During fall semester’s first quarter, students in the senior Creative Writing elective read, analyzed, and wrote poetry. English Teacher Kim Gonzales hopes the students’ gained confidence and ease as both readers and writers of poetry. “This is a genre that is simultaneously so accessible and so powerful. Poetry is for everyone, and there is a poem for every feeling and occasion,” she said. “Poems you’ve read take up residence in your head, instantly available for those moments when no other words will do. How many times in a given week do I think of Rilke's lines: ‘Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. / Just keep going. No feeling is final.’?  I've lost count.” 

Kim also hopes living like a poet helped these students begin to build a lifelong disposition toward awareness and fearless creation. “Living like a poet means staying present and open to experience, developing steady habits of observation, and sharing ideas with a small supportive writing community,” she said.

Student Max C. said poetry gives him a great vessel to express deep, raw emotions where he blends the abstract and the obvious. “There were very few parameters as to where you could go with the poems we wrote. So, I found topics I was interested in. This allowed me to write some personal and specific poems, like the poem that looked at my friendship with one person through the lens of a jacket,” he said.

He also enjoyed seeing his classmates progress in their poems through peer review circles where students wrote feedback on each other’s poems. “I got to see how the poems evolved, like one that started as being about one person’s visit to the dentist evolved into a longer poem about many visits to the dentist that the writer combined with commentary about growing up,” Max said. “It was weirdly fun to get and give critical feedback on our work.”

As part of a class assignment, students sent in their work for possible publication to various places, including the UPrep Blog. Below and at the link, some Creative Writing students share their poetry with our community.

Hurry Up and Eat!

By Anousha M.

Where my parents are from

love smells like ginger hitting hot oil.

It stings the eyes before it feeds you.

Affection is measured in overfilled plates,

in the way my mother scolds because

she’s already cleaned the rice I spilled on the floor.

I was born in America,

where words are wrapped in napkins,

coated with fine sugar and

smoothly creased by the edges before serving.

And after serving, their compliments

taste like sponge cake:

 

soft, white, weightless,

crumbling when I hold it too tightly.

School is where I first learned to say please and thank you

after unwrapping a frosted cupcake,

but the boom of tartari kheye nao

still rings in my ears, like after having chili

in my home’s kitchen. We sharpen our

knives on each other’s nails,

simmer our pots until they shine. We yell

until our throats burn. And somehow

that’s how we survive

because when we spill the hottest spices,

we mean I care enough to season you with love.

America slices its words so finely

that I can’t taste who loves me.

When I leave home for college,

I will pack my kitchen’s smoke in copper pots,

the hiss of too much salt,

the ache that proves the cooking is real,

hoping it lasts long enough

to season the life I am about to make.

 

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