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First things first:  April is National Poetry Month, and this week is National Library Week!  It's like a Turducken for poetry lovers.  Our own Alison Hawthorne Deming and Norman Dubie are two of poets.org's featured poets, along with UA-alumnus-turned-ASU-faculty Alberto Rios.

Teachers can find National Poetry Month tips for incorporating poetry into the classroom here; feel free to check out the Poetry Center's lesson plan library here.

Brad Meltzer's article on the unsung heroics of school librarians at The Huffington Post is making the rounds, and you have until April 11 to participate in the six-word story contest hosted by atyourlibrary.org.

Gerry LaFemina claims that poetry in American is experiencing another Golden Age.

And our very own Tucsonian Joshua Furtado won the 2012 Arizona Poetry Out Loud State Competition! On March 29th, at Phoenix Center for the Arts, Furtado brought the house down with his renditions of Eve Merriam's "Catch a Little Rhyme," Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee," and Ravi Shankar's "Contraction." Josh will be heading to the Poetry Out Loud Nationals in Washington D.C., May 13-15, to represent the state of Arizona. Good luck, Josh! We're so proud of you!

You can watch his semifinals performance at the UA Poetry Center here.

Two new members of the Arizona Board of Regents were confirmed; Greg Patterson's confirmation hearing lasted more than an hour.

 Finally, an article on why literature is important, discussing Michael Mack's new book, How Literature Changes the Way We Think, which I wish I'd had lying around last semester when my students asked me, on the day of the final, "Why should we care about literature?"  The argument here, specifically, is that art is not simply a reflection of the world, but a space created where revolution can happen, where sidelined ways of living can be brought to the surface and championed, and where current culture and norms can be challenged.  Why do you think literature is important?

Hilary Gan is an Education Intern, and an MFA candidate in Fiction at the University of Arizona.

  John Dwyer is a returned Peace Corps Volunteer and blogger for The Good Men Project.  He currently resides in Washington, D.C.

When I went to Mongolia to teach English through Peace Corps, I knew I would come back with at least one more tattoo. The only question was what would be the subject or inspiration? The tattoo I had inked in college combined my faith, friends, and love of Romantic poetry, so the bar was set high for the next one. It took the entire two years of my service to settle that question.

    Asian tattoos are dangerous, and that has nothing to do with health regulations. In my travels, I have fallen in and out of love with Chinese characters, Cambodian script, and Japanese kanji. Seeing pictographs that are visual representations of ideas on a level beyond the Western alphabet, or letters that can be said to physically flow unlike the blocky typeset of the Romans, well, that's addictive to a writer. Asian alphabets also attract lonely high school boys, and frankly I would like to believe I put that phase firmly behind me. There are many reasons not to get the words for Warrior Poet inked on your body in Korean, and I would be remiss if I did not include the issue of verification. If you cannot read your own tattoo, maybe it deserves a second thought.

    Landing in Mongolia, Chinggis Khaan International Airport greets travelers with three entirely different alphabets. There is English using the Romanized alphabet, Mongolian using Russia's Cyrillic alphabet, and Mongolian again, this time using the traditional script. After decades of suppression by first the Chinese, and then the Russians, Mongolia's traditional script is making a comeback. The traditional script, originally developed by Chinngis (Genghis to the Western World) Khaan so that messengers could write it without having to get off their horses, slides vertically down the page instead of horizontally. It has the utilitarian grace of a hammer or perfectly balanced sword.

    It makes sense that many Peace Corps Volunteers are seduced by re-emerging alphabet. American arms and ribcages end up being permanently adorned by the alphabet, but I fought against it. In the community I lived in, I drilled my fourth and fifth graders daily with the ABC's. In my ger, the felt tent I called home, I tweaked tattoo designs based on the soyombo, Mongolia's national symbol that appears on everything from vodka to the flag. I intended to avoid letters completely when getting inked.

    After my first year of teaching, I took my design with me to the capital during summer break. I visited a tattoo artist that Volunteers favor because he studied in New York until his visa expired, and possibly a little longer. While holding the tattoo gun against my skin, he quizzed me on the soyombo's meaning. He nodded in approval while I showed off my knowledge about how the circle and crescent were the sun and moon, the vertical lines were for strength and vigilance against neighboring enemies, and the triple flame on top was borrowed from Buddhism. When I thought I had passed the test, I stopped and waited to hear about how well I had studied. However, instead of heaping on accolades, the artist said only: "It's also the letter A."

