CHRISTINE TROETSCHEL AT ALBANY PUBLIC LIBRARY
April is National Poetry Month! The Albany Library is doing DIY magnetic poetry. Metal altoid-sized tins, adhesive magnetic sheets, and words cut out of magazines.
poetry
Serving Teens Virtually
Guest writer: Ian Duncanson
Like everybody else, I have been trying hard to stay connected with teens in my community during our COVID-19 closure. My library’s virtual storytimes and children’s videos have been a hit, but reaching and engaging teens is tricky even in normal times!
Virtual Poetry Contest
Every April, the Beaverton City Library runs a National Poetry Month contest for teens sponsored by our Friends group. This year’s contest entry flyer encouraging teens to write Free Verse poems had already been created and distributed to teachers the week before spring break when we closed. I retooled the flyer during the final week of March with these changes:
- The entry fields on the form were made typable so that students could save the PDF with their entry information rather than having to print and scan or turn in.
- I normally allow up to two entries per person but shifted it to one entry to save myself a lot of shuffling and possible confusion.
- I extended the due date to the end of April to make it even easier to write one and submit.
- Instead of taking physical entries at the libraries, I added my work e-mail address to the flyer so students could submit their entries by e-mail.
I e-mailed the updated flyer again to all of my school writing and library contacts and encouraged them to pass it on to their students who are doing virtual work. The response has been really good so far and the process is smooth, provided I keep up with downloading and indexing all of the entries that come in. I also loosened up the entry sheet rules to allow students to type their information into an e-mail if they are having problems getting the PDF to fill in on their computers or devices. I will be judging the entries with a colleague and the Teen Library Council via Google Drive and a member of the city’s Web services team will post the winning entries on our site.
The cool thing about doing a virtual contest like this is that it could easily be adapted for any other type of virtual contest you want – photography, scratch game coding and digital art are some of the possibilities I’m considering for the future.
Remote Teen Library Council Meetings
Ending the Teen Library Council’s year before I normally do was another hard pill to swallow. The year normally ends in May, so I decided to host a couple of virtual check-ins / brainstorms via Zoom before then. It’s a good way to get further ideas for possibilities, especially if virtual services continue on into the summer. I create a Zoom link and then send it to members about an hour before the meeting to ensure security. Most of the members connected for the meeting and we were able to do a check-in and brainstorm some potential virtual programs and contests for summer reading as a contingency plan in case in-person programs at the library are not possible. I have been putting together a collection of Bibliocommons Booklists, several with input from the Teen Library Council.
Booktalk Videos
With the school year prematurely over, I will be unable to go to schools to do my regular summer reading and book talk visits. Instead, I will be working with some fellow librarians to put together a series of short middle and high school book talk videos highlighting some new titles to send to teachers who would otherwise invite us to speak in front of their classes. Each book talk will not exceed 90 seconds and we will be editing them into videos with three talks per video by grade level or theme. I find that filming myself doing book talks is actually much harder than going in and doing them in front of classes. I am inherently more self-conscious when I am being filmed and the booktalks really lose a lot without spontaneity and interactivity. This video is an excellent 5-minute primer on what to do and what not to do when you’re starting to make digital content with your smartphone or iPad.
Ian Duncanson is a Youth Services Librarian focused on teen services at Beaverton City Library.
And We Stay by Jenny Hubbard
Reviewed by Ian Duncanson, Beaverton City Library
And We Stay is written in both verse and prose, with an emphasis on the latter. Emily Beam’s junior year of high school in the mid-’90s was cut short when her boyfriend Paul took a gun to school and committed suicide in front of her in the library. Traumatized from the experience and unable to return to her normal high school, Emily has enrolled in a boarding school in Amherst, MA where she seeks comfort in being alone, writing poetry, and bonding with her new roommate. She also throws herself into the life and poetry of Emily Dickinson, finding strength and hope in the works of the dark and enigmatic American literary figure who lived and attended school in Amherst. As the story progresses, we learn more details about Emily and Paul’s relationship and what drove him to suicide.
I’m normally not one for poetry in prose stories or novels written in verse, but I thought that the poems in And We Stay (written from Emily’s perspective) were strong and provided insight into the character and her coping with violent trauma. Even though the cliché boarding school setting might elicit an initial groan, it does not play a lot into the story. Hubbard focuses more on Emily’s thoughts, growth and literary interests than on the surrounding boarding school life and antics. With school violence in the news, And We Stay is a timely story about a broken person left traumatized in the aftermath of another’s actions and healing through the support of friends.
“Inspired by Poetry” times 30
I’m not a fan of poetry in general. I don’t really “get” it most of the time and I find a lot of poetry to be tiresome and pretentious.
