For These Pupils, It Was Poetic Justice : Verse Springs to Life, Wins Honors in High School Contest

Sixteen-year-old Oscar Flores was ringing up a customer’s tab at a little Tijuana cafe last week when an inebriated man from southern Mexico staggered in with a tale of woe.

Flores, noting the downtrodden man’s hard luck, thought about how he would feel if there were no one who would listen to him and began to scribble a poem on a napkin taken from the counter. Between customers, Flores wrote furiously as his ideas spilled forth. He soon completed the poem. It was only one among many that Flores--who last year began attending Hoover High School in East San Diego--has penned in Spanish or English when wanting to express a particular feeling or emotion.

Sascha Dublin’s world in Del Mar is seemingly a universe apart from that of Flores. The Torrey Pines High School graduate is preparing to enter prestigious Brown University in the fall after a distinguished high school career that included achieving the highest score of any California student in the 1988 statewide academic decathlon.

Yet Dublin finds her creative outlet in poetry as well, keeping a daily poetry journal and reading her works this summer to a group of friends who gather periodically to share their writings.

Common Love for Verse

Despite their contrasting environments, both Flores and Dublin symbolize the common love that many students throughout the county have for writing verse.

The two earned the top awards this spring in a countywide poetry contest for high school students, a competition that attracted almost 130 entries and heartened judges and teachers with their quality and breadth.

“I have to say I was very surprised at the quality of the stuff that was in the contest,” said Robert L. Jones, a creative writing professor at San Diego State University and Mesa College, and one of the contest’s judges.

“Almost none of the poems seemed . . . cranked out for an assignment, but rather (they) seemed to reflect real fun; that the students found the process valuable and interesting.”

Bruce Boston, the English Department chairman at La Jolla Country Day School, coordinated the contest, which was begun in honor of Amy Marie Watkins, a Country Day senior and avid poet who was killed in an auto accident in 1987.

“Her parents wanted a memorial which would encourage and support young writers in the English language,” Boston said. “And they decided that the contest should be open not just to Country Day students but to those throughout the county in order to encourage young writers everywhere in San Diego.

“I found extraordinary the sense of community that the contest brought about, and I found out about the great number of students who are writing poetry. It was very moving to see Oscar up there at the awards presentation reading his poem.”

The contest awarded $50 for first prize and $25 for second prize.

Poems in English

Flores, a native of Mexico, has lived in the United States only a year, staying with a cousin in East San Diego. He has long written poetry in Spanish, and won a statewide poetry competition for students in Baja California two years ago.

But his English-as-a-second-language (ESL) teacher at Hoover High School, where Flores has improved his language ability considerably, gave him the incentive to begin writing in English as well.

“She told us that we were going to write poetry, and I thought to myself, ‘Great, I really like that!’ ” Flores said during a break from his summer job at the Tijuana cafe. “I like to read poetry, and I like to write it because I can express myself the way I want to, to say what I want to say about a certain moment.

“It’s not hard when you have a feeling about something. It’s all in how you feel.”

Flores acknowledges that writing in English was difficult at first because of his small vocabulary, and he remembers his excitement in completing his first English poem.

“It made me feel different than at any other moment,” he said.

Poetry is an important tool for ESL students such as Flores, according to Hoover ESL instructor Rita Elwardi.

“I have realized, both from the teaching courses I have taken and from my experience, that teaching about poetry is a wonderful way for the ESL students to express themselves and feel successful in their writing,” Elwardi said.

“Second-language students can do well because they can play with the language and arrive at images and phrases that would be harder for us native speakers sometimes because we get caught up in cliches. The students come out with these delightful phrases.

“And Oscar has all the talent in him to do well in all aspects of English if he puts his mind to it.”

Other Winners, Too

While Flores was winning the La Jolla Country Day contest, two other students of Elwardi received honorable mention: Phonepheth Vorarath and Adisak Sae-Hor.

