An Edgy Way of Existing: Poetry in a Community School
© Paola Bilbrough
Days at this inner-city Melbourne school can be an emotional war zone: a performance of some kind is enacted by either a student or an adult. Of course to teach well you have to be something of a performer, and the majority of teachers here have endless patience and a gentle but no bull-shit manner. Yet tears, spats, boiling rages and attention-seeking dramatics occur regularly, and are not exclusive to the students.
Parents have hysterics on the phone and threaten to come in and 'sort' everyone out. One mother regularly sends in charcoal caricatures of a male teacher, another insists on being notified three days before her son is suspended so that her bowling schedule is not disrupted. And after weeks of being demeaned in front of students I told a teacher to get out of my face and let me do my f****** job. Courtesy as a strategy had failed, in this case a bit of agro worked: the teacher treated me with respect and even warmth ever after.
I am talking about a 'community' school with continuous enrollment. Frequently, those enrolled have been expelled from everywhere else. The student population is described as 'at risk' -they have drug and alcohol issues and are often homeless or in transitional accommodation.
My first involvement with the school was in 2002 as a youth worker. At the time I had just finished an Asialink Residency in Japan. I'd been researching a novel set in the 1930s and lecturing at a Tokyo university. My students were glossy twenty-two year olds who’d never experienced an economic pinch. Initially I found my new position almost intolerable. I went home and cried almost daily. I stopped trying to write my novel. I didn’t write a poem for six months.
In my first week I listened to a boy tell his friend that sticking a knife into a lump of clay (which is what he was doing) felt exactly the same as sticking a knife into a body. Another day I gave 'support' while a teacher talked to a 15-year-old and his mother about the teenager's options. The boy was about to leave school to get a job and live with his thirty-two year-old girlfriend. His mother was distraught, the teacher was worried, and I felt slightly unsure about exactly who I was supporting. The boy covered his face with his hands and looked at me through the gaps in his fingers.
Some days I felt barely older than fifteen myself. I've already admitted to losing my temper with a colleague, now I have to say that with the older more authoritarian staff I noticed that I had an alarming tendency to regress: pouting, being cheeky, swishing my ponytail around. Being a mature, yet empathic role-model required constant vigilance.
In 2003 I returned to the school on an Arts Victoria Artists in Schools Residency. I was there as a poet, one day per week for twenty weeks. Why did I return? Well, the school had an intensity, an edgy way of existing that that appealed to me. I'd noticed that some of my most difficult 'clients' were happiest and most at peace (in one piece) when they were concentrating on making something: art or a cake for example: immersed in the rich colour and texture of paint or the satisfaction of beating egg white into peaks. They told me extraordinary, terrible stories and often had astounding insight. I wanted to keep having involvement in their lives.
In a decade of working in community settings, I've also seen the astonishing power of literacy: how people begin to unfurl and light up when they start to really read and write, and how they often want to write something significant about themselves. Literacy and self-expression is both cathartic and calmative.
The project didn't have the most felicitous start: the day before I arrived back, Dee, a student I'd enjoyed working with the year before, came to school drunk, punched the English teacher in the face and was expelled. The year before she'd written reams of poetry and I’d been hoping to engage some of her phenomenal energy.
As a poet I still wanted to connect with students who didn’t necessarily want to write so I cooked breakfast once a week as I’d done the year before. I felt like this consistency contributed in invisible ways to the poetry project. Occasionally students who were distressed asked to come and hang out in the Poetry Room. They wrote poems without ever intending to.
As a youth worker, I’d shared an office with three or four other welfare staff and I’d never had a key. As a poet I suddenly had a bunch of keys and a room with arched windows, sticky desks and a lot of dead flies. In the end I didn’t use the designated Poetry Room more than half a dozen times. Often it was poetry on the run, in corners and gaps or in the art room with other students drawing and painting around the one or two poets. During a disgruntled conversation in the photocopy room about love and frustration and being non-conformist, I said to Aaron, the student who was chewing my ear off, 'here’s some paper, get it all down.'
