With the school year under way and the heat wave winding down, a cool poetry program heads into its third year. In 2008 Elizabeth Rivers, then Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, launched Poetry Writers in the Schools (Poetry WITS) with the mission “to showcase student writing and encourage poetry teaching.” The program has been slowly gaining traction in Montgomery and surrounding counties. Your local literary scene examiner sat down with Ms. Rivers recently to catch up on the latest.
Cleveland Wall: How did this program get started?
Elizabeth Rivers: Traditionally each Montgomery County Poet Laureate has done some sort of community project, as I knew from David Simpson who had won the year before, so I knew what mine would be before I even entered the competition. I especially liked the idea of having a youth poetry contest connected with the adult poet laureate competition.
CW: So, the other aspects of the program came later?
ER: Yes. We developed the website to let people know about the contest and once that was in place we saw the opportunity to include lesson plans and to showcase children’s work.
CW: Including some from beyond Montgomery County also, right?
ER: Right. The youth poetry contest is only for local students, so this was a way to include children from neighboring areas as well. The same is true of our visiting poets program. In fact, our first visit was to Ben Salem School in Bucks County.
CW: What has been your main objective?
ER : I want children to feel free to express their thoughts and feelings, and I want to give them the tools to do that, maybe reveal a hidden talent some children didn’t know they had. Sometimes poetry is taught—maybe by people who aren’t that comfortable with it themselves—in terms of rhyme and meter and form so that the tools of poetry become the object of poetry and there’s no pleasure in it. I want to appeal to that sense of pleasure and wonder. Above all, poetry should be fun.
CW: How has the response been from the community so far?
ER: Slow. (Laughs.) Often public schools are bound by tightly scripted curricula, so it takes extraordinary motivation on the teacher’s part to make room for poetry. That is one advantage that homeschoolers and private schools have; they can be much freer to pursue interests and try new things.
CW: What is your ideal for the future of Poetry WITS?
ER : I’d like to see a lot more poems submitted to the website. I’d like it to become a national name so that children know they have a national audience for their work. We are slowly gaining momentum, seeing more interest in the program each year.
CW: So, this has gotten well beyond the usual scale of the poet laureate’s community project.
ER: Yes. I am on a mission of almost religious fervor to gain recognition for the contributions that children have to offer. At the 2010 laureate reading I was sitting next to Robert Bly and his wife, Ruth. I asked if they’d seen this anywhere else in their travels, youth included in a celebration of adult poets. Ruth said, “I have never seen anything like this.” I’d like to change that. I want to push the boundaries of who can do what.
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