By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Terