Their Words Are Their Bond

Sam Stapleton may never see a poem as lovely as a Krispy Kreme doughnut. But you can tell that he knows his quatrains. The proof was there Sunday afternoon, when Sam’s untitled poem about baseball was read aloud at Westwood Charter School’s 5th Grade Poetry Exchange Festival, a cross-generational celebration of all things lyrical, metrical and blank verse.

A slightly built, dark-haired boy with a shy demeanor, Sam took a pass on publicly reciting his poem, a kind of pre-pubescent “Casey at the Bat” concerning a hapless outfielder’s pursuit of a fly ball. Instead, his words were given flight by poet Brendon Constantine, who was sporting black jeans, green socks and several small loopy earrings.

“I asked him to read, but unfortunately there’s a copyright issue,” Constantine joked before launching into these reverberant lines: “But the ball is coming down, KABOOM!/The ball is now bouncing on the ground/Now the pitcher runs off the pitcher’s mound.” When Constantine finished, the children, teachers and parents scattered around Room 8 broke into barrages of applause that went floating down the second-floor corridor.

Poetry readings and festivals can sometimes be deadly affairs--hermetically sealed, insider gatherings where the participants vastly outnumber the audience members and the language feels as distant from everyday reality as Sanskrit. This one was different. Inspired by the idea that art-making can be a vital community endeavor spanning geographic, age and experiential boundaries, the festival was designed to match each of the school’s 125 fifth graders with an accomplished adult poet living and working in Southern California.

Earlier this spring, the students wrote letters and sent poems to their assigned poets and asked the poets to reciprocate in kind. Word of the event spread when poet Richard Beban posted an e-mail to some of his friends and colleagues.

Most poets wrote back promptly and sent poems of their own. About 75 of them showed up Sunday to take part in an afternoon of readings, informal chatter and group verse-writing activities. A bake sale, whose offerings included chocolate chip cookies and the inevitable Krispy Kremes, helped fortify participants for the three-hour event.

Artist Lorraine Bubar, the festival’s prime mover, said that by taking part in the afternoon, the adult poets were validating the students as “fellow writers.” “It’s made [the students] realize that there’s these active poetry communities, these artist communities, that want to reach out to them,” said Bubar, one of whose daughters is a Westwood fifth-grader.

Last year, Bubar helped organize a similar exchange between students and visual artists, sponsored by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s education department. That event, involving several hundred children, drew responses from such internationally renowned artists as John Baldessari, Robert Irwin, Charles Ray and Alison Saar. Their artworks, along with the students’, were exhibited at LACMA, where a reception was held allowing students and artists to meet each other. The professionals’ artwork was then sent to the children to keep.

Bubar said that the poetry exchange furthers the 10-year-old charter school’s emphasis on literature and the fine arts--programs that often get short shrift in the cash-strapped Los Angeles Unified School District. “LAUSD is just pushing literacy, basic skills. That can be boring. This makes it alive,” Bubar said. Diana Berz, the school’s curriculum coordinator, credits Bubar with tapping the creative energies of the neighborhood school, where many parents take a hands-on role in expanding their children’s cultural horizons. “She rallies us,” Berz said.

On Sunday, poetry was everywhere you looked along the school’s second floor: Pasted on cabinets and walls, jotted down in folders on students’ desks, scribbled on little slips of paper that got passed from hand to hand. One sign on a playground wall invited passersby to “Write a poem using as many of these words as you can”--”Banana,” “Awesome,” “Fear,” “Dream,” “Like.” Even Keats might’ve blanched at that assignment. There were few other rules about what could be in the poems, other than an informal ban on such words as “orb.”

As students, parents and poets were trickling in, classroom “hosts” asked everyone to contribute a line to a “group poem” triggered by passing around a sprig of fresh rosemary (Grecian urns being in short supply these days). In Room 8, poet Stephanie Hemphill and student Brett Whalen began jotting down words, trying to hit on the perfect alchemical combination. At the back of the room, camcorders were silently turned on, the adults did their best to fit themselves into chairs and desks designed for 10-year-olds, and for several minutes the only break in the stillness was when a cell phone went off, playing the opening bars of “Greensleeves.”

Poet Stuart Denenberg, an art dealer in his other life, took in the busy scene. “In our culture, arts are kind of the neglected stepchild. What’s serious is what’s making a buck, and the rest is not serious,” he said. “Art should be a wonderful incursion to the ordinary, elevating the ordinary by virtue of its unordinariness.”

A few doors down the hall it was standing room only as poet Jack Grapes, a stocky man in gray sweatpants and a blue polo shirt, acted out his prose poem “The Tree With Three Hearts.” The mixed-age crowd giggled at Grapes’ impersonation of two French Canadian lumberjacks, got big-eyed as the words gained momentum, and gasped when Grapes fell to the ground, face-first, imitating a fallen tree.

Student Nahal Zarnighian later said she liked Grapes’ performance because “he expressed his feelings,” as she herself did in her poem, “A Door”: “A door can open to a very magical place/ ...Joyful things might be sent to the front of your door.”

Several adult poets said the door to becoming writers had opened back when they were students. Jason A. White said he’d never thought about becoming a poet until a teacher at San Pedro High School told him he had a gift that mustn’t be wasted. Today, he said, he writes poetry “to better understand who I am.”

“You start writing about real adult things; it’s not so much in imagination and fantasy as when you’re young,” he added. “Sometimes it’s a lot of pain, and you have to deal with that.”

Pain was deeply woven into some students’ poems. In “Beach,” Adam Estrin conjured up the image of “Waves crashing in the cold blue waters/Like 100 meteors hitting the flat stone surface...Washing away all my sad feelings.” He’d been matched up with poet Carine Topal, who was moved to respond with a poem, “After Receiving Adam’s Poem,” that incorporated pieces of the boy’s verse: “Washing away/all my sad feelings,/a white envelope/with a letter inside/Adam sends me meteors/a beach, waves, flat stones.” A number of other poets favored this reciprocal approach. “Those are really the most charming,” Bubar said. “They really capture the spirit of the whole event.”

Feelings of gratitude flowed from all sides. Constantine, who programs film screenings for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, said that Sam’s baseball poem had helped him get past a creative dry spell. For his part, Sam allowed that it was “kind of easier” to have Constantine read his poem than to read it himself, “because he kind of acted it out too.”

Really, the afternoon went by too fast. By 3:45 the school was emptying out, apart from some die-hards in Room 18. Could any of the students imagine becoming poets for--don’t laugh, now, all you adults--a living? Ellen Moreh wasn’t sure. Writing short stories was fun, she said, but poetry was tougher. “I don’t like any of my work,” she said wincing. “My work’s really weird.”

But in poetry, weird can be good. Horace Coleman remembered the all-too-conventional poems he was forced to imbibe as a youngster, from a schoolbook titled “Memory Gems.” “It’s a wonder I became a poet after that,” he said. Four o’clock had arrived, and the last stragglers gathered up jackets, leftover Krispy Kremes and their copies of specially printed spiral notebooks containing copies of all poems submitted for the event. Look on their works, ye mighty, and despair!

“It’s the antidote to television,” said poet Tom M. Hall as he gathered himself for the walk out to the parking lot. “Live communication.”