I am always looking for opportunities for my high school students to get involved with our local community as part of their English class. Often that means seeing live theater at one of the several amazing theaters in our area, but last month a new opportunity presented itself: typewriter poetry at our local independent bookstore on our community’s First Friday Stroll, a night to celebrate the cafes, galleries and small businesses in downtown Sarasota, Florida.
Though I admit, at first, I had a hard time developing a strong incentive to entice students to fill their Friday night with typing poetry on old-fashioned typewriters, a handful of intrigued students took me up on the idea and spread the word to their friends.
When the evening arrived ten students filled the lobby of Bookstore 1 with cheer, mingling with students from several other schools. Teachers from multiple levels of our school also showed up to celebrate the novelty of spontaneous poetry.
Students eagerly took turns sitting at the typewriters, at first amazed at the amount of finger pressure needed to make the words appear on the carbon-copy paper, as compared to the ease of typing on their fancy laptops. Once they got their fingers going, the poetry started to click-clack-ding to life on the page. A few students even donned red or black berets during their turns to inspire their poetic voices.
Passersby, out for First Friday Stroll, ordered up poems by choosing juicy words from a jar at the table to get the poet started, or they could suggest a theme or idea they wanted to inspire the poem-making. Many older members of the community were delighted to see the juxtaposition of their old familiar Royals and Smith-Coronas with the young faces and fingers of the 21st-century adolescents. One student even celebrated his birthday there that night, and the collective of students worked together to develop a birthday poem called “Wind Joy Way” for him with contributions of lines from all of them. What a way to celebrate a birthday!
Poetry became, for a solid hour, a game of playing with words and ideas on a Friday night for a group of adolescents who were willing to try something new.
Tomorrow’s Child/ April 2018/ Pg 26
