Poetry for Peace chooses the right words

Fairfield sponsors “Poetry for Peace,” a writing celebration for community schools

Despite a daylong ice storm that closed all area schools, the University’s Kelley Center was a beehive of activity on Jan. 18, as children, their parents and teachers, along with University students, gathered to celebrate the culmination of the Poetry for Peace contest.

Open to all Bridgeport and Fairfield school children through grade 8, the Poetry for Peace contest has quickly become one of the most cherished traditions of the University’s Martin Luther King Jr. weeklong series of events. Last year, the contest garnered 700 entries; this year, there were over 1100 entrants, all writing a poem on peace – however they define, experience, or envision it.

It’s community outreach at its very best, a program coordinated by Fairfield faculty, with input from Fairfield students in various disciplines, and lots of effort from area teachers working with their own students.

“We recruit a team of student judges from the Graduate School of Education and Allied Professions, plus undergraduate students from the English and modern languages departments,” explained Nels Pearson, assistant professor of English and co-coordinator of the contest. “It’s wonderful to witness the discussion between them about what constitutes a good poem. An English major might not be particularly impressed with a student’s use of a certain metaphor, for example, but the education student might point out that, developmentally, that metaphor was very advanced. Ultimately, the criteria [about what makes a good poem] come from our students.”

Cassandra Boskello ’12, an English and Spanish major and one of the judges, said she was surprised at the maturity level of several of the poems.

“I didn’t expect them to be so profound. Lots of the poems reflected the violence of the children’s environment, and that really moved me,” she said.

Each year, the winning authors – this year, there were 70 of them – are invited to bring their families to the campus and to read their poems during the ceremony; their poems and dozens of judges’ favorites are published in a book given to all winners and their school principals.

“The goal is simply to give students the opportunity to reflect creatively on the theme of peace at a time when so much of what they encounter in the media is dominated by images of violence and overwhelmed by the rhetoric of opposition and entrenched positions,” said Dr. Pearson. English teachers since the beginning of time have been telling their young writers to “describe it, don’t define it,’” said Dr. Pearson, “and the best of these poems did just that.”

Read more at the Fairfield University Magazine site...