Statewide poetry inititative to kickoff with Mt. Blue Campus event

FARMINGTON – A new statewide initiative designed to provide students with additional resources to learn, practice and create poetry will take an important first step at the Mt. Blue Campus next month.

Imagination 101: Poetry in the Schools, supported by Maine Poet Laureate Wesley McNair, represents an attempt to change what he sees as the oftentimes “top-down” method of teaching poetry in school. Students exposure to poetry in the classroom usually consists of poets being brought into the school, according to McNair, with the students then following up with prepared questions.

Recently, a three-member “poetry team” performed at the Blaine House to kick off one component of the Imagination 101 initiative, a program called “Written Word, Spoken Word and Hip-hop.” The team includes Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, the former executive director of the Telling Room in Portland who has a background in teaching and poetry; Eric Axelman, a hip-hop artist who has released two CDs; and Lady Zen, a spoken word artist who performs to jazz fusion music.

“They like each other and collaborate quite beautifully,” McNair said. “They represent a huge spectrum of poetry genres.”

On May 2, McNair and the poetry team will present roughly an hour-long presentation at the Mt. Blue Campus to 100-plus students. Afterwards, 30 students selected by the English Department will participate in workshops with all three artists.

The entire exercise will be filmed and edited by personnel associated with the University of Maine at Farmington. The May 2 workshop will form the basis of the initiative’s website, as the poetry team goes on tour through high schools across the state.

“We’ve spent years shaping this thing,” McNair said. “Everything has been designed for students and teachers.”

The program seeks to honor sources of poetry that students actually utilize in their day-to-day lives, as well as familiarize teachers with those same sources. By bringing poetry that students relate to into the classroom, McNair believes that the previous model of teaching the subject can be improved.

Additionally, the project will showcase the new Mt. Blue Campus. “I can’t imagine a better high school for this,” McNair said.

Another aspect of Imagination 101 is the “Letters Between Poets” collection, archived and displayed online by Colby College. The basis of the collection is formed through correspondence between McNair and poet Donald Hall, running from 1976 to 1984. In the letters, Hall and McNair trade drafts and discuss poetry.

Assembled by Pat Burdick, special collections librarian at Colby, and her department, McNair likened the work that went into the project to that of a book. The viewer is able to search the collection by poem, keyword or theme, providing another tool for the Imagination 101 project.