SSCS secondary English teacher Jennifer Field introduces our visiting authors/poets at the Oct. 13 school Poetry Festival during an assembly in the auditorium. (left to right are Paul Muldoon, Ilya Kaminsky, Katie Farris and Maggie Millner. Field said of the festival: “Students who participate get a chance to meet a professional in the literary world. To make an analogy, imagine if LeBron James came to our school to do a basketball camp with our students for a day. These poets are the equivalent of this in the literary world.”
SSCS hosted its annual Poetry Festival on Oct. 13 and Sharon Springs students in grades 6-12 had the pleasure of mingling with world famous visiting poets during an assembly in the school auditorium.
Festival founder and Pulitzer Prize winning Irish poet Paul Muldoon shared a poem which compared the sounds of coy wolves he heard with a reference to the song “Ghost Riders in the Sky” by Frankie Laine. “Poems can end weird and they can start that way too,” Muldoon told the students. “When you’re in the poetry business you can’t worry what people think about you. But you can write your own stories and you don’t have to rely on Disney to do it for you.”
Muldoon and three visiting authors – Ilya Kaminsky, Katie Farris and Maggie Millner – shared their work, talked about how they developed a love for poetry and fielded questions from the students. Some SSCS students interested in this medium had an opportunity to have their work critiqued by the visiting poets during afternoon workshops (see below). Students from Cooperstown, Canajoharie, and OESJ also visited SSCS to join in on the poetry festival.
SSCS secondary English teacher Jennifer Field said of the festival: “Students who participate get a chance to meet a professional in the literary world. To make an analogy, imagine if LeBron James came to our school to do a basketball camp with our students for a day. These poets are the equivalent of this in the literary world.”
SSCS students work with visiting author/poet Maggie Millner.
Face-to-face workshop with a pro
As part of the Poetry Festival, a group of SSCS students had an opportunity to attend a face-to-face workshop with visiting poet/author Maggie Millner. Originally from Cherry Valley, Millner’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, POETRY, Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is a Lecturer at Yale University and a Senior Editor at The Yale Review. She published her first book this year and told students she started writing poetry as a teen as a way of “fitting in. Writing sustained me as a person,” she said.
During a two-hour session, SSCS students took turns sharing, reading and critiquing each other’s poems while getting writing tips from a real pro. SSCS students participating included Jayna Manko, Dezi Lasky, Thomas Chairvollotti, Kora Dunston, Isabel Garcia, Alexsis Messias and Layla Negron.
View more photos and video clips from the Poetry Festival on the SSCS Facebook page.