    Turns out the soyombo was the first letter in an alphabet created by Zanabazar, a Mongolian who is considered Asia's version of Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci. Now venerated as a saint, Zanabazar composed music, contemplated theology, and created an absurdly complex alphabet for Mongolian Buddhism. Look up the soyombo, ye Mighty, and despair at having to use an alphabet with such intricate letters.

    Once I realized that despite all my efforts, I had gotten a tattoo that used an alphabet I could not read, I decided to capitulate completely. Mongolian script looks awesome, so why resist the temptation? Yet, I retained one caveat - I wanted to be able to read my tattoo. I returned to my community with all the study materials I could find on learning Mongolian script.

    My two greatest resources were a half-transcribed copy of "The Secret History of the Mongols," and a collection of poems. The Secret History was a sizable work attributed to Chinggis Khaan, but would have been worthless to me without the poems which had an assortment of transcriptions for the phonetics, and translations into the Cyrillic alphabet or even occasionally into English.

    The poems also lead to one of my favorite English lessons for my 9th grade classes. I had originally asked some of the Mongolian teachers I was closest to for help learning the traditional script. I would sit in the teachers' room, writing and rewriting the alphabet, but could rarely entice anyone to do more than write their name for me. Honestly, I was often extremely angry that no one seemed willing to take the time to help me when I had moved all the way to Mongolia to teach English and live in a community that had literally no other Westerners. Later, I learned about the cultural suppression that only recently ended in the '90s, and felt quite embarrassed over my emotions. Many of my fellow teachers would not have had the opportunity to learn the alphabet that was their own cultural heritage until they were studying at the university, if at all.

    In the meantime, I figured that if the teachers wouldn't help me, maybe the students would. I noticed that as early as fifth grade they had textbooks with traditional writing in them. So I made a lesson around a short poem, White Mountains, which I had in Mongolian script and English translation. To be safe, I made the lesson for my oldest students, 9th grade. The poem itself is in the accompanying picture, and a brief summary of the lesson plan follows:

• Alphabet song (5 min); my students were too cool to do their homework, but rarely too cool to sing.
• Matching Alphabets (7 min); jumbled columns of Cyrillic and English alphabets were written on the board, students individually wrote them down and matched corresponding letters. The first student to finish correctly had the honor of showing off and matching the letters I had written on the board.
• Translation of script to Cyrillic (10 min); to my students' endless amusement, I scratched the traditional script on the board and had individual students come up, correct my scrawls, and write English letters that made similar sounds.
• Teacher aided translation into English (8 min); I actually had a student write the poem on the board for me in script, then as a class, we translated the poem into English.
• Groups of four, each one picks a season (2 min); students arranged their desks into pods of four, and each group picks a paper at random from a pile. Each piece of paper has a season written on it.
• Competition to brainstorm associations for the given season (8 min); each season had at least two groups working on it. After five minutes of brainstorming, the groups with the most words per season wrote their lists on the board. If the other groups had words missing from the list, they could add them afterwards.
• Composition of weather/season poems; homework given for students to write their own poems. Since homework was rarely completed, it was an excuse to continue this lesson at a later point. On a review day, I could go over color and seasonal vocabulary and have students compose poems in class.

As a teacher, this lesson had everything I could desire. Most of the work, especially the writing, was done by the students, and it revolved around a subject I was interested in, poetry. My students were also extra excited by the chance to show off something they knew more about, Mongolian script. I even ended up borrowing one of the writing textbooks for a day, because as my student said, I obviously needed to study more than she did.

By my final summer in Mongolia, I could read almost as well as I could speak the language - which isn't saying much, but it was enough. I finished my soyombo with a healthy spattering of traditional script surrounding it. When people find out that my tattoo is in Mongolian, they inevitably ask what it says. I like to change to translation each time because it doesn't matter so much what it says as how it says it. Like a poem, I find it hard to argue that one interpretation is really more valid than another.

Hilary Gan is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Arizona, an Education Intern at The University of Arizona Poetry Center, and writer-in-residence at Hollinger Elementary.

I was lucky enough to be present for the Poetry Out Loud Southern Arizona Semi-finals competition--I even scored a seat by the outdoor propane heater for the last half. I am a fiction writer who knows very little about poetry and who tends to favor the out-of-vogue and terribly inappropriate narrative poetic stylings of Charles Bukowski. I like it when ugly language is repurposed into something beautiful, and I like finding beauty in grittiness.

