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.