Poetry Is Everywhere For Howell Teacher, Even Among The Paint Chips

HOWELL, NJ — For Bridget Gage-Dixon, who teaches creative writing at Howell High School, the rhythm of the school year is reminiscent of the cyclical rhythm of her writing.

Gage-Dixon is a poet, recently published in the New Jersey Bards Anthology, who has been drawn to working with words since she was a child.

But she is not a poet who writes every day.

"I write cyclically. I gather material and then I write," she says of her own creative habits.

Gage-Dixon has found time to write all her busy life. In fact, even before she could write, she would refashion the fairy tales her mother read to her: "I would tell her that the story wasn't right; that something else should happen," she recalls.

Growing up in Middlesex County, she entered the competitive Middlesex County Arts High School. Then she diverged into family life, with marriage, adopting two sons and having a daughter. When they were a little older, she pursued college at Ocean County College and then Stockton University in Galloway Township, recommended there by one of her OCC teachers who knew the school's poetry program included a residence by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn.

Living in Jackson and still raising her family, she would drive an hour and a half to Stockton. But it was worth it, she said.

Dunn was "an amazing mentor," she said, with whom she studied for two semesters. She also studied under his protege, B.J. Ward.

Gage-Dixon, who is going into her 18th year as a teacher for the Freehold Regional High School District that includes Howell High School, started her teaching career through the alternate route to certification. While accomplishing that, and getting a full-time subbing position, she received a Master's in Fine Arts from the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine, again studying under accomplished poets. She was able to work for her MFA not online but by mail, she says, in the midst of her certification as a teacher. In addition, there were certain periods of time when she had to be in attendance at the program.

In her role at Howell High School, she teaches certain Creative Writing, Junior Honors and International Baccalaureate classes.

And this is where we get to the paint chips.

In one hands-on lesson, Gage-Dixon has her students choose five paint chips with names that might inspire them, such as "Lush Sunset."

"I try to teach the students to be concrete in their words and apply that to poetry and all their writing," she says.

In this exercise, the students take paper and glue and write around the imaginative and often unlikely paint chip names, creating their own verse.

For her own poetry and that of her students, Gage-Dixon writes in free verse. The poetry of meter and couplet is actually a niche area of modern poetry, she said, and free verse is the prevailing method.

She exposes the students to poetry they can relate to, she says, such as a poem about a girl who likes to play the tuba, or a poem about someone who forgot to feed the pet gerbil.

Students also participate in the Poetry Out Loud competition in which students have to memorize a poem and deliver it. The competition first takes place within the local school, then regionally in the county and then at the state level. Howell has been participating in the program for two years, and Gage-Dixon says they have done very well in such a short time. She also has her students choose a poem to read with the class every day during National Poetry Month in April, along with coming up with guided questions for discussion of the poem.

Gage-Dixon's own writing can be contemplative or observational, she says. And it has been gaining attention. An anthology of her poems, Breach, is currently available for pre-sales at Finishing Line Press. And she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, an American literary prize that honors the best poetry, short fiction, essays or other literary works published in the small presses the previous year.

Her contemplative poem "Jersey City Midnight" was recently included in the New Jersey Bards Anthology of New Jersey-specific poems. It was inspired by a rooftop visit to her daughter's Jersey City apartment building one summer. The poem is reprinted here with her permission:

"Jersey City Midnight"

"Nothing is lost in this strange city
its clear membrane of sleep
fluttering against the skyline.
Poverties dissolve across its streets
inside its unkempt houses.
A rich man’s name is printed in large letters
across the river, here a simple stone church.
The delicate apparatus of need scarcely
hidden by wire and wine-dark sky.
The jails are full of the redeemed descending
into sleep, as housewives huddle
beside the men constantly evading them.
Children dream of rooty paths,
of withering limbs they’ll climb
up to the shadowless sun."

Bridget Gage-Dixon