My mother is an English teacher and says that the best poems for high schoolers are the old, tried-and-true sentimental poems: 'O Captain, My Captain!" and so forth. Sentimental rhymers were the poems most of the students chose to perform.

Robert Oliphant argues in his article "Speech, Hearing, and America's 100 Most Memorable Children's Poems" that the memorization of poetry helps children develop phonemic awareness, learn multiple connotations for words, and become "civilizationally literate."  He goes on to explain that rhymes allow children to practice distinguishing between consonants, while literary devices use words in different contexts and allow students to expand their understanding of meaning, as well as expanding their vocabulary to include words that are uncommon in their neck of the woods. 

So it appears that the students who are going on to the State Competition on Thursday, March 29 in Phoenix (Joshua Furtado, Cassandra Valadez, and Mark Anthony Niadas) were the students who gleaned these lessons well enough to express their poems with the full force of their own personality. 

Two out of three of the winners were actors in their school drama clubs, and it showed. What made them stand out was their treatment of the poem like a conversation. They let sentences and meaning dictate their delivery, rather than the rhymes; they recognized and allowed the humor of their pieces into their performances, and it was clear that somehow they related deeply to their poems in unique ways, which brought hidden meanings to light. They had distinguished their phonemes to the point that they could choose to ignore or emphasize them.  They had understood multiple connotations so well that they could express them with the tone of their voices.  And they had understood the purpose of the poem so well that they could take, say, a 19th century poem written by a guy in Massachusetts and perform it in Tucson, Arizona with all of the emotion of the original and some besides.  In short, they had learned their poems.

So if you would like to see what an arts education really does for our students, please think about attending the State Finals Competition, held here:

Thursday, March 29, 2012
7:00pm - 9:30pm
Phoenix Center for the Arts
1202 North 3rd Street
Phoenix, AZ 85004

And in other poetry-related news this month, check out the links below:

The U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan blogged about the importance of arts in the schools: http://www.ed.gov/blog/2012/03/it%e2%80%99s-march-do-you-know-how-strong-your-schools%e2%80%99-arts-programs-are/

The New York Public Library offers its summer seminar program for teachers in conjunction with The Cullman Center Institute for Teachers: http://www.nypl.org/events/cullman-institute-teachers

And Reddit has an official "literature channel" for videos of performances thanks to Miracle Jones:  http://www.reddit.com/r/litvideos/ 

Rita Oldham is a senior at the University of Arizona, majoring in Education.

             My mom was a teacher, and she would often come home from school with stories to tell. Listening to her made me feel as if I was watching a TV series. I grew to love the unique characters that filled her classroom, and I felt that I knew each one as if they were my closest friend. Yet, I rarely met them. They were simply a figure of my imagination, an idea of what I hoped them to be. Each student was different in their own way, and had their own struggles and triumphs, yet each touched my mom's heart. Somehow, despite the craziness of each day, my mom would come home inspired and reassured that she was in the right place in her life. I was in awe.

            Years later, I was interning at an elementary school and I was...in agony. I wasn't sure where my mom's angel of inspiration had come from, but it was definitely not with me. Kids were flying from wall to wall. I had to jump from desk to desk, dodging the bullets of pens and pencils. I was anything but inspired. I came home exasperated, distressed, and plagued with emotional and mental fatigue. I whimpered to my mom, "I thought you said teaching was rewarding, invigorating, and life-changing. You never told me it was a fight for survival...literally!" My mom smiled at my statement, oblivious to my serious undertone. She only replied, "Stop looking for a moment of reward. The prize comes when you least expect it." And, as always, my mom was right.

            It was a Saturday morning in beautiful Tucson, Arizona. I was fulfilling the requirement of an assignment by donating a few hours of my time at the university's Poetry Center. It was Family Day, and children ran down the book-filled halls with their parents not too far behind them. I was on craft patrol, bracing myself for waves of children to engulf the table I was at to cut, color, and glue to their little heart's content. In honor of the "Speak Peace" exhibit that was on display, we were encouraging students to write their dreams and ideas of peace onto colorful strips of paper that would then become a chain connecting the vision of one child to another. Older kids wrote; younger kids drew. Either way, paper and markers skid across the table like a plate on ice.

