It was a scene not commonly found in the Newburyport Art Association.
Groups of teenagers, sitting on the floor with their notebooks out, quietly writing away.
But that was what visitors to the Water Street gallery found last week, when Debbie Szabo's creative writing students had their class there.
The field trip was part of a collaboration between the art association and the high school.
Art association executive director Elena Bachrach approached Newburyport poet Rhina Espaillat last summer with a question — what's the name of the high school creative writing teacher?
She was led to Szabo and offered her idea: a community collaboration program that would explore the link between art and poetry — and melding the visual arts and literary arts. It was met with excitement. Soon plans were made.
Last Wednesday, Espaillat and Bachrach visited Szabo's class. Espaillat told the 13 students — a mix of all four grades — about how art can speak to a person and how poetry can be a vehicle to speak back. She was armed with examples of poems that did so, both the work's early drafts and final pieces.
On Thursday, the class arrived at the art association with their assignment: to walk through the gallery and familiarize themselves with it. Then, find a piece of work that speaks to them and respond by writing a poem.
"I would not be surprised if some of them have never been in the art association before," Szabo said.
Szabo did a similar partnership with the Bridge Gallery during the last school year. Such programs are valuable, she said, and students respond well to new voices, outside of the teachers they interact with each day.
Once they had a rough draft of their piece, the students would spend their next several classes polishing their poems. The students have been invited to read their poems aloud at the annual art association members meeting in January.
Junior Dana Pymento was focused intently on artist Mary Shapiro's painting, "New Orleans, Mon Amour."
"I can see a story in it," she said.
Bachrach said she hopes to build on the program and to establish similar collaborations with other schools and more disciplines, such as social studies, math and science.
"I feel very strongly about the connection of the visual arts to other disciplines," she said. "With arts budgets shrinking in schools, this is one way to service the schools."
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