poem about the caesura (“is sleepy-eyed, sometimes/dozing—ah, yes—even midsentence”) could make you laugh?

And that’s the point of Maddox’s modus operandi. Make poetry fun. Yes, poetry is fun if only because its language gives us pleasure, even when the subject matter is sad or dark. If pleasure isn’t the right word, maybe uplift is. If you can sing your blues, or dance them, maybe you’ll feel better. In that respect, Inside Out is a valuable self-help book for writers and writing teachers.

Book Review: An Episcopal Priest Locates the Peaceful Eye of the Justice Storm

A new book by the Rev. Mike Angell titled How Can I Live Peacefully with Justice? arrives during a year when the cry for justice in the nation’s streets—triggered by the apparent murders of Black citizens by police and vigilantes—seems anything but calm. The publisher brands the work as A Little Book of Guidance, but that label is misleading. How Can I Live Peacefully with Justice? is weighty with expansive and helpful insights arising from the author’s efforts to build what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the Beloved Community,” which seems so distant now. 

The rector of an Episcopalian church in an inner-ring suburb of St. Louis—my church, as a point of full disclosure—Angell describes marching for racial justice in the wake of Michael Brown’s death, transforming a local laundromat into a once-a-month community center, and partnering with human-rights activists in El Salvador.   Angell asks readers to reject a negative “unjust peace”—a mere absence of conflict—that’s based on repression and instead strive for a positive, dynamic peace flowing from wrongs redressed and relationships restored, however tumultuous that process may be.

How Can I Live Peacefully with Justice? is small in the way a gem is small—precisely cut and polished. Angell writes beautifully, persuasively, and with humility, addressing us from his one particular life. He reckons with his inheritance of white privilege, the pitfalls of ego, which are especially deep for clergy, and the struggle and joy of coming out as a gay man. It’s a prerequisite self-examination for achieving the inner equilibrium needed in the fight for justice. Angell explains that it’s “less peace within yourself and more peace with yourself.” Accordingly, he questions his inner “shoulds” when he feels “frustrated, inadequate or entitled” in justice work:  “How do I think this meeting should be going? How do I imagine folks should be hearing me? Why do I think my preferred outcomes should be the case?”

In the end, Angell ably answers the question he poses in the title of his book. Make peace with yourself, build relationships of trust, and get set for an adventure. After all, what Angell has in mind “isn’t the calm that comes because the storm has ceased, rather it is a comfort that happens as I get more comfortable riding the waves.” It’s a believable peace for 2020 and beyond.

An Interview with Robert Lowes

Photo by Saundra Lowes

Why did you choose An Honest Hunger for your book title?

The phrase comes from a poem titled “Perch.” It compares the fate of this small fish when it is caught by a human angler’s deceitful, wormed hook to the fate of being swallowed whole by a largemouth bass, “fellow fin, an honest hunger.” The phrase describes my life as a person of faith—specifically, as a Christian—who wants to follow God while remaining intellectually and emotionally honest. And like everyone else, I’m not always honest with myself or others. I think God’s hunger for us—I believe he loves us—is more honest than what we muster for him.

And a hunger for God, as I’m often reminded, is not just a quest for inner peace. People of faith hunger for a more just society, modeled after the kingdom of God. Sometimes that means marching in the streets. Blessed are the troublemakers. God hungers for us to do the right thing.

Many of your poems are written in traditional forms such as the sonnet, the sestina, and the villanelle. Why do you craft poems to fit such specific molds?

I have several reasons. I grew up reading formal poetry in addition to free verse, and I liked the musicality of meter and rhyme—sound patterns in general. I have come to appreciate how different forms create different poetic effects. The 14 lines of the sonnet embody compression—crushing a lump of coal into a diamond. And if you write an Italian sonnet, such as my own “Deep Space Photo,” you have the possibilities inherent in the octet, the first eight lines; and the sestet, the final six lines. The octet can ask a question, and the sestet can answer it. Or the octet can make an assertion, and the sestet can challenge it. The repetition of words in the sestina and lines in the villanelle can entrance the reader, and if you vary those words and lines and turn them on their heads, you can surprise the reader (provided you surprise yourself, as Robert Frost famously said). Finally, I find that confining myself to formal patterns paradoxically can liberate my imagination and wordplay. However, I also write free verse and prose poetry, so I’m not in one camp.

Who are some of your favorite poets living today?

A. E. Stallings is one of them. She approaches Frost in her mastery of form as well as her depth of feeling. If I go back to late poets whose lives overlap mine, I would add Czeslaw Milosz, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1980 for a body of work that merged the public (think political) and private realms in a Shakespearian way. While always delighting in old favorites such as Dickinson and Wordsworth, lately I have plowed more ancient ground with the likes of Sappho and Horace, who was a great raconteur.

How has your career as a journalist informed your approach to writing poetry?

Prose and poetry are on a spectrum. Journalism ought to sing at times like poetry. And poetry ought to have some of the logical landmarks of prose lest it be unintelligible. That said, I rely more heavily on my analytical left brain when I work as a reporter, and on my intuitive, creative right brain when I turn to poetry. But there’s crossover. Like a reporter, I instinctively fact-check my poems for accuracy when they venture into factual matters. Yes, an iPhone is soldered together, as I state in the eponymous poem.

A bit of my healthcare reporting has seeped into An Honest Hunger. There’s a poem about flipping through an illustrated medical dictionary. Several poems dwell on information technology, which reflect my extensive reporting on electronic health records and the computerization of medicine in general (see “Knowledge Worker Aces His Constellations”). On a more personal note, the sestina titled “Night Nurse” sprang from open-heart surgery to repair my leaky mitral valve.

You have organized poetry contests for high school students in St. Louis and led poetry workshops in their classes. Have you learned anything about poetry in these activities?

While some people may view poetry as an esoteric, otherworldly art form, I think every person is capable of poetry, even if it is just a single fresh description or figure of speech. I remember giving a high school English class an exercise in creating similes. How do you fill in the blank if I say, “As eager as….” One student raised her hand and said, “As eager as a new disease.” I was blown away. At the time, the world was battling an outbreak of the Ebola virus, and her simile struck me as a perfect way to describe a ravenous pathogen. By applauding one example of creativity in the classroom, I hope to encourage more of it.

One of your reviewers described An Honest Hunger as “laugh-out-loud funny.” Do you try to be funny?

Humor is a way of coping with life outside the Garden of Eden. It’s better than curling up in a fetal position.

What’s the best practical wisdom you've received from a fellow poet that has informed your work?

Always be reading great poets. They show the way forward. Their style invariably rubs off in small ways, which is inevitable, and yet they also give you the courage to be your own poet, develop your own style and voice. You build something new on top of the tradition. And somebody else builds on top of your work.