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CULTIVATING THE CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSE

Author(s): Esther Shein, Globe Correspondent Date: October 4, 2001 Page: 6 Section: Globe West

NATICK - Poetry, says Andrew Green, is a healing art form. It is a way to express feelings and a vehicle for "comforting and consoling us; a way of relating to a personal tragedy."

And it's Green's mission to get children to understand how poetry is connected to everyday lives and that it doesn't have to be full of rules. Green is founder of Potato Hill Poetry, based in Natick, which has provided workshops, residencies, and readings around the country since 1994. He also publishes a magazine geared to teachers, students, and poetry enthusiasts that comes out five times a year and has a subscriber base of about 2,000. Potato Hill, he says, is "dedicated to promoting the sometimes far-fetched notion that poetry belongs to us all and not just a select few."

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Green says he believes there will be a lot of poetry written by students as a way to articulate their thoughts. "It seduces kids to write about things from their hearts. There's a freedom to write something that's not going to be graded or bound by the grammar police. The subject area is wide open."

He notes that poems often begin with one small detail, and recalls one, among the influx of poems that Potato Hill received after the Columbine High School shootings in 1999, from a girl about a recurring dream she had about the blankets in her room and her mother. Although a few poems have trickled in about Sept. 11, Green says he thinks it will be a while before students really begin to express their thoughts in a written format. "Sometimes people need time to digest what happened before they begin to write about it. It may take some time before we see more poems about this event."

Kathy Kenney Marshall, a third-grade teacher at Framing ham's McCarthy Elementary School, agrees. Kenney Marshall, who has brought Green in to do poetry residencies at the school for the past five years, says her students are slowly beginning to recount what the day means to them. "My kids have writing journals, and I told them after we had some discussion about the events of 9-11, they could write a poem or put some words down about what happened," she says. "Even kids who said they didn't want to, every single one of them - whether it was just a few words - wrote something down."

Kenney Marshall has brought Green in to work in grades 3 through 5 at McCarthy, and, she says, while he teaches poetry exercises in each class, "more than anything, he talks about language and word play, rhythm, really the love of the language. He gets kids to write about some of the ideas and . . . the writing prompts he has." For example, in one class, he once wrote on the blackboard the phrase, "Oh, the way. . ." He gave the students a few ideas of ways to complete the phrase, like, "Oh, the way my alarm clock wakes me up in the morning," Kenney Marshall recounts. Green gave the students about 10 minutes to silently write whatever came to mind, starting every line with "Oh, the way."

"The kids came up with some incredible images and we sent it home for homework and told them to sit at home and watch what goes on," Kenney Marshall says. "They came back with pages and pages of images. One boy wrote about, `Oh, the way the rocking chair rocks on the porch.' "

Elizabeth Guydan, a sixth-grade language-arts and social-studies teacher at Framingham's Walsh Middle School, says she found Green's work to be "delightful" when he came to the school twice last spring. "He was very appropriate in his presentation concerning poetry. . . . In fact, all the sixth-grade teachers commented on how he engaged the students and how natural and at ease he was with the students, and made it a natural experience for them."

Guydan says Green read some poems that he had written and talked about what inspired him to write them. "And that got the students to think about their own everyday experiences," she says. "What happened afterward was, they brought in poems they wrote for days afterwards; whatever was going on in their lives - even ordinary things."

"I want kids to write about what's important to them," Green says.

The name "Potato Hill" was taken from the nickname of a mountain in Lincoln, Vt., where Green was teaching and conducting poetry and writing workshops in the late 1980s. "The dairy farmers there were known for growing potatoes," he says, and had dubbed Mount Abraham as Potato Hill. One time, Green says, he invited some of the locals to "come to Potato Hill for a poetry reading," and the name stuck.

While he was teaching, "I always felt there was a need for some students to have a vehicle [to write their thoughts] and discuss poetry," he says. "I felt there was a fear and apprehension when poetry was mentioned." Children tend to be brought up under the "same misconceptions as adults when discussing poetry: that it's difficult to understand, and there's rules to follow," he says, and people's experiences tend to be about having to memorize poems and then get up and recite them in front of a class.

Green recalls once reading a poem titled "Cows at Night" by the poet Hayden Carruth, and how one of his seventh-grade students commented afterward, "I never knew you were allowed to write poems about cows!" Previously, the student, who grew up on a farm, had told Green he thought poetry "was for sissies." After that, Green says, the student began handing in "sheaths of poems."

"When I go into a school, I get kids to write about what's going on in their hearts and minds," he says. "What's important to me is that poetry is a healing art." Green says he often hears from teachers that some kids who are labeled "special education" are often the ones who respond the most to poetry.

Kenney Marshall says she has also gotten Green to do poetry residencies in her own children's schools, in Randolph, because she is so impressed by his work. "He has a wonderful way with his voice. The kids are mesmerized," she says. "He can recite or read a poem in a way that has captivated every single class I've had. The kids who can't sit still do. It doesn't matter what the poem is - even when it's abstract and they don't understand it."

She says Green has great management techniques with the kids and a way of including all of the students in his lessons "in a way that is meaningful."

He "emphasizes that things don't have to rhyme, and he stays away from that because it's tough to do well. He tries to teach them to play with the sounds of words," she says, adding that he has a way of drawing out reluctant writers and students who don't think they have any talent for writing poetry. Kenney Marshall also says she thinks the students relate well to a man coming in to teach them poetry, and that he's also "very positive and supportive to the teachers."

Green is planning a poetry reading for students in Decemberin conjunction with the Morse Institute in Natick, to give children an opportunity to read their work in front of the community.

"Kids love to say words out loud," he says, and poetry is "a celebration of sounds and words."

Poems make people feel better at a very elementary level, he adds, "because they connect to something inside; something in our soul and spirit. That's why I want people to not be afraid of poetry."

For more information about Potato Hill, call 508-272-1999 or use our online contact form..

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