Young Poets Use Images of Broken Glass, Gunshots in Quest for Dignity

Construction paper signs hanging in the Flint Street Recreation Center hint that this is no gentle neighborhood:

“No Smoking. No Yelling. No Stealing. No Weapons.”

But half a dozen young people on this day are gathered in a small room at the back, next door to the game room, absorbed in a world of imagination.

To the muffled accompaniment of clattering pool balls, the group of boys, ranging from baby-faced eighth-graders to lanky 18-year-olds, is writing poems.

At the front of the room is Ross Talarico, Rochester’s writer-in-residence, a wiry 44-year-old in blue jeans and a Detroit Pistons sweat shirt. Talarico passes out sheets of blank paper and pencils and lists of words--weather words, action words, body words and idea words.

“We’re going to create two or three phrases that we could slip into a poem if we ever felt the need to,” he says. “I’m going to show you in five minutes how you can put together an image, which is an illustration of an idea.”

In a few minutes, the giggles have subsided and the kids are busy scribbling lavish phrases . . . “fog drifting through the heart of love” . . . “wind whispering into the ears of rage” . . . “broken glass crashing against the heart of love.”

Half an hour later, they have produced their first poems.

“Outside I see the rain flowing down like the tears from your eyes,” writes Damon Glasgow, a small 13-year-old with curly black hair carved into a flat top. “Inside myself I feel the pain of people dying on days like today.”

Talarico, who has published five books of prose and poetry, began running writing programs five years ago under the auspices of the city recreation department. He returned to Rochester, where he grew up in an Italian city neighborhood in the 1950s and ‘60s, because he wanted to bring “poetry and language and the excitement of it all” to the people of his hometown, he says.

It was difficult at first to persuade inner-city kids to join a poetry workshop, Talarico says.

“When you walk into a tough neighborhood, and you’re a stranger, and you’re white, and you say you want to start a group of kids writing poems--they look at you funny.”

Sometimes it took a game of one-on-one basketball for the kids to accept him and give poetry a try. At one recreation center, Talarico challenged anyone he could beat at Ping-Pong to try the program. Other times, he would reserve the gym for the workshop, so that kids who wanted to play basketball had to try their hand at poetry first.

The results surprised even Talarico.

“They not only tried it, they got involved and about a year later it was a status symbol to have poems up on the bulletin board,” he says.

Kids who had joined just for the basketball turned into writers who sometimes didn’t even bother to play hoops afterward, Talarico says.

“When I walk into a center now, kids run up and want to know if their poems are on the sheets.”

Talarico is in his second three-year contract with the city. He runs about six writing classes at a time, three for senior citizens and three for young people--including one poetry and basketball workshop.

A collection of writing from the workshops, called “Rochester Voices: Uncommon Writings from Common People,” will be used as a textbook in the Rochester public schools next year.

In his workshops, Talarico tries to change the kids’ impression of poetry.

“We don’t write about pussy willows in my class,” he says. “We don’t write about things that aren’t meaningful. I let them know they have to take a good look around. If it’s the scar on their hand, that’s what they have to write about. If they have to step around broken glass on the street, that’s something to write about.”

The young writers’ poems are filled with images of broken glass, gunshots and cracked pavements, grim reminders of the reality of their daily lives.

The first poem in “Rochester Voices, “ a piece called “Father,” by 18-year-old Germone Wright, begins:

On the corner of Seward and Jefferson,

I met a bum who just might be

my father.

At least he looked like

the man I once knew ...

“Nobody ever talks about missing their fathers,” Talarico says. “Until you read a poem like this and you realize it’s something they think about all the time. Where the hell are their fathers?

“I’m blown away by some of these poems. I’ve read them a hundred times but I’m still blown away.

“It’s not cute stuff. It’s real writing, real literature.”

There is a creativity, a wit and humor, in inner-city kids that is little appreciated, Talarico says. He believes it is the product of the toughness of their lives and the adversity they are forced to cope with daily.

When Talarico reads the poems out loud, the teasing and banter stop and everyone listens.

“Do me a favor, don’t just toss these,” he says as he passes out typed copies of the best work from the week before. It is a constant theme in this class--respect for what you have created.

And suddenly, as the young writers read the poems they and their friends have written, poetry stops being something that only other people do.