A Poet Reaches Out to the Young With Rhyme, Reason--and Love : 'You Need Poetry in Every Single Human Being . . .'

By PENELOPE MOFFET

Nov. 21, 1986 12 AM PT

The woman in the green frizzed-out wig and red cap and gown beamed at the 40 young children assembled at the Fountain Valley Community Center. The children stared back, some grinning, some leaving their seats to run to her.

Dr. Fanta Cee, also known as Clara Peck Schultz, also known as the poet laureate of Fountain Valley, was about to present the Poe Family puppets: Poe-Et, Poet-Ettic, Poe-Etta-Klee, Poe-Mom and Poe-Pop.

“One good thing about this is you get to swim in love,” Schultz said, hugging a little boy.

Schultz introduced the puppets with a rhymed invitation from her poem called “Eop’s Corner”:

Write a poem on a fig - leaf

Wave it in the air

Hang it on the Poet-Tree

Poems are to share....

Behind her, a fig tree branch propped up in a bucket serving as the “poet-tree.”

Schultz, 65, is the author of Fountain Valley’s official poem, called, aptly enough, “Fountain Valley,” which was adopted by the city in 1974. For more than 15 years she has been giving public performances of poetry at libraries, schools, teachers’ conventions and children’s folk festivals because she believes musical language should be a part of daily life.

“You need poetry in every single human being in the world,” Schultz said. “I don’t think scientists are doing such a hot job of preserving the world. It’s up to the arts and God almighty to pull us out. Not everybody believes in God, but everybody can respond to art, to poetry.”

A total of 250 children, ranging from 2 to 8 years old, came to Schultz’s three presentations Monday to listen to the “doctor,” help chant poems and giggle at several “silly-willies” she had written:

Silly-willy used the glue

To brush his teeth last night

Now he cannot talk or sing

His teeth are stuck too tight!

At each session, Schultz held the children’s attention by “the warmth she generates,” said Phyllis Brown, Fountain Valley’s head librarian. Schultz’s appearance earlier this week had helped launch National Children’s Book Week activities at the Fountain Valley Public Library.

Schultz, who has been a poet all her life, wrote the “silly-willies” when her own three children were small. She also writes historical and inspirational articles as well as adult poems, some of which were collected into a book, “Because of the Wind in the Wheat,” published by the Bristol, Ind.-based Wyndham Hall Press. Friends and the library have published other Schultz poems in two small books, “Personal Passion” (a long religious poem) and “Cameron’s Tale” (a children’s story).

Schultz wrote Fountain Valley’s city poem at the request of the Fountain Valley Bicentennial Committee, of which she was a member. Today the poem hangs, framed, among plaques on a City Council conference room wall. Beneath the verse, the author is described as the “Fountain Valley Poet Laureate.”

City Council minutes show no record of Schultz ever being formally appointed to the post, but Jan Wilhelm, former chair of the city bicentennial committee, said she and other community leaders consider Schultz to be the city poet laureate. And she is “introduced from countless (civic) platforms” as such, Schultz said. She has also written commemorative poems for her home town’s library and historical society.

In general, city poet laureates and official city poems are rare, although many cities have adopted official songs. Calls to a number of Orange County, Los Angeles and Riverside city halls and arts organizations turned up only one other local poet considered to be his town’s laureate--T. Duncan Stewart of Newport Beach. Stewart wrote some Bicentennial poems for Newport in 1976 but has not written an official city poem.

Many state poet laureates have been named across the country, however. (Los Angeles writer Charles Garrigus, a retired legislator, is poet laureate for California.) According to Elliot Figman, executive director of the New York-based Poets and Writers organization, the laureates’ duties vary from state to state. Some poet laureates write verse for various civic occasions. On a national level, earlier this year Robert Penn Warren was named the first U.S. poet laureate.

John Brander, a Santa Ana lawyer who is the chair of the literary arts disciplines committee of the Orange County Arts Alliance and editor of the California State Poetry Quarterly, believes poet laureate awards should not be too frequently bestowed or it would “diminish” the awards’ significance. However, he added, “Clara Schultz has been prominent in Fountain Valley for many years, and in her case, it (the designation) has meaning for her community.”

Schultz, who moved from Spokane, Wash., to Garden Grove with her husband, Jack, in 1960, has lived in Fountain Valley since 1965. For 20 years she taught elementary and junior high school classes in the Garden Grove and Fountain Valley school districts, then took a one-year job as principal of Faith Chapel Christian School in Westminster before retiring six years ago to write full time. She still substitute teaches in Garden Grove junior and senior high schools. She also directs the Sunday school program at St. Wilfrid’s Episcopal Church in Huntington Beach.

Schultz said she has always incorporated poetry into her teaching methods but doesn’t wear the “Dr. Fanta Cee” outfit in the public schools. Teen-agers are “a tough audience, but I adore (adolescent) kids, and I don’t put up with any horseradish. I hook them with my silly-willies. . . . I have never yet (been given) a hard time. They clap for me, if you can believe that.”

Reciting poetry to students teaches them about “the flow of words . . . poetry is usually very visual, and if they make pictures in their heads they’ll remember” facts, Schultz said. Also, she added, poetry “teaches them inference. Poetry suggests and prose makes statements.”

She uses serious as well as funny poems in the classroom setting, Schultz said. One poem she often recites is “No Taps,” from “Because of the Wind in the Wheat.” The poem, about a soldier who “first lost his mind, and then he died,” usually makes an impression on her students, Schultz said. An excerpt:

The last time I saw him

He was boxed into space

That could not accommodate his bulk

Not even the sound of taps.

When she teaches, Schultz said, she uses poetry as an adjunct to more traditional lessons, not as a replacement. She believes education should be enjoyable as well as practical.

Schultz herself began playing with language when she was growing up in rural Pennsylvania. “Before I could hold a pencil, I walked around chanting things that rhymed, and when I could hold a pencil, I wrote things down,” she said. Her first poem was published in a Christian magazine when she was 10, and many of Schultz’s later poems have been published in small magazines and anthologies. Today she is both a local and national officer in the National League of American Penwomen.

Hopes to Cut Back

Schultz said she hopes to soon cut back on all her community involvements, so she can have more time to write. She’s putting together a book proposal, “Quills for Kids,” about her poetry-teaching ideas, and she has a second collection of adult poetry, “Ride a Humpbacked Whale,” half-finished. She also wants to write more articles, she said.

To make more writing time, she has sometimes considered quitting all her teaching activities, but “the kids stimulate me,” Schultz said. “It excites me when I read a poem (aloud), and I hear a kid who I’ve been told is troublesome come forward with some really empathic remark.

“Every kid should have poetry read to him, and every kid should read a poem a day (to) learn more exciting words and how to use metaphors and similes in prose. . . . (Poetry) puts kids in touch with their own ideas and ideals and helps them to think at the top of their abilities,” Schultz said.

Excerpt From Clara Peck Schultz’s “Fountain Valley”

Fountain Valley, we, your citizens,

Salute you as the Southland’s City of

Today. Indeed, this designation is

An indication that we understand

Our past; that we revere each pioneer,

And do acknowledge and appreciate

The services we have inherited.

We know that memory becomes a treasured

Servant who will use old dreams to move

Our yesterdays toward tomorrow, and

Provide us with full use of our today.