Sae-Hor, an immigrant from Thailand, also started class at Hoover this past year and found he could develop ideas for his poems from looking at art. Sae-Hor won a countywide poster contest in 1987 to come up with a slogan and design for an anti-drug program. The 11th-grader draws almost daily.

“After I look at something in art, that helps me write a poem, sort of like drawing a picture in words,” Sae-Hor said. “Also, you can put any idea that you have in a poem and you don’t have to worry about the grammar so much.

“But I was very surprised that I was picked for an honor because I didn’t even know that Mrs. Elwardi had entered me. I felt like somebody had made a mistake.”

Almost all students who write poetry find themselves enthralled with the sweep of imagination possible through verse.

“Poetry, that really tells who I am, and everything else that I write is incidental,” said Dublin, of Torrey Pines High.

“Poetry is a real challenge, where you are taking on something that is more than just following rules or a form . . . it is a real reach where you are exposing yourself in a way you don’t in the academic decathlon, for example,” she said.

Dublin credits her English teacher and decathlon coach, Blaze Newman, for allowing students to try different creative techniques in fulfilling writing assignments for literature units.

“For example, we studied a particular style of poetry in class and then were able to use the same style in our own analyses,” Dublin said.

‘Experience Transformed’

Dublin said her ideas begin with something that she has experienced but quickly grow into something larger.

“The experience becomes transformed into something much bigger, where I will add my experience to one that perhaps happened to a friend and little pieces come in and the poem takes on its own life,” Dublin said.

She found the contest exciting, especially the awards presentation, where the winning students read their poems to the audience.

“I thought it was wonderful that so much quality poetry is being written by high school students, where we can share our work and have our voices heard,” she said.

Albert Wei of La Jolla Country Day School won an honorable mention for his poetry, which he often writes to express his views on politics, social causes and other contemporary issues.

Wei, who will begin studies at Columbia University in September, talked about drug abuse, the difficulty many young people have finding a job and toxic spills as examples of issues that people may hear about over and over through the media and become desensitized to.

“But, if I present these same issues in poetry or in another creative way, then people will react to it differently because of the imagery, or the wording, or whatever,” he said.

“My goal is to present the material in a way to trigger more reaction than you might get if the same issue was presented in a usual way.”

Wei was one of Boston’s creative-writing students at Country Day, and he said such classes can be difficult at times “because you are given a specific assignment and it is difficult to force poetry if you cannot become emotionally involved with the topic.”

So Boston tries to smooth the creative process for his students, believing that everyone at some level--what he called “the cellular level”--understands the need to articulate his or her experiences.

Boston has local poets read to his classes, and he would like to see more activity by duplicating in San Diego what already is done in the San Francisco region by the Bay Area Writers Project.

“To keep alive that ability to do that articulation through the language of poetry, that is my calling,” Boston said.

THE BACK OF MY HOUSE

I sat down by a big fruit tree.

I closed my eyes,

almost sleeping . . .

Big apples around me,

the warm air touched all of me.

I heard what it’s like to be one of them--

the rush of water,

the force of wind on the tree branches,

the song of birds,

the run of horses.

I open my eyes.

A boy jumps to grab a bunch of grapes

clinging to the wall. --OSCAR FLORES

LEAVING

The moment freezes:

you turning away,

the glare of the street lamp wounding my eyes,

and the dying silence as the stars stop singing.

But I cannot cry.

Your face so still and clear--

a slate grey lake in dead winter--

and I feel my face turn to marble in response,

an unmarked grave

beneath the snow of our coldness,

and although I know I must be feeling pain,

it does not hurt.

Then I turn away,

resting my blinded eyes,

seeking the cool comfort of a black velvet sky.

Its glimmering needles of shattered light

dig into my eyes like thorns,

stinging sharply--

salt on tender flesh.

And I can hear the waves of my heart

surging too loudly

and the relentless tension thunders rhythmically,

pounds on the glass doors of my eyes.

How can you fail to see what is in my face?

But I will not cry. --SASCHA DUBLIN