            At one point, a little voice peeped up behind me and I turned to see a little boy with blond hair, and sky blue eyes. In the kindest manner fathomable, he asked, "Please miss, can I join?" I kneeled down to the polite child and asked him what his name was. He slowly yet steadily replied, "My name's Elijah. I'm 5. How old are you?" I smiled and answered and invited him to sit next to me. As if shocked to be invited, Elijah said, "Ooooh thank you so much!" It reminded me of a Shirley Temple classic where the orphan finds her family. I gently pushed him towards the table  and briefly explained the purpose of our project. Instead of the paper chain slips that I handed him, the little boy grabbed a plain white piece of paper and a blue marker. He began to look at me, then look down at his paper, then look at me again, and make a few marks on the page. When he was done, he exclaimed with a burst of excitement, "It's you and me!" I looked at his paper and sure enough, there was a spitting image of myself. I had two stringy legs, a lopsided head, a smile that overtook a crooked face, and a blue skinny body with no clothes. Next to me stood a smaller version of that image, presumably the artist himself. His tree-branch arms extended upwards, connecting with my own tree branches. "See?" he asked. "We're friends!"

            Elijah handed me the marker and asked me to write his name above his figure. As I did, I asked him what school he went to. He said that he goes to school with his mommy, and he turned and pointed to a woman behind him. She was petite and young, and was pushing an even younger child in her stroller with one hand while holding onto her pregnant belly in the other. I tilted my head with curiosity and she explained that Elijah and his sister were home-schooled. I commended her for her beautiful family and to my amazement, her eldest child chimed in, "No, YOU are beautiful!" I was astonished. Sitting before me was a stranger 3 foot tall with a heart the size of a giant. He didn't care that he only just met me. He didn't care that he didn't know me. And he didn't care that I was four times his age. To Elijah, I was his new beautiful friend.

            Before finishing his drawings, he and I drew a picture of his younger sister, and his baby brother that was on his way. He even cheerfully invited me to his house later that day so we could play with his trucks and puzzles. Out of all the children I had met that day, I was truly sad to see him leave. No one else had his spunky personality, his regal manners, and his superb drawing skills. No one else made me smile like Elijah did. He taught me the meaning of true happiness.

            I realize now that that little boy was the reward my mother found every day in her teaching career. It isn't the profound statements, or the excellent grades, or even the stories each student creates with their lives. It's an unexplainable joy that you receive through their simple smile. It's the unfathomable inspiration you feel when you're with them. Time stops, and suddenly, nothing is important. It's the little things that make our lives valuable. For my mom, it was a classroom filled with students. For me, it was a little blond boy by the name of Elijah.

It takes a certain attuned perspective to see "a strange maroon pelt" where a "vinyl coat in the car door" really is. Or "red math" for a digital clock. It is this propensity for the eerie everyday that lends Paul Guest's poetry a special slant. His most recent collection of poetry, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, offers a dark look at everything from coupons and monsters to the etymology of galoshes.

Though most of what you'll find written about Guest and his poetry pushes the sad fact of his permanent childhood paralysis as a sort of map key to his writing, such singular pointing misses a wealth of nuance. Namely, it misses Guest's ability to take imaginative jaunts to a refreshing - if absurd - extreme, which cannot be narrowly attributed to what the book jacket calls "a life forever altered."Neither can the specific but applicable shards of historical knowledge be named symptoms of tragedy; lines like "better to cover you / beside the eastern sea / with lapidary jade / fat emperors ate hoping not to die" pile in like trivia into a treasure box.

Still, without the knowledge of Guest's paralysis, it would be harder to forgive his compulsion to throw barriers up in the midst of otherwise universal poems. The opening poem, "User's Guide to Physical Debilitation" sees "witch's brews of resentment," "extreme atrophy," and "the gradual, bittersweet loss / of every God damned thing you ever loved" over the course of two melodramatic pages. This is not to say that a predicament such as Guest's is undeserving of empathy; rather, reader discomfort arises from the hunch that to nod with his lament is to kowtow to pity in a situation where marveling at his inventive language would be worth more to everyone involved.

Remarkably, between the near-surreal portraits and heavy references to a paralyzed life, you don't get the feeling you've fallen down the rabbit hole into Guest's own world. Indeed, you'd be hard-pressed to pinpoint anyone to whom such elegant distortions and crystalline phrase twists might belong. The portrait rather seems to be about the world at (very) large.

by Christy Delahanty

Justin Gordon is a senior at the University of Arizona, majoring in Creative Writing.

