“…poetry, like bread, is for everyone.”
— Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton

Many people say they don’t enjoy poetry or they don’t find it accessible. But they didn’t have Merna Ann Hecht for a teacher. She teaches her students how they can find the small stories that tell the larger story through poetry.

As a poet, storyteller and essayist, Merna heads up a program called Stories of Arrival: Youth Voices at Foster High School in Tukwilla, WA. According to Seattle-based Jack Straw Productions, The New York Times described Foster High School as the only high school in the most linguistically diverse school district in the nation. It’s student body is composed of immigrants and refugees from Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kenya, Mexico, Tanzania, Vietnam, Nepal, and other places spanning the globe. They have left behind family members, suffered war and poverty, and often will be the first in their families to graduate from high school.

In her work with Foster High School’s English Language Learners, Merna has seen how writing poetry (and listening to it) not only aids the students in learning English and connecting to people of diverse backgrounds but also helps them build bridges between their lives as they are today, lives they may not have thought to translate into their new language, and their lives as they remember them. Because the students are learning English, their words, according to Merna, often “side-step the rules and boundaries of grammar, syntax, punctuation, and sentence structure,” infusing their work with spirit or what Merna calls “the wild side of poetry.”

In addition, Merna says, because “poetry has the capacity to hold paradox and ambivalence, it can give voice to what grieves us, wounds us, troubles us, and at the same time give us courage and hope.” I believe we all need the opportunity poetry gives us to confront, record, accept and transform. With the gifts poetry brings, we learn who our experiences have made us into.

Here are descriptions of two exercises Merna uses to help students translate feelings and memories into a new language. Even as native English speakers, we translate when we write to turn the mundane into the luminous.

My Life is Like…
Using this exercise from Merna, Yosef Woger from Ethiopia began his poem:

 My life is like a house
A house built on sand
It stands on the wish of God
Sometimes it falls when the wind comes
Sometimes it stands for a long, long time
To keep the promise of my God.

My life is like a tree
A tree grows its strong roots
It does not dry out due to lack of water
Because the roots are so deep…

Yvner Cadeus from Haiti began his “My Life” poem this way:

My life is like wind blowing
in the air to make flowers happy,
like the waves of the sea
racing until it gets to the shore
yet my life is also like a jail
where there is no hope.

Ai Ngo from Vietnam wrote this first stanza:

My life is like a wind
A wind so gentle
 But sometimes, the wind
Effects the rivers,
Moves clouds,
Disturbs the field.

Each of these students has made a strong connection with the wind in its strength and ability to change the landscape, which parallels their experience of the abrupt changes in their lives. You can do this exercise, too, to understand your life right now.

Start a poem with the words “My life is like.” Finish the sentence with whatever simile strikes you, whether that is wind, another element in nature or an object from home. You might want to do this several times to find a simile that intrigues you: My life is like a shoe, my life is like the fig tree I planted in my yard, my life is like the ferns that grow in the shade.

In this way, you have a question and look around for what might be the answer. When your attention falls on images, you trust them and then try to figure out how they might yield information for you.

After I wrote those three, I realized I wanted to investigate the reason my attention was drawn to the ferns. I started writing using the specifics from the growth and habitat of the ferns in my yard:

My life is like the ferns
that grow in the shade
near the cedar trees;
fresh new shoots
unfurl from the center
and on the outside,
old leaves the color of rust.

After I wrote the first stanza, I realized that I needed to make use of the cedar trees since I mentioned them in the first stanza. I wrote:

The cedars’ branches
dapple sunlight on present
and past equally.

When I told myself to use the cedar trees in the second stanza, I looked at the way their feathery branches caused a pattern of sunlight on the ferns. Then I realized that this observation held a message for me at mid-life and I put the words “present” and “past” into the second stanza. Reading it over, I think I would title the poem “Unfurling.”

After you do this exercise, I believe that you will understand from the inside out (not from the outside in as your early teachers wanted you to) that poetry is, as Merna tells her students, “a condensed language that will allow them to express their emotions and tell about their experiences in a unique shorthand.”

My Story
To use the power of visualization, Merna provides each of her students with a piece of paper with a large circle on it. Inside the circle is the phrase “MY STORY.” She asks them to draw three important picture memories and reminds them that specific details and images will help in t heir poetry. She has seen that writing from visual memory opens the floodgates to poetry.

Karen from Burma wrote these lines after doing the visualization pictures:

But the Burmese army entered our village
Confiscated our properties
Killed our cattle, pigs and chickens
Set our homes on fire
Forced labor on our village men and raped our village women
And the persecution goes on and on like a circle…

And Vic Pinzari from Romania wrote about an incident with a dog:

One day, I was playing outside,
The dog came up and bit me!

I went home, thinking,
I should be bleeding.

But it wasn’t a deep bite,
My hand did not bleed,
I understood, the dog wasn’t so bad,
But instead he was lonely;
From that day on, I made a new friend.

Bhagi Biswa from Iraq wrote about a bird singing outside her house:

Maybe her beak is hard and strong
like an interesting and powerful Chinese chopstick,
or like a thorn of a red rose,
protecting itself from its enemies.
Maybe her beak is without a tooth
and she eats slippery, crawling earthworms
and survives for the winter
to sing every spring
with joy.

The question, “What are three important memories I have?” served as a net to gather striking images from the students’ previous lives. Once those memories were in their consciousness, their poetry-making minds made them into metaphors.

To do this exercise yourself:

1. Take out a blank piece of paper.
2. Draw a circle.
3. Put in the words “MY STORY.”
4. Sketch three memories that come to you.
5. Take the one that most captures your attention and write. Start with the phrase “I remember” if you’d like to help you write the memory. Be sure the language you are using contains the specifics you drew in your visualization as well as others that arrive because you are thinking about your memory.
6. If you’d like, continue with another stanza that starts “I remember,” and write about the second visualization.
7. And then write about the third visualization.
8. This will probably quickly become a poem because you have already done the work of poetry by paring the memory down to its essentials in the drawings you made.

Merna ends a recent article she wrote for Teachers & Writers Magazine with another of her students’ memory poems:

From Krishna Dhital, originally from Nepal:

I remember guitar, you bring your

Voice, let’s sing it, blood in your heart
is red like mine, tears in your eyes are
the same as mine, song is loud
voice touches everyone’s heart.

Poems, Merna says, please and excite us with “truthful expression, their imagery and their potent effects on others. This too, is what I mean by the ‘wild side of poetry.'”

And here’s one more idea I can add for helping you come over to the simple and direct wild side: try doing the exercise above by hand writing your words with your non-dominate hand. The seemingly less skillful person in you often holds the strongest truths.