New Haven Independent

“—First time/Glad I’m not hooked,” recited Baez over a drum beat in a video made at a poetry and music event at Fair Haven Middle School in February, and screened at the Board of Ed meeting on Meadow Street.

The February event was a concert at the school by legendary Puerto Rican protest singer Roy Brown . Monday night’s screening of the student poets’ opening act was the evidence for the Board of Ed that Brown wasn’t the only socially conscious artist wowing the crowd that winter evening.

Baez’s poem, an expression in Japanese tanka form of her first (and last, she said) experience drinking and smoking, grew out of a workshop led by Fair Haven’s visiting poet-in-residence, Aaron Jafferis. Jafferis’s six poetry sessions with Fair Haven’s eighth-graders were thanks to a federal Community Arts Partnership grant, directed by New Haven schools’ arts director Nilda Morales into a program called Arts at the Core of Learning.

Their culmination was the February reading, accompanied by the celebrated Festival of Arts & Ideas drummer Ras Mo Moses (at left in photo, beside Jafferis). This is the last year of the program aimed at motivating students to learn through art, Morales said, and the second year it’s had Jafferis teaching poetry at Fair Haven.

Jafferis’s marks in the school? High. “He’s excellent,” testified Morales. “The first day of his workshop he gets the kids to write.”

“It’s been so successful with the kids, as an outlet for their own feelings and emotions,” said Fair Haven’s eighth-grade English teacher, Cindy Maturo. “You’ll see kids who were formerly disengaged just come alive and become so impassioned.” The encouragement to express themselves on “somber” themes like parental abuse could be “like an intervention” for some students, Maturo said. “We do get some poems where we’re surprised how frank the kids can be about an experience. It’s empowering.”

“It was kind of fun, too,” said Baez, who said she’d kept all the poems — like Sandra Cisneros’s “Abuelito Who” — that “Mr. J” brought in to the class, and liked drawing from them to make her own poetry.

So did fellow award-winner Christine Otero, whose favorite part was finding the “hidden message” in poems. She remembered one about a lemur by the poet-in-residence himself, with its love theme coded in a “first paragraph all about ‘L,’ a second paragraph all about ‘O,’ then ‘V,’ etc.”

“Then you had to pick an emotion and use it to write about something that happened in your life,” another classmate, Elizabeth Carillo, remembered. Carillo picked fright. “It was about my cousin and how the cops were looking for him because of a fight,” she said.

A second, live poetic treat Monday was a booming recitation of Oscar Brown, Jr.’s race-themed poem “I apologize” by Charles Simuel, a senior at Hillhouse High School and the year’s winner of the Hillhouse Annual Reading Contest. Besides the certificate and congratulations, Simuel got the surprise of learning he wasn’t the first winning reader in the Board Room Monday night: Jafferis won the same award when he was a Hillhouse senior ten years ago.

Simuel does “a little writing,” he said, but didn’t think he’d follow in Jafferis’s footsteps: his main art is his performance. His award-winning work with “I apologize” was inspired by a reading he witnessed by the poet himself. “I took what he did and took it a step higher. I added aggressiveness and more bodily expression — and just ran with it.”

Poetry wasn’t the whole of Monday night’s meeting. A new federally-required “Wellness Policy” to up physical activity and nutrition and a recommended in-school “Tuberculosis Screening Policy” got moved through as first readings of initiatives to be worked into the New Haven system. But the poetry was what had members talking after the session adjourned.

“The quality of the writing, the inflection in their voices — incredible!” reviewed board member Richard Abbatiello.

“That was outstanding,” seconded newly-restored board-member Carlos Torres. “The social content is back very heavily. [The poems were] very socially conscious, very aware. It speaks well for young people of what’s coming up in society. Lord knows we need it!”