By Logan Monteleone
Elm Staff Writer
Chestertown celebrated National Poetry month on the weekend of April 5 through 7 by hostingthe fifteenth annual Kent County Poetry Festival. Sponsored by the Kent Cultural Alliance, the Bookplate, the Rose O’Neill Literary House, and Robert Ortiz Studios, the weekend featured numerous events for students and community members to listen, share, and write their own poetry.
The highlight feature of the festival was a visit from the beloved, world renowned Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye.
On Friday at 4 p.m., WC students and faculty members gathered on the Lit House porch for a lecture, reading, and workshop hosted by Nye.
Before the event began, senior Joshua Torrence said, “I am so excited to do a generative workshop with this legendary poet, I love her work. It’s crazy that she’s even here.”
Lit House Director Dr. James Allen Hall gave Nye a thorough and heartfelt welcome.
“No one unfolds a poem quite like Naomi Shihab Nye,” he began. “I mean that her often conversational tone calls your ear forward to listen; her poems say I have a story to tell you.”
“In Nye’s hands, the poem then becomes a record and an agent of change, a way of processing an often difficult and always complex world,” Dr. Hall said.
Nye brought an abundance of gratitude and enthusiasm to the podium, expressing her admiration for the Eastern Shore — upon visiting for a third time in six years — and the strong inspiration and sense of community she feels in Chestertown.
Speaking about the Eastern Shore, Nye said, “It just is a very radiant, very unusual place — the land, the trees, the sky, everything about it: crossing that bridge going over the Chesapeake when you come here [is] just thrilling.”
Nye then spoke “a little bit about being a writer, a writer person, and why.”
She discussed the importance of having literary mentors, and shared stories and selections from the work of inspirational figures in her life as a writer, including William Stafford and E.B. White. Nye was delighted to learn — from a comment offered by professor and poet Meredith Davies Hadaway — that Stafford was the first visiting writer to stay at the College in the early days of establishing a creative writing program.
Among much insight and commentary into the life of a poet, Nye focused on the importance of constantly taking notes and of consistently writing.
“I definitely believe in the positive contagion of being a prolific writer: the more you write, the more you will be given to write,” she said. “You’re not going to use up your body of material, because life will keep happening.”
The generative workshop included three prompts. For the first, Nye offered up a phrase she saw on an otherwise unmarked headstone in England, which read “a maker and a mender.” She asked the audience to make a list of what they are making, and what they wish they could mend.
The second prompt — inspired by a sign displaying the two words, which was posted without context around a city Nye formerly lived in — asked studenst to jot down thoughts that came to mind at the phrase “Lost Friend.”
For the third prompt, Nye asked students to write down a question that has been recurring and prominent in their minds and make the question a title for a poem which draws on responses to both of the previous prompts.
Freshmen Hope Benjamin and Amelia Watson and senior Dante Chavez shared their poems aloud at the end of the workshop, inviting praise and excitement from Nye,
The following day featured the keynote event of the festival, a reading and discussion with Nye at 7 p.m. on Saturday at the Garfield Center for the Arts, moderated by NPR critic Maureen Corrigan.
Nye spoke on her Palestinian-American identity, sharing her thoughts and insights with intense emotion and awareness for the present, but also with messages of hope for peace.
She read work from her collection Tiny Journalist, written from the persona of Janna Jihad Ayyad, a young Palestinian who at the age of seven began recording and sharing footage and anti-occupation messages via social media on her mother’s phone.
Offering answers and raising questions with the sensitivity and insightfulness of a poet and storyteller, Nye’s talk was autobiographical as well as worldly, and she spoke to the nature of her own work and the work of poets everywhere.
On Sunday, the Poetry Festival’s open mic event was held in Bob Ortiz’s studio. Community members, visitors from nearby towns, and WC faculty and students, along with students from local schools, both attended and signed up to read at the event.
Director of the Kent Cultural Alliance John Schratweiser, manager of the Bookplate TessJones, and Bob Ortiz alternately introduced readers and spoke throughout Sunday’s open mic.
Torrence and junior Morgan Carlson were among the current WC students to read their own poetry, as well as Center Coordinator for the Lit House Linda Hamrick.
Various readers and attendees spoke on the sense of a safe space for open expression in the studio on Sunday; the way that being vulnerable in sharing ourselves through poetry — as Kent
Cultural Alliance’s artist in residence Austen Camille said — encourages those around us to be vulnerable too.
Founder of the Kent Cultural Alliance Leslie Prince Raimond was so glad to be in
“I was instrumental in getting this started way back when… and it continues to blossom,” Raimond said. “It used to be just bring your own favorite poem, but now people are doing all of their own poetry in addition to their favorite…”
Leslie Raimond’s son, Morgan Raimond, and daughter-in-law, Barbara Eaton, were visiting Chestertown from their current home in San Francisco.
“One thing that struck me [was that] the poet, they don’t need a canvas, they don’t need a pot, they don’t need anything, they have it within their soul, and just to bring that out and share it with everyone…[is] one of the powers of poetry, is that it’s so portable,” Morgan Raimond said.
“Quite a few people said that this is their first time reading their poetry,” she said. “Robert Earl [playwright and poet in residence with the WC Drama Department] said poems are meant to be shared out loud, and it’s sort of like music is meant to be danced to,” Eaton said.
Prince Raimond recognizes the importance of bringing members of a community together in shared cultural and creative spaces, and values poetry for its connective ability. She said, “I see this as an absolutely fabulous example of what community and college connections can do.”
Photo Caption: Artist Kayti Didricksen (right) holding her blind contour drawing of senior Morgan Carlson (left), sketched while Carlson read their poetry at Sunday’s open mic in Bob Ortiz’s studio.
Photo by Logan Monteleone