So, naturally, I’ve devoted hours and hours over the last two years to planning and creating “Inspired by Poetry,” a 30-part display that celebrates how poetry has been integrated by young adult authors represented in the Teen Scene collection at Salem Public Library. As most readers notice from time to time, snippets of poems—some classic, some contemporary—are woven into many stories, inspire book titles, and appear as chapter headings. Usually, the story includes a piece, rather than the entire poem. Initially inspired by Ally Condie’s use of Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” in her book “Matched,” I got to thinking that it would be interesting to share the whole of the poems with our patrons.
April was the obvious time to do something about it, with it being National Poetry Month and all. I read and researched and poked around until I managed – in April 2013 – to create a “Poem a Day” display set up like a calendar by putting up a new poem each day from April 1-30. Then, I left it up for a week or so to give the poems at the end of the month a chance.
“Poem a Day” calendar display.
I so enjoyed watching patrons stop and read the poems. I enjoyed even more helping those same patrons find the books that included the poems. And I also read and thought about each poem myself and learned that I might, after all, be a fan of at least some poetry.
I’ve updated a bit since, as I continue to read and stumble across poetic inspirations in my collection. The poems currently included are:
• “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” (Dylan Thomas) used in “Matched” by Ally Condie
• “Nothing Gold Can Stay” (Robert Frost) used in “The Outsiders” by S.E. Hinton
• “Illusions” (Ralph Waldo Emerson) used in “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” by Ransom Riggs
• “Invictus: The Unconquerable” (William Ernest Henley) used in “Clockwork Angel” by Cassandra Clare
• “I Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone” (Ranier Maria Rilke) used in “Shiver” by Maggie Stiefvater
• “Ozymandias” (Percy Bysse Shelley) used in “Okay for Now” by Gary Schmidt
• “To a Mouse” (Robert Burns) used in “Of Mice and Men” by John Steinbeck
• “Go and Catch a Falling Star” (John Donne) used in “Howl’s Moving Castle” by Diana Wynne-Jones and “Stardust” by Neil Gaiman
• “Stop All the Blocks, Cut Off the Telephone” (W.H. Auden) used in “Taking Off” by Jenny Moss
• “From a Distance” (Cliff Richard) used in “Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes” by Chris Crutcher
• “The Red Wheelbarrow” (William Carlos Williams) used in “The Fault in Our Stars” by John Green
• “I’m Nobody! Who are You?” (Emily Dickinson) used in “Nobody’s Secret” by Michaela MacColl
• “The Hollow Men” (T.S. Eliot) used in “Wither” by Lauren DeStefano and “The Compound” by S.A. Bodeen
• “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye” (Robert Burns) used in “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger
• “Psalms 147” (Holy Bible) used in “Number the Stars” by Lois Lowry
• “Crossing the Bar” (Alfred Lord Tennyson) used in “Crossed” by Ally Condie
• “Paradise Lost” (John Milton) used in “The Golden Compass” by Phillip Pullman
• “How Do I Love Thee?” (Elizabeth Barrett Browning) used in “Delirium” by Lauren Oliver
• “All is Truth” (Walt Whitman) used in “Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets” by Evan Roskos
• “Lady of Shallot” (Alfred Lord Tennyson) used in “Avalon High” by Meg Cabot
• “There’s a Certain Slant of Light” (Emily Dickinson) used in “Emily’s Dress and Other Missing Things” by Kathryn Burak
• “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (John Donne) used in “One Piece: Volume 5” by Eiichiro Oda and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Earnest Hemingway
• “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock” (T.S. Eliot) used in “The Shadow Society” by Marie Rutkoski and “Dreamland” by Sarah Dessen
• “Song of Myself” (Walt Whitman) used in “Paper Towns” by John Green
• “Morning Song of Senlin” (Conrad Aiken) used in “A Swiftly Tilting Planet” by Madeleine L’Engle
• “The First Day’s Night Had Come” (Emily Dickinson) used in “Recovery Road” by Blake Nelson
• “The Highwayman” (Alfred Noyes) used in “Mark of the Gold Dragon” by L.A. Meyer
• Monologue from “Hamlet” (William Shakespeare) used in “Perchance to Dream” by Lisa Mantchev
• “The Road Not Taken” (Robert Frost) used in “The Rhyming Season” by Edward Averett
• “The Old Church Tower” (Emily Bronte) used in “Clockwork Angel” by Cassandra Clare
The display pages are designed in full color on 11×17 paper, but I have created a PDF that could be easily printed in “fit to page” mode on 8 ½ x 11 paper. I would be happy, nay delighted, to share this file with anyone who wants to share these poems with the patrons in their libraries. Just email me at ssomerville@cityofsalem.net to receive a copy.
OYAN - Oregon Young Adult Network 