On Saturday, I came to work an hour late. My manager asked me why I was so late, and I said, "I'm sorry, I was volunteering at the Poetry Center." His response was, "There's a center for poetry?" This had not been the first time I had received that response, and it probably won't be the last.  As an English major, I have read many different poets, but most people hardly ever focus on poetry. Some even go as far as saying poetry is a dead art, but what I saw at the Poetry Center today proved that poetry is still alive, and will continue to grow for future generations. There are people out there who still see the importance of poetry, and they want to spread their vision to the next generation. The biggest problem with poetry is that most people are ill-informed on the subject. Most people hear the word poetry, and think of rhyming and exalted speech, but poetry is so much more than this, and it is through events, like Family Days at the Poetry Center, that teach the public about poetry.

The Family Days events at the Poetry Center are good for all ages. There are writing activities run by local writers for the children, and a large library of poetry for the adults. People have told me, "I don't like poetry," to which I reply, "You just haven't found the right poem yet." The Poetry Center has something for everyone. Poetry is powerful, and the children realize this especially.

The children that come to these activities have a blast. There are many children who will say, "I don't like to write," but there isn't one child that will say, "I don't like to pretend or imagine."  This is why Family Days are important; it allows children to express themselves on paper in a friendly writing community. The child that learns to appreciate writing is given a tremendous gift; they have an outlet that will always be there.  At Family Days, the children can write and submit their work to the Poetry Center anthology, dance to their favorite poems, sing along with local song writers, and let their imaginations run free.

Sarah Minor is an MFA candidate in non-fiction at the University of Arizona, and writer-in-residence at Corbett Elementary.

On a warm Saturday morning this September I headed to the Poetry Center to lead my first Family Day activity. The event fell during the Poetry Center's Speak Peace exhibit and we had planned peace themed activities combining visual art and writing for the families to participate in. Having only worked with high school and college-aged students before I was, of course, terrified of young children. Not young children exactly, but the idea of inspiring young children to sit down and write, to come up with a message about peace--an topic adults have a hard time discussing--all while overcoming the limits of spelling and handwriting. What if the activity was too simple? What if they grew bored quickly or couldn't sit still? And how old were third graders again?

As I fanned out the flat rainbow of construction paper across the long worktable between the PC's tall bookshelves, I thought about how my own 5^th grade paper folding skills were a little rusty, and how all the peace messages I could come up with seemed used, cliché. My activity involved the kids writing messages for peace on construction paper and either folding the paper into a crane, or stringing it up as a peace flag for display.

I was sitting alongside a group of pre-K students drawing peace pictures for flags when a small shoulder bumped mine. A little brunette girl wielding a blue crayon stretched out her arm to plop a bright pink sheet down in front of me. "Can you help me write a story?" she said. I paused in surprise, and then "Heck Yes!" said my brain and "Of course!" said my mouth. A story? And all it took was a pencil and some colorful paper? Could it always be this easy to inspire a child to jump into the writing process? I suspected not.

Like me, the little girl had just moved to Tucson and was missing her best friend from back home. She wanted to write a story about them playing together and going on a walk through the desert. She wove the story quickly aloud, animating with her hands and dictating as I wrote. With very few prompting questions, soon she and her friend were walking down a path with their dogs and had come across a snake! "That one happened for real," she told me of her encounter with an animal from her new desert home.

Across the table from us, her audible tale had excited some other visitors, who were telling each other a story about princesses and creating "peace crowns" out of construction paper. "The Queen of Peace," said one as she slipped pointed yellow circlet with a peace sign in the center through her ponytail. "And I'm the Princess," responded the other. Next door at the table, a little boy was drawing "Peace Robots" complete with messages for his chain of flags.

I read the little girl's story aloud and she smiled, pulling the paper from my hands to begin work on an illustration. I had somehow looked up to find myself surrounded by inspired writers working excitedly. They had each found their own way around any writing limitations, and were lost in peace-based imagination, all without detailed instruction or the folding of a single crane.

I guess the lesson here is not just to be able to adapt a lesson and forgo structure, but to trust in the creative energy inside the youngest of writers, and to look forward to those you hope to inspire, inspiring you in return.