To Inspire Students' Creativity through Poetry

When it’s National Poetry Month, Cupertino Poet Laureate Jennifer Swanton Brown is busy with not only poetry readings but also a fundraising campaign for the California Poets in the Schools (CPITS), a literary artists-in-residence program founded in 1964 to bring poetry education to California schools.

The CPITS website displays student poetry from statewide schools. The Santa Clara County page presents poems with titles such as ”Eight Ways of Looking at Outer Space” and ”Five Ways of Looking at Fire,” exemplifying the mission of CPITS to stimulate students’ imagination and stretch their intellectual curiosity.

Brown, a board member of CPITS, stresses the necessity of poetry education by quoting Steve Jobs, “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — that it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.”

“Children need to learn how to be creative, how to think about something that nobody knows the answer to already,” said Brown. “Learning math and science where the answers are already known is important, but to learn to think creatively, children have to be given opportunities to learn about the arts.”

Poetry as an art will be brought to schools in over 30 counties of California if CPITS meets its current fundraising goal of $5,000. According to a CPITS announcement, every $75 donated can put a poet teacher in one classroom.

Brown explained that CPITS poet teachers get paid $75 per lesson, including preparation time. She said a poet teacher ideally should give 10 weekly lessons per semester, but due to budget constraints, there may be only four weekly lessons in a series.

Brown joined CPITS in 2001. She received a grant from the Cupertino Arts Commission in 2003 and 2004. That sent her to a poetry residency for second graders and third graders at Regnart Elementary School in 2004 and 2005. After that, she taught poetry for GATE students at Regnart off and on for several years.

A seed grant in 2014 put Brown in a residency program at Monta Vista High School, teaching 10th graders, but that grant has run out.

Some parents have recognized the importance of poetry education and stepped up. According to Brown, a parent she met through her day job at Stanford University wanted poetry education in his children’s school, Gomes Elementary School in Fremont, in Spring 2014. Then the PTA raised enough funds to make it happen with Brown’s help. Five different CPITS teachers from different counties taught there for four weeks.

All the CPITS teachers must be specially trained. Brown as the Santa Clara County Area Coordinator said she recently finished training three local poets to become poet teachers.

CPITS promises to send more poet teachers to classrooms in the next school year as long as sufficient funding can be secured. The current CPITS campaign will run through the month of April.