For the Love of Words: Dayton, Ohio's Five Rivers Poetry Project

Phi Kappa Phi Forum, Spring 2004 by Pringle, Mary Beth, Cassel, Adrienne

the syllables fluttering

saying please love me,

from continent to continent

over the curve of the earth.

- Joseph Millar

"Telephone Repairman"

The Five Rivers Poetry Project was born in March 2003, partly in response to the war in Iraq and partly as a result of our continuing awareness of the silencing of women's voices worldwide. As teachers of literature and women's studies, both of us know that words are an effective tool for reclaiming what has been lost through disenfranchisement and oppression. We feel that poetry provides the best means by which each of us - no matter our sex, nationality, religion, ethnicity, or sexual preference - expresses our longings, joys, angers, and sorrows. We believe that by affording occasions to share poetry, we are creating opportunities for increased understanding that will lead to a more peaceful and humane world.

Thanks to a Phi Kappa Phi Literacy Initiative grant, two classes at Wright State University (Dayton, Ohio) -Women's Poetry of Resistance and Poets in the Community - plan to devote their quarter-long efforts to increasing a love for poetry in the Greater Dayton area. Students in the Women's Poetry of Resistance course focus on the words of women too often overlooked or suppressed. The Poets in the Community class will foster a love of language by providing opportunities for Greater Dayton community members to experience the power of words in verse.

Five programs will serve as the foundation for this work. Following precedents set by London's Poetry on the Underground and the U.S. Poetry in Motion program, Poetry Rides the Bus will display poems in poster format on Dayton RTA buses. Poems posted on buses will be a mix of well-known verses and those written by Dayton children.

Poetry Around Town, joining the American Poetry and Literacy Project, will brighten Dayton's winter months by bringing poetry to people in unexpected places. Students will distribute free copies of Dover Thrift editions' Great Poems by American Women.

To reconnect poetry to its powerful oral tradition, Five Rivers Poetry Project will host several Memory Circles, during which community participants will recite much-loved poems that they have memorized. They also will discuss the poems' meanings in their own lives.

Dayton's Favorite Poems will give Dayton-community members a chance to be videotaped reading the poems that they love most and discussing the reasons those poems are important to them.

The fifth project, Poets in the Schools, will provide training for college students to teach poetry-writing workshops in area schools and community centers.

This exciting work is already well under way. Students in the Women's Poetry of Resistance course, taught by Professor Adrienne Cassel, began the term with an examination of poems written by women revolutionaries in El Salvador and South Africa. They also studied poems written by African American women in response to women's oppression around the world.

Focusing right now on the Poetry Around Town program, teams of students from the Women's Poetry of Resistance class are preparing to distribute hundreds of free poetry anthologies around Dayton. They are writing letters that explain the project and inserting them into copies of the anthologies. The students are also tucking in copies of favorite contemporary poems by internationally known women writers. On distribution day, enthusiastic students will crisscross the city in a van, dropping off volumes of poetry at sites that the students have chosen. So far, key drop-offs include women's shelters, the YWCA, and other places where women congregate.

Women's Poetry of Resistance students also will figure importantly in the Memory Circles program. Students will organize and lead individual memory circles or avoid a final exam by memorizing and presenting a poem during a Circle event.

Poets in the Community students, to be taught by Professor Cassel in the spring, will continue the work of the Women's Poetry of Resistance group. As part of the Poetry in the Schools program, Poets in the Community students will plan poetry-writing activities and design poetry-writing workshops, which they will conduct in local elementary and secondary schools. They also will select poems to be displayed on Dayton-area buses as part of the Dayton Rides the Bus program.

In an effort to include secondary students and teachers, The Five Rivers Poetry Project has invited high school videography students and their teachers to film Dayton-community members reading poems for the Dayton's Favorite Poems project. Following a procedure recommended by Robert Pinsky's renowned Favorite Poems Project, Dayton's Favorite Poems will distribute the videotapes to local television stations for public viewing.

These five programs funded by Phi Kappa Phi's 2003 Literacy Grant are just the beginning of the work we envision for the Five Rivers Poetry Project. Next year, we hope to expand our outreach efforts by funding a series of visiting writers, continuing work with local schools and community organizations, sponsoring writing workshops, establishing a poetry house, and more.