Young poets face audience
Karen Peterson photo
Poet Rachel Mindell receives a stack of thank you cards from students for teaching them about poetry.
Karen Peterson photo
Students face a big audience during the poetry reading.
Karen Peterson photo
Annalysia DuMontier, 11, reads her poem about food and the body. “My eyes are grapes,” she said.
Karen Peterson photo
Karen Peterson photo
Karen Peterson photo
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ST. IGNATIUS – Before the poetry reading got started in the Mission elementary school on June 3, fourth and fifth-grade students began negotiating whether or not they were going to read in front of a crowd of people.
“I don’t want to read,” Zaquan Bourdon-Winchester, 10, said to Rachel Mindell, the guest poetry teacher for the past 12-weeks from the Missoula Writing Collaborative.
Zaquan explained his fear after helping to set up the tables in the lunchroom for the poetry reading.
“I feel like my stomach is boiling,” he said. “I read in front of my class, and that wasn’t so bad. All the people make me too nervous.”
Mindell wanted the audience to hear each student’s best poem from the poetry workshop, so she allowed students to pick a friend to read if they were too nervous to share. The poems were also published in an anthology for kids to take home.
“They’ve made so much progress,” she said of the 73 students.
During the poetry project, Mindell went into four classrooms to teach the students about poetry on Wednesdays. The young poets learned about the complicated twists of metaphor and other poetic tools.
“They can dive right into writing now,” she said.
Annalysia DuMontier, 11, is one of the rare students that isn’t bothered by public speaking. She said she enjoyed reading poetry for her class.
“I acted out one of my poems called ‘Ode to My Glasses,’” she said. “I learned how to make people laugh, so I’m not nervous. I just express how I feel.”
Students shared poems about haunted houses, snowboarding on a hill in Polson, dreaming of unicorns and being kind of sorry for things they’d done. One student compared a cat’s paws to fry bread, and another student wrote about his super powers.
The poetry project was paid for by the Missoula Writing Collaborative, the National Endowment for the Arts, the St. Ignatius Indian Education Committee and by many supporters. Mindell hopes to be back next year with another poetry workshop.