He started with: 'This is my rant/ I don’t expect you to listen/ but do try to show some respect/ these observations may be tragically skewed/ but they’re mine...'
Parents have hysterics on the phone and threaten to come in and 'sort' everyone out. One mother regularly sends in charcoal caricatures of a male teacher, another insists on being notified three days before her son is suspended so that her bowling schedule is not disrupted. And after weeks of being demeaned in front of students I told a teacher to get out of my face and let me do my f****** job. Courtesy as a strategy had failed, in this case a bit of agro worked: the teacher treated me with respect and even warmth ever after.
I am talking about a 'community' school with continuous enrollment. Frequently, those enrolled have been expelled from everywhere else. The student population is described as 'at risk' -they have drug and alcohol issues and are often homeless or in transitional accommodation.
My first involvement with the school was in 2002 as a youth worker. At the time I had just finished an Asialink Residency in Japan. I'd been researching a novel set in the 1930s and lecturing at a Tokyo university. My students were glossy twenty-two year olds who’d never experienced an economic pinch. Initially I found my new position almost intolerable. I went home and cried almost daily. I stopped trying to write my novel. I didn’t write a poem for six months.
In my first week I listened to a boy tell his friend that sticking a knife into a lump of clay (which is what he was doing) felt exactly the same as sticking a knife into a body. Another day I gave 'support' while a teacher talked to a 15-year-old and his mother about the teenager's options. The boy was about to leave school to get a job and live with his thirty-two year-old girlfriend. His mother was distraught, the teacher was worried, and I felt slightly unsure about exactly who I was supporting. The boy covered his face with his hands and looked at me through the gaps in his fingers.
Some days I felt barely older than fifteen myself. I've already admitted to losing my temper with a colleague, now I have to say that with the older more authoritarian staff I noticed that I had an alarming tendency to regress: pouting, being cheeky, swishing my ponytail around. Being a mature, yet empathic role-model required constant vigilance.
In 2003 I returned to the school on an Arts Victoria Artists in Schools Residency. I was there as a poet, one day per week for twenty weeks. Why did I return? Well, the school had an intensity, an edgy way of existing that that appealed to me. I'd noticed that some of my most difficult 'clients' were happiest and most at peace (in one piece) when they were concentrating on making something: art or a cake for example: immersed in the rich colour and texture of paint or the satisfaction of beating egg white into peaks. They told me extraordinary, terrible stories and often had astounding insight. I wanted to keep having involvement in their lives.
In a decade of working in community settings, I've also seen the astonishing power of literacy: how people begin to unfurl and light up when they start to really read and write, and how they often want to write something significant about themselves. Literacy and self-expression is both cathartic and calmative.
The project didn't have the most felicitous start: the day before I arrived back, Dee, a student I'd enjoyed working with the year before, came to school drunk, punched the English teacher in the face and was expelled. The year before she'd written reams of poetry and I’d been hoping to engage some of her phenomenal energy.
As a poet I still wanted to connect with students who didn’t necessarily want to write so I cooked breakfast once a week as I’d done the year before. I felt like this consistency contributed in invisible ways to the poetry project. Occasionally students who were distressed asked to come and hang out in the Poetry Room. They wrote poems without ever intending to.
As a youth worker, I’d shared an office with three or four other welfare staff and I’d never had a key. As a poet I suddenly had a bunch of keys and a room with arched windows, sticky desks and a lot of dead flies. In the end I didn’t use the designated Poetry Room more than half a dozen times. Often it was poetry on the run, in corners and gaps or in the art room with other students drawing and painting around the one or two poets. During a disgruntled conversation in the photocopy room about love and frustration and being non-conformist, I said to Aaron, the student who was chewing my ear off, 'here’s some paper, get it all down.'
He started with: 'This is my rant/ I don’t expect you to listen/ but do try to show some respect/ these observations may be tragically skewed/ but they’re mine...'
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