Free verse on demand, and other poetic pursuits

Published 12:11 pm Saturday, April 26, 2008

Bainbridge’s celebration of National Poetry Month continues.

A freshly baked maple donut!

A carpet of sugar coats your fluffy body.

I watch you closely

through finger printed glass

Maple bar donut

Oh, how I desire thee

– “Donut,” by Melanie Forthun

This poem succeeds, as they say, on a number of levels.

For one thing, it was written for an 8-year-old girl with a wicked fetish for sweets.

And even though poet Melanie Forthun had only just met this youngster, she fully understood and succinctly captured the yearning that the girl regularly experiences when she presses herself against a bakery case and peers in.

But the most impressive part was that Forthun, a West Sound Academy high school student, completed the piece in roughly three minutes, with observers standing by and a growing waiting list of other commissions. Want a poem about your dog? We’ll pop out some free verse for you. Celebrating an anniversary? Here’s an ode to your honey.

“Rip the sheet off, and it’s done,” said Eleanor Johnson, Forthun’s poetry instructor. “It’s in the grand tradition of ‘occasional poetry.’”

As part of Bainbridge Island’s celebration of National Poetry Month, which continues through April, Johnson joined forces with poetry month organizer Kathleen Thorne to assemble a “Poetry on Demand” stand in Winslow Mall last Saturday.

Thorne got the idea from an article in the August 2007 issue of “American Scholar” magazine, in which poet and teacher Douglas Goetsch recounted his effort to turn a group of New Jersey high school students into working poets by setting up a poetry booth in a Princeton square.

At first, just as Goetsch described in his essay, most Winslow passers-by weren’t quite sure what to make of the endeavor and strolled by with polite, “I don’t see you” smiles.

But Thorne and Johnson proved to be fine hawkers who over the course of the day drew dozens of residents and visitors into the world of commissioned poetry.

No one failed to be charmed; even folks who didn’t think they wanted poetry couldn’t help but express their delight at the results. Student Anne Boucher, for instance, wrote a poem for a woman whose daughter was about to run the Boston Marathon.

When Boucher’s customer read the final poem, which cleverly incorporated Nike’s ubiquitous slogan, her politeness turned to glee.

“Oh!” she said. “Is this ‘Just Do It?’ I love it! Love it!”

Johnson, who herself writes poetry under the pen name Eleanor St. James, said the students took their assignments seriously, asking lots of questions and working hard to convey an appropriate tone.

And just as Goetsch found, the assignments weren’t all larks. One woman asked for a poem about a funeral; another asked for one that was just plain “angry.”

“Some were hard to write,” Johnson said. “The sad ones, they found hard to write.”

One of the ideas that inspired Goetsch’s experiment in the first place was the idea that creating something for the sole purpose of giving it away, in a “Buddhist attitude of nonattachment,” could prove creatively fruitful. Johnson said her students found that to be true, too.

“In many ways, it was a freeing thing,” she said. “Because once they gave (the poems) away, they could open themselves up to the next person.”

After four hours of writing, the students packed it in. Most, Johnson said, wanted to stay because they had more commissions to fulfill.

“We should do this more often,” they said.

● See David Goetsch’s “Poetry Stand: How a precocious group of high school poets learned to provide verse on demand” at www.theamericanscholar.org/au07/poetry-goetsch.html. Poetry month continues through the month on Bainbridge and in Kitsap, with the Jewel Box Poetry Reading on April 20; “An Island of Poetry” reading at 2 p.m. April 27 at the Bainbridge Public Library; a weekly poetry workshop with local poet John Willson at the Strawberry Park Center; and “Poetry Corners” displays throughout Winslow. See www.artshum.org for complete details.