A crew of Cornell creative writers lent their time and experience to guide young poets during Nature Poetry in the Garden, an event held May 3 at the Ithaca Children's Garden. The dampness of the day added detail to the creative work, and a few raindrops on notebook pages.
"One of the gifts of poetry is creating community across space and time and weather," said event organizer Dan Rosenberg, Tompkins County Poet Laureate and visiting senior lecturer in Literatures in English in the College of Arts and Sciences. "The M.F.A. students and lecturers who volunteered clearly embraced that ethos - applauding a middle schooler's striking image and oohing at a simile dreamed up by a fifth-grader."
The workshop was hosted by the Ithaca Children's Garden, where young poets explored the grounds and wrote poems about what they found, with coaching and inspiration from the Cornell writers. Though the garden's bounty provided the subjects, the poets' imaginations fueled their work, Rosenberg said, as they asked themselves what their chosen flora might want to say to passersby ("thank you") and dreamed up comparisons to what it is not at all like ("the U.S. military.")
"Working with kids is special because you get to engage with these passionate little spirits who are much more playful and free than many of us in the M.F.A. program," said poet Em Setzer, M.F.A. '25, who worked as a preschool teacher's assistant and as a nanny before starting her creative writing graduate studies. "My job is to listen and tease out meaning from what the kids say. Kids know exactly what they want to say and will tell you once you've gotten it right."
Setzer also shared with the workshop participants her keen interest in birdwatching, an activity that informs her own poems and that "requires patience, observation and appreciation, much like poetry."
"I enjoy talking to young people about poetry and making it clear that poetry is something accessible, something for everyone and something that is useful for our living," said Aishvarya Arora, M.F.A. '25. "The chance to spend time with young people who have curiosity about poetry, to me, is a hopeful thing."
The workshop was designed to encourage the participants to pay attention to things in new ways, Arora said. "The Children's Garden is already a wonderful space. Being in natural settings like that can bring us back into our bodies, especially in springtime when everything is blooming. There's so much to look at and appreciate."
Participants wandered the garden to find a new favorite plant. A handout suggested questions to inspire a poem and provided examples from poems by Emily Dickinson ("May-Flower"), H.D. ("Sea-Violet") and William Carlos Williams ("Winter Trees.")
Setzer remembers a poet who visited her elementary school when she was about 10, making a lasting impression she brought to Saturday's workshop.
"She taught us to keep journals of our time spent in nature by literally taking the materials of the environment - leaves, dirt - and putting it on the page by taping, smudging or drawing. We would write detailed records of what we couldn't put on the page, too," Setzer said. "This process both taught me to see the nature for its constituent parts and planted the seeds of a lifelong practice of careful, appreciative observation."
Kate Blackwood is a writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.
