Bach School venture leads to poetry event

Bach School venture leads to poetry event ANN ARBOR—”The Poetry of Everyday Life” is collaboration between the University of Michigan’s Arts of Citizenship Program and a third-grade class at Ann Arbor’s Bach School. Members of the U-M project team visited Ann Arbor’s Broadway Park with the Bach students and then helped the children create poems and corresponding artwork from the experience.

The culmination of this effort will be “The Poetry of Everyday Life,” a poetry event, 7-8 p.m. Jan. 16, at the Ann Arbor District Library at 343 South Fifth St. During the event there will be a combination of a “favorite poem” ceremony, performance poetry, and a reading of participants’ own poems. The Library has mounted an exhibit of the artwork.

“The Poetry of Everyday Life” is the brainchild of Bach teacher Chris Maxey-Reeves and Julie Ellison of U-M’s Department of English. Jim Schultze, Bach’s art teacher, student teacher Will Case, and Bach principal Pat Chapman, all contributed to the project.

Among the activities in which the Bach students participated was creating and decorating a handmade “commonplace” book, a book of blank pages for collecting poetry by others and themselves and for collecting ideas for poems. They also created poetry folders, with age-appropriate poems focusing on rivers and a sense of place by such poets as Langston Hughes and Louise Bogan and discussed David Stringer’s “Balancing” from the new anthology of writings about the Huron River watershed.

U-M students from the School of Art and Design, Ceci Mendez and Andy Dean, helped the Bach School art teachers with the art project.

“The Poetry of Everyday Life” is free and open to the public. For more information about the event, contact the Ann Arbor District Library’s Youth Department at (734) 327-8301.

Arts of Citizenship ProgramAnn Arbor District LibraryJulie EllisonLangston HughesSchool of Art and DesignYouth Department