History Of The Visual And Performing Arts Projects

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Just for context: This is a 26-week English elective for juniors and seniors on reading, writing, and performing poetry. Our department doesn't offer AP or honors English. Most of the upperclassmen get their first or second choice in their two-term and spring-term electives; those who wish to can take the AP exam and generally feel they're well prepared. Every elective includes at least D&G jewelry sale one pre-20th-century work and a mix of genres, and all students practice incorporating research into their writing and create at least one analytical essay, a personal essay, and poetry, a story, or scenes for a play.

We emphasize that all writing is "creative," and we offer opportunities to mix the genres and work in other media. For the first month or so, my poetry class explores diction, sound, and imagery, particularly in relation to their readings and writings about imprisonment and release, guilt, isolation, anger, and reconciliation. We travel backwards from Jimmy Santiago Baca's prison memoir A Place to Stand to some of Blake's Songs of Experience. Then we bring ...
... our individual and collective experience to bear on Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

I've been offering this arts project response to "Mariner" for at least ten years, during which time we've had little alternative space other than the stage—when we could get it—or the practice room, equally hard to reserve, or the little outdoor acting platform, or a narrow and sinuous art gallery—not a good performance space. But any change of venue, especially if it allows for a change in lighting and more space for movement, can help students open themselves to new experiences, whether as performers or audience.

Then there's the arts faculty. Every English teacher should cultivate the arts departments! If there are none, then generous, artistic friends should be brought in. Poetry, in a book or at the end of a student pencil, is an art and needs the context of other arts. I lead a session in journal writing for the ceramics class, and the ceramics teacher leads my students in mask-making when we read Antigone. The architecture teacher and I visit one another's student critique sessions. My poets have created poems for the music teacher's compositions and have read them aloud at performances by the chorus and jazz band.

The drama director has coached poets on their readings for the yearly poetry assembly, and wholesale cartier jewellery I've prepped students to see the fall play. By now, every October the arts teachers gear up for the onslaught of student poets begging for advice and studio space for their "Mariner" projects. Students who have worked for several years in a particular medium and know a particular arts teacher well can "play to their strength" if they choose, but there are also nervous students who are taking a risk with this project and trying to get beyond the clichés of junior high magazine collage, or students who love singing and playing piano—or drums, or guitar—but have never composed music. Or there's the student taking first-year dance who wants to choreograph and perform, or a painter who's never worked in charcoal before.