Teens Find Poetry Is a Path to the Soul

The junior high class started with noogies to the head, punches to the shoulder (“two for flinching!”) and spitballs fired surreptitiously from the back row by a kid named David.

It ended an hour later with sobs and then silence as the brutal murder of his mother was recounted in an almost inaudible whisper by a boy named Andrew.

The metamorphosis of a roomful of squirmy Mark Twain Middle School pupils into an audience of respectful and attentive listeners wasn’t due to anything punitory. It was the result of poetry.

The seventh-graders were wrapping up a two-week poetry class by reciting poems about their own lives.

“Write about your most powerful experience,” class instructor Sita Stulberg had told them. “There’s nothing you can’t write about. Write about your strongest, most intense memory. Don’t worry about spelling or punctuation. Just write it down.”

The 30 youngsters in the Venice school’s sixth-period English class picked up their pencils and poured out their souls.

Scrawled across lined notebook paper ripped from three-hole binders were heart-wrenching tales of death and gang shootings--subjects not normally associated with childhood.

In her poem “My Brother,” Sarah Medley told of her happiness when her brother was released from jail and of her anguish when he was sent back. She blamed herself because once she had gotten angry at him and wished he was back in jail:

My mom said

it was him who

put himself there.

I never believed her.

I would wake

up and cry and

say it was because

of me he is

in there.

Marcos Rodriguez told of a drive-by shooting in the poem he called “Booming Rain.” He wrote:

I’m walking to the laundry.

My whole family is there.

The sky is clear

with the sun shining

and clouds passing

slowly as the wind blows.

Suddenly I hear booming sounds.

From behind and front

a shower of bullets crosses our way.

I throw myself in a small bush.

I hold my head down,

afraid to get up and see.

The shooting stops.

My sister is on the ground,

her shoulder bleeding bright red blood.

I am terrified. I love my sister so much.

I hope she’ll be all right.

Anthony Makkar titled his poem “One Day You’re Here, and the Next?” It told of the death of his mother:

I cried for days.

How could I picture life without my mother?

She always sat next to me when I was going to sleep

when I was young.

I am hurt inside forever.

My heart is broken like glass.

The classroom poetry reading session came on the eighth day of Stulberg’s series of visits to the school. Earlier, she had received a typical seventh-grade welcome when she introduced herself to the class.

“I have one rule: We respect each other, and nobody talks,” Stulberg had explained.

“That’s two rules,” a boy in the center of the classroom had wise-cracked.

Stulberg wasted no time explaining the elements of poetry that first day to her skeptical, restless audience. She got an earful in return.

Discussing imagery, she asked the class which poem they would read--one that talked of a “green apron” or one that described it as “a vomit-green apron.” From the side of the room a boy shouted back: “I’d read whichever poem was the shortest!”

When she read several lines of poetry to illustrate that poems do not have to rhyme, another boy interrupted. “That’s a run-on sentence!” he burst out as his classmates laughed riotously.

That gave Stulberg the opening she needed to explain the difference between poetry and prose, and she took it. The visiting poetry lady was slowly but surely gaining control over the class.

Stulberg, a 46-year-old Westwood writer and poet, has taught poetry in public schools for 15 years. Although she works independently now, she started as one of 250 writers participating in a statewide artist-in-residence program called California Poets in the Schools.

These days, she works steadily in about 30 Los Angeles-area elementary, middle and high schools between Bel-Air and Long Beach. Her two-week sessions are conducted in English classes and cost $850. Schools pay for them from campus improvement funds, PTA and booster club donations and gifted-student education programs.

English teachers sometimes view Stulberg with suspicion when she first shows up.

“Their eyes get wide when they hear me say punctuation and spelling do not matter. They are wondering where I’m going with this. But they suddenly see their kids are in love with writing, instead of dreading it,” she said.

“I’m teaching them the process of creative writing, not the history of poetry or about dead poets like Tennyson and Shakespeare.”

Veteran Mark Twain teacher Kate Kausch has invited Stulberg into her English class for four years. She said poetry opens doors for many of her students, who come from troubled homes “and have experienced an inordinate amount of death and violence in their young lives.”

Many shun academic work and classroom participation until they experience the poetry class, according to Kausch.

“They learn to be compassionate toward their own pain and to that of their classmates,” she said. “My classes are never the same after Sita leaves. The students bond with each other in a way I am able to build on for the rest of the year. Their self-esteem improves, even as the most unlikely among them create poems of great beauty, which are appreciated by their classmates.”

That’s why there was applause and quiet hugs after students such as Chelsea Rippel, Frank Clark, Anthony Sola and Khamira Pitts read their poems aloud while Kausch and Stulberg listened from the back of the room.

Chelsea wrote an introspective poem about loneliness called “Shadow,” and Frank dealt with teenage anxieties with “Prom Night.”

In “That Horrible Day,” Anthony told of the 3 a.m. phone call that sent his family racing to a relative’s house. They arrived:

To see that

my Uncle Vance had passed away.

My 5-year-old cousin was filled with tears

seeing that her dad was gone.

Khamira told of being hustled out of her dying grandmother’s hospital room as frantic nurses and doctors worked to save her in the poem she titled “The Day.”

Andrew Evans’ poem “That’s What” evoked the greatest response. Classmates were in tears when he finished reading it:

September 29, 1991

was the end of my life.

I can’t even close my eyes to remember

the horror I have to endure for the

rest of my life.

The trunk, the gun, the horror

of being thrown in the trunk and shot.

I feel it. I know it.

It happened to my mom.

Afterward, 13-year-old Andrew admitted his apprehension at reading it aloud to his friends. “But I thought by expressing my feelings I could move another step beyond it. Doing it helped me, big-time,” he said quietly.

Twelve-year-old Sarah Medley was crying as the readings ended. Classmate Christina Bayron hugged her.

“They’ve expressed feelings you never knew they had,” Sarah said of the classroom poets. Said Christina: “I feel better knowing I’m not the only one, that others have suffered a lot of pain--some more than me.”

Stulberg, who collected earlier student poems for a 1997 book, “A Child’s Recipe for Enlightenment,” which is sold in Westside bookstores, praised the young writers.

“Your work is powerful. You have a voice,” she told them. “You have worked with things that are really tough, and you’ve had the courage to share. Now you won’t walk around all your life thinking you’re alone.”

The end-of-school bell had long ago rung. But the usual rush for the classroom door was missing.

There was no noise, no noogies, no poking or joking. These seventh-graders were poets.