Blog, November 17 — Rhina P. Espaillat

Notes on Contributors

Powow Poets Blog

One of the many things poetry does well is help create a sense of community, even among people who may not know very much about each other except that they share an interest in this old, peculiar, enduring form of communication. That is worth doing right about now, when so many fractures are taking place in the society, and several states are enacting anti-Other measures to keep their communities from becoming multi-everything—or multi-anything.

Here in Newburyport, Debbie Szabo is an imaginative, dynamic English teacher who directs the local high school’s very successful creative writing group, Poetry Soup. She has established cultural connections between her students and those of like-minded teachers in neighboring Lawrence and Haverhill. Yearly reciprocal bus trips between the paired high schools of each city are arranged by the teachers involved and locally funded by the Commission for Diversity and Tolerance. Those exchanges allow youngsters from very different cultures to spend two days a year exploring each other’s environments. They share each other’s backgrounds, lives, languages, ideas and lunches, under the supervision of a teacher from each school. Together they produce poems that then form part of a chapbook containing student poetry and photos.

The success of the program—both literary and human—has been such that the poems constitute a record of how “community” happens. It forms through frank and open learning and the substitution of living faces and real voices for the stereotypes that sometimes obscure the view between cultures. It would be wonderful to see such efforts duplicated elsewhere.