A Look at Poetry Festival

Last Thursday, April 30th was the first ever MHS Poetry Festival. In all English classes, professional poets came and spoke to the students about their professions, often reciting some of their poems and creating new pieces with the classes. The day was appropriate since April is “poetry month” and also because the annual Dodge Poetry Festival occurred on Monday and Tuesday of last week as well.

Since English teacher Ms. Wessel was in charge of the Poetry Festival, MDO spoke to her about it after the whole day.

MDO: Was the first ever festival? How did it get started?

Ms. Wessel: We’ve had visits from single poets and writers over the years, but this is the first time we had a festival.  I contacted the Dodge Foundation when I was about to write for a grant from the MEF to bring in a poet.  Michelle Russo is the contact person at Dodge.  They have a long history of putting together mini-festivals for schools.  They also run the big festival in Newark that runs every two years.

MDO: How do you think the day went?

Ms. Wessel:  I thought it was great!  The main reason is that a number of students – even students I don’t really know – spoke to me about how much they enjoyed listening to the poets in the assembly.  We don’t do a lot of contemporary poetry in our curriculum, so for most students, they had a very limited experience with this type of poetry.  Contemporary poets like Michael Cirilli and Cat Doty write works that capture the heart.  Even though their work is complex, it engages the heart over the mind.  It doesn’t require analysis to be appreciated.

Each poet’s visit to the English classes was different due to their great uniqueness and freedom to do anything relating to poetry in the hour of class. I luckily enough had 2 experiences with the poets on Thursday, once during Journalism class and once during my AP Language and Composition class. During Journalism we had a class discussion about the meaning of poetry and during Lang we actually wrote a poem as a class together. Both experiences were very different but taught us a new way to look at poetry in general.