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This year I was privileged to develop and lead Monson Arts’ first-ever creative writing seminar for high school students. The writers in our pilot program came from six rural high schools in central Maine. Our cohort of thirteen students, ranging in age from fourteen to eighteen, met every two weeks, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Those from remote schools spent hours on the bus to get back and forth to our classroom.
Over the course of our time together, these former strangers formed a tight-knit community. The writers became devoted friends and supporters. They critiqued and praised each other’s work; they asked hard questions; they undertook difficult tasks. They analyzed poems, invented writing exercises, revised their drafts, and collaboratively designed and performed a staged reading. They were never afraid to take risks or share their feelings. They begged for the chance to come back to next year’s program. They taught me so much, not only as a teacher but also as a writer and a human being.
The coronavirus pandemic has destroyed what would have been the final weeks of our program. But as I muse here in quarantine, thinking back on our sessions together, I’m starting to recall certain moments when everything seemed to come together: when a poem or a prompt or a conversation seemed to shift all of us into another plane of being . . . those moments when communal discovery—the spirit of art itself—became palpable.
So I thought I’d share one of those moments with you, and invite you, wherever you are sheltering, to step with me into our own room of discovery . . . to feel, to express, to share, to imagine . . . not alone, but together, in solidarity and mystery, side by invisible side.
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A few weeks ago, wrestling with trepidation and shyness, I brought a poem of my own to share with the students. I don’t think of this piece as one of the great things I have written. I chose it because it is set in rural central Maine. It portrays a landscape and an economic reality that is extremely familiar to the students in my cohort. It is their world—one where I, too, lived for more than two decades.
We read the poem together. Then I asked them to notice what the poem doesn’t say. What stories are missing? What might be happening before the poem begins? After it ends? What other voices or points of view might enter? What about the past? The future? What if an eye looks up? Or down?
In other words, here’s my poem.
Now you write the poem I didn’t.
Walking into Town
this road is empty for most of the day but
when the log trucks whip over the ridge
jake-breaking belching diesel
then watch out deer
the soot-stained sky glowers
snow is on the way snow
is always on the way
& the tar is always buckled with potholes &
frostheaves & in the ditch today
old mrs richards is hunting for budweiser cans
for mountain dew bottles to trade
down at the store for baloney to feed
her grandson he’s three & he’s smart
she tells me he’s three
& his teeth are rotting out of his head
If you are so inclined, email your response poem to frost@frostplace.org. Maybe together we can tell the collective tale of Mrs. Richards and her grandson, the road, the store, time past or future, the characters who collect in the interstices of the story, the sky, the trees, the faraway city. The inarticulate heart: Framed. Spoken.
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