Thursday, May 20, 2004

Student Poets Reach Within
by Judith Havemann
There were few riffs on vague or distant topics in the Parkmont Poetry Festival.
The 600 entrants in the citywide contest chose subjects that were intensely personal andrelevant to their lives.
Jasmine Baxter of Jefferson Junior High School wrote verses about the random murder of her
beloved brother. "God can have him later. I need my brother at my side," she wrote.
Brooks Swett of the National Cathedral School for Girls wrote of a time when summertime iswistfully recalled "at the end of Eden and the eve of fall."And Reginald Williams of Hart Middle School wrote about poverty and "the tin cup whichearned him a few cents each day of his miserable life."
They were among the 40 winners of the Parkmont festival, which honors the writing of poetryby public and private school students across the city.
Over the past 22 years, the festival has attracted thousands of contestants. Each year, thepoems are weeded down to about 200 by a panel of published poets. This year, Cornelius Eady,an author of seven books of poetry who is now teaching at American University, picked the 40winners.
On May 8, each student was asked to read his or her poem to an audience of more than 100friends and relatives at the private Parkmont School on 16th Street. The winners received a $25gift certificate from Olsson's Books and Records, a T-shirt and a booklet of the winning poems.
Monica Jones, an English teacher at Jefferson Junior High School in Southwest, said herstudents are highly motivated by the freedom to express themselves that poetry offers. "Theylove writing poetry. They are not intimidated by the grammar," she said.
She assigns her students topics. Anger was their favorite this year. The poems they turned inseethed with anger over injured friendships and, especially, betrayal. They wrote about things
their teacher had never imagined.
Nancy Schwalb, who is the executive director of the D.C. Creative Writing Workshop based at
Hart Middle School in Southeast, reads poems with the students in her classes and asks them todistill the meaning of the work in their own words.

"Once they start, their vocabulary really grows. They begin to use words on the edge of their
vocabulary. They know the meaning of these words, but they never have used them" until they
begin expressing themselves in poetry, she said. Her students draw images from their own lives,
but some of them choose to write fantasy, she said.
Judy Lentz, poetry coordinator for the festival, said the contest started with a smaller range ofstudents and expanded to include both junior and senior high schools as it became established.
All schools in the city are invited to participate each year, she said. It is one of the few vehicles
for public and private school students to come together.
Topics have changed over time as the city has changed, Lentz said.
"The subject of living and dying in D.C. has come up more in the past 10 years," she said. "There
are always some students who write about beauty and nature. We used to see more of it. It is areflection of the time. They are writing about what they see in the world."
Fourteen of the winning poems were chosen by District Extra editors for publication.

Thursday, May 20, 2004
D.C. Extra; T10, 536 words