Artist Lisa Wilde has been teaching English at Brooklyn’s Wildcat Academy for ten years. Her students come with lives and dreams broken by poverty, foster care, disabilities, absent fathers. Every semester, she lures her students into a one-week poetry seminar. Over lunch and other cracks in the school day, Wilde draws or paints their portrait. A recent public exhibition at a branch of the Brooklyn Public Library brought together the students’ poetry and Wilde’s portraits.
As told to WKCD by Lisa Wilde
“I am a teacher at Wildcat Academy, a public (charter) second chance high school in New York City. For the majority of our students our school is their last chance at a regular diploma. Kids end up at Wildcat for a whole variety of reasons, but as our principal says, they all have a reason.
“Wildcat is a co-op school—the students alternate a week of school with a week of school-coordinated work. But being a co-op school does not exempt us from any of New York State’s requirements for a high school diploma. This makes class time extremely precious because our students, many of whom have academic gaps from being out of school, have to gain the knowledge and skills to pass all five New York State Regents tests.
Life and Times of Young Rellington Growing up he never knew what he Or why do people die? By Tyrell Bramble |
In class, we read poetry, discuss descriptive language and then, using ideas gleaned from Kenneth Koch’s books, the students write poems. It is always a wonderful experience. The poems are interesting, often revealing, sometimes stunning, and I always feel they should be seen by a larger audience— because of their inherent value, but also because I think the poems’ sensitivities, intelligence, passion confront stereotypes, especially of kids who end up at a ‘second chance’ high school.
“Last spring an opportunity opened up to have the poems read by a larger audience. The Brooklyn Public Library Windsor Terrace branch put on an exhibition of mounted enlarged versions of selected students poems, accompanied by portraits (sketches and paintings) done by me of the students. The students read their poems at the opening and the exhibit’s run was extended twice because of the response. The show was actually only taken down because another venue wanted to put up the work. The poems and portraits are currently on view at Grace Institute—a school in Manhattan that provides free job skills training. According to the Grace Institute director, the show has been very inspiring for their students, who also are trying to get a second chance.
“Having the poems and portraits in shows has been significant for the Wildcat students in many ways—expanding their horizons, getting acknowledgement and seeing themselves as ‘equal.’ At the same time, I think it has been meaningful for the different audiences to be able to read these poems and see the portraits. I frame the show with the opening quote from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, where he says people cannot see him. This is a statement I hear echoes of from my students: they are not seen, they are not perceived—or worse, they are seen as a threat. I think—I hope—this show allows people to see these kids who are our future in a deeper, more real way. The poems show a kind of truth and honesty that can't be denied. I also see the show as a testament to the value of both art and a second chance.”
Both Tyrell Bramble and Corelle Bayne made their father the center of their poem. They are currently seniors at Wildcat. Here’s what they had to say:
Tyrell Bramble
At first I was very skeptical about writing poetry, I’d never done it before. But then when I started doing it, it was fun after a while. We read a lot of poetry, but we mostly wrote our own. I began by thinking about past experiences, about things that happened growing up and then just wrote about it. I just let it go. I think the first thought is often the best thought, but if you need to go back and change it, there’s always room for change.
|
We read our poetry in front of the class, we’d take turns reading. There are a couple of shy students that didn’t, but you’re going to find shy people everywhere. I always got positive feedback, I never got anything negative. And it was easy to give other people feedback. You told them what you liked and didn’t like and nobody took it negatively, everybody just enjoyed themselves.
My father passed away before I could read the poem to him. It was both easy and hard to write about my father. It was easy to focus on it, but putting it down on paper for other people, so it would sound good, that was hard.
[For the exhibit at the library] we all went and recited our poems. There was roughly 150 people there, it was pretty packed. I felt a little nervous, but I got the bugs out of my stomach. Afterwards, a lot of people came up to me and commented and said how much they liked my poem.
Wildcat pretty much changed me as an individual. Before I went to Wildcat, I wasn’t the best kid, I was doing a lot of things that were bad, illegal, a lot of things. I’d kinda dropped out of school, I only went when I felt like going. But Wildcat pretty much transformed me.
Not every student is going to feel good about writing poetry. Students are scared of the challenge and of finding something to write about. But for me, it’s mind cleansing, it clears the world out, everything is just away for the moment when I’m writing. It’s just pure to me.
Corelle Bayne
I’d never written poetry before. I don’t like to write. It was an assignment I had to do for school. They said you had to express your feelings. And I happened to have something I needed to get off my chest. So the poem I wrote just came to me like that.
At the time I wrote it, my father was incarcerated. So I mailed it to him and he saw it. He said he liked it, that he really wanted to know how I felt about everything. It touched him a lot.
For me, good things came out of it, but sometimes I don’t know why I wrote the poem. My father is back present in my life, but we still don’t get along.
My relationship with my father was something I’d been holding on my chest, so writing about it was a way to not to have to think about it so much anymore.
I hit it off in one draft and then just had to fix some mistakes. It was very hard for me to read it aloud, to everyone, but I did read it to my father, and reading it to him was more effective, to me, then having him read it. I read it when I was upset, out of anger.
It’s the only poem I’ve written. I may write more, I have stuff in my head, but as I said, I’m not a person who likes to write. And I can’t write on something that doesn’t interest me, it has to be something that affects me strongly. Schools should give students more chances to write from our own experiences. It’s a way for us to take on understanding of ourselves.
[At the library event] I was shaking very much, no one could see it, but I was. It was nice to hear from the older people and have their comments. They said they enjoyed my poem, that they could relate to what I said. That made me feel good.
If I hadn’t written the poem, I’d still probably be in that state of mind, upset and angry [at my father]. But now that I’ve put it on paper, I’ve thrown it to the back of me. What’s done is done.
Download a PDF of the Wildcat student poems.
See a slideshow of drawings and paintings of the students.
Bookmark with: 
Digg
StumbleUpon
Delicious
Reddit What are these?
