By Colleen LaMay | Photo by Kathy Strauss
Prince William County’s two reigning poets laureate have a year left to find you, grab you by the collar— metaphorically, of course—and explain that you, too, can be a poet. You have the creative spirit. Let go of your fear of the word “poetry” and tell the truth, your truth, about something that matters to you. Forget that you don’t understand poetry or can’t follow complicated rules for writing it.
Prince William County named its first poets laureate in June 2014: Zan Hailey, a recent graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University and Robert Scott, a poet, novelist and teacher at Osbourn High School in Manassas. With their selection, Prince William became the first county in Virginia with poets laureate.
While Hailey will focus on adults and children, Scott will pour more of his energies into the 86,000-plus students in Prince William County public schools. Each of the poets laureates has unique ways to overcome the groaning protests of people who believe poetry is boring.
Robert Scott Scott wants to collect 10,000 poems from Prince William County residents of all ages and lifestyles, from sales clerks to elementary students, to display on the walls of a coffee shop or library. So far, he has about 2,000. Even that is too many for one wall. Now, he is thinking poems, or excerpts, will go on a wall or two, maybe at a library branch, with a searchable database nearby to help poets pinpoint the location of their works.
“I’ve had so many poems come in that are just gorgeous, from writers I’ve not heard of, who are just submitting things to the project. They are touchdowns better than me at writing poetry,” Scott said during a recent break between classes.
Scott plans to keep plugging away at his 10,000 poem goal, even if he doesn’t achieve it by the time another
poet laureate takes his place next summer. “It has been such a terrific undertaking for me. I hadn’t expected it to be
as widely accepted as it has been,” he said. The laureate’s plans also include helping teachers use poems to prepare
students for Virginia’s high-stakes Standards of Learning tests. Scott also plans to work more closely with Write by the Rails, the Manassas chapter of the Virginia Writers Club, to nurture writers and ease the transition for the next poets laureate.
At school, students study literary devices, including consonance—repetition of consonant sounds in a sentence—as
part of the state’s SOLs. Why give students a test to see if they can write 10 examples of consonance? Instead, Scott asks them to write a ten-line poem. “Make it creative and enjoy yourself doing it, but demonstrate to me that you understand those kinds of literary devices,” he tells students. Scott so far has taken that message to 14 schools in Prince William County, including Glenkirk Elementary School in Gainesville, Mountain View Elementary School in Haymarket, T. Clay Wood Elementary School in Nokesville, Ronald Reagan Middle School in Haymarket and Woodbridge High School.
Sometimes, just saying “poetry” in front of students elicits psychic pain, usually from students who have read only the work of long-dead poets such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or Edgar Allan Poe.
To counteract that “dead” feeling in his classroom, Scott schedules “Poetry for No Reason” several times a week, letting students hear contemporary poems by the young and the living. Among his students’ favorites is Suli Breaks, a young spoken word poet whose titles include “Why I Hate School But Love Education,” about Mother Teresa, Malcolm X, and others who thought for themselves and accomplished great things but never finished their formal educations. “If you don’t build your dreams, somebody else will hire you to help build theirs,” Breaks says in the poem, implying that schools’ well-meant mantra of “graduate, go to college, get a job” may not work for everyone.
“Why I Hate School but Love Education” is extremely different from Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha,” an epic poem written in 1855 in trochaic tetrameter and based on Native American legends of the era.
Students may find “The Song of Hiawatha” as interesting as grass growing, but the traditional school standards still are worth learning. Scott strives for balance. For every “dead poet,” as he puts it, Scott throws in a vibrant, living poet such as Breaks, whose poem concludes “There is more than one way in this world to be an educated man.”
For Scott, the bottom line is to tell the truth, using the right words in the right order. The result is poetry. The main ingredient is a truth. “I am not interested in people who lie,” he said. Alexandra “Zan” Hailey Twenty-three-year-old Manassas resident Alexandra “Zan” Hailey focuses her efforts as poet laureate on pushing people young and old beyond their artistic comfort zones. She calls her method “Ekphrastisize That!” which is based on a literary form
called ekphrastic writing.
Don’t be put off by the big word. In its most common form, ekphrasis means using a work of art, usually a poem, to describe another work of art, usually visual. The most famous example of ekphrasis is “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” by poet John Keats.
In the poem, he contemplates in iambic pentameter the images of people, animals, musical instruments and more on a real or imagined ancient urn and concludes, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”
Hailey, who offers free seminars at venues around Prince William, often has students start “Ekphrastisize That” by
listening to one of hundreds of letters painter Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his younger brother and closest friend, Theo. Vincent Van Gogh, who was thought to have suffered from epilepsy and bipolar illness, committed suicide at age 37.
From the letter, Hailey picks words that describe important ideas, and students create a poem using some of those words. Then, they turn their poems into paintings on cardstock the size of a large index card. The paintings explore the theme or some other aspect of the poem. Although students may not consider themselves talented at more than one art form, such as writing and painting, stretching their creative muscles pays off, Hailey said.
“A lot of times, students surprise themselves with what they can produce. And I’m not asking them to paint the Sistine Chapel,” she said. “Normally, it’s a 5 (inch) by 8 (inch) piece of cardstock.” Potentially, students could turn the painting into a photo and then sculpture, giving them a variety of perspectives on their original subject, a letter written by the artist Van Gogh.
Hailey is unaware of other artists taking ekphrastic writing to such lengths. “It’s uncharted territory. It is kind of exciting and terrifying,” she said. Where the concept ultimately will go remains uncertain, but the benefits are clear.
“You are gaining something for your time because the writing is happening over and over. Whether you realize it, you are gaining a lot trying these things you wouldn’t normally try and then returning to the thing you are comfortable with. It’s like being at the beach. You go back to the umbrella, but you go into the ocean for a little bit,” she said.
Hailey has also shared “Ekphrastisize That!” to some venues, including the Northern Virginia Writing Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping kids and adults improve their writing. Students attended a variety of events, including Hailey’s workshops, during summer 2014.
In the upcoming year, Hailey hopes to expand her method with the NEW School in Historic Manassas. While the weather cooperates, Hailey wants to teach adults and children outside. She said that taking a walk enhances creativity. The momentum and movement help Hailey put whole poems together in her head. She writes them down as soon as she gets home before she forgets the lines. Her mantra is similar to that of co-laureate Scott: Don’t be
afraid of poetry or other artistic endeavors such as painting or sculpture. Sometimes, people who think they can work in only one medium discover a new talent. “There is often a block. You are like, ‘I can do this, but I can’t do that. I can do ballet, but I can’t swim,’ and really … the greater process is pretty much the same across all art forms,” Hailey said.
Clearly Scott and Hailey function in different worlds and bring a divergent vision of poetry and its place in society. But that’s OK—they’re calling all residents of Prince William to bring their world and their vision to the project and their neighbors. Poetry is for everyone, and they want to make sure you don’t forget it.
Colleen LaMay, new to the Prince William Living team has jumped (w)right in (pun intended) to showcase other writers in Prince William. Read future issues to see more of Colleen’s work. She can be reached at clamay@princewilliamliving.com.
