NEWBURYPORT — In his poem "Notes on the Art of Poetry," the Welsh wordsmith Dylan Thomas described poetry as a world of "words, words, words, and each of which were alive forever, in its own delight and glory and oddity and light."
Newburyport High School English teacher Deborah Szabo and her creative writing class want locals to realize the delight, glory, oddity and light of poetry with the seventh annual Favorite Poem Project. Her class has once again partnered with The Record Magazine staff and Poetry Soup in this endeavor. They are asking community members to send in poems that have a special meaning or just ones they enjoy.
Szabo's project is an offshoot of the National Favorite Poem Project created by former U.S. Poet Laureate and Boston University professor Robert Pinsky. The event started in 1997 with the purpose of celebrating "the sheer pleasure" of poetry with the public. Pinsky received more than 18,000 submissions from across America and compiled some of them in two books he edited with his BU graduate students.
Szabo was inspired to create the Newburyport project after taking a course with Pinsky. Her students select which poems will be read at the Newburyport Literary Festival at 3 p.m. on April 26 at the Firehouse Center for the Arts. She doesn't expect the kind of volume Pinsky received, but her project has been a success in the past. She believes this year will be no different.
"We try to have an eclectic program," she said. "We try to seek out people who aren't from this country to read poems in other languages. We have a student from Brazil who will read a poem in Portuguese this year."
Readings in other languages through the years have included Swahili, Spanish, Russian and Serbo-Croatian among others.
"It's an enriching experience to hear because you really get to see what other people are like through their readings," Szabo said. "By the end of the performance, you feel like you know them."
Robert Frost poems tend to be a favorite among those who submit to the project, but the students typically have a good range from which to select for the reading.
The Favorite Poem Project encourages all community members, from business people to clergy to politicians among all others, to submit verses to the project.
Szabo recalled one year when then-mayor Al Lavender recited a simple and humorous Ogden Nash poem, highlighting what different poems can mean to different members of the community.
The point of the project is not necessarily for people to send in their favorite piece of poetry but instead a piece that means something important in their lives.
"This shows how vast our community is," Szabo said. "We see how different we are, but at the same time how we're the same through our favorite kinds of literature."
The project is a teaching tool for Szabo's students, and she believes they will see begin to see poetry as something more than words on a page.
"They spend their whole lives caught up in where they'll go to college or if they'll win the big game or who's going to take them to prom, and that's all on the surface," Szabo said. "It's so easy to live on the surface. Poetry is there to remind us that there's something beneath the surface."
The creative writing class has also made a Favorite Poem Project bulletin board at the high school that contains many of the favorites of students, faculty, administrators and others for all to see.
"Poetry is not a torture device used by teachers on students," Szabo said with a laugh. "Part of the reason why I love literature, and all the arts for that matter, is that they are fantastic for bringing people together. Poetry can be so accessible, and it connects people."
HOW TO SUBMIT A POEM
Mail your submission to Deborah Szabo at Newburyport High School, 241 High St., Newburyport, MA 01950 or e-mail to dszabo@newburyport.k12.ma.us by April 1.
Please include a copy of the poem, a brief paragraph explaining why it is a favorite, your name and a piece of identifying information, such as your profession or age, so a wide variety of people to read at the performance can be chosen.
No extensive literary analysis is required, just an explanation of why the poem is important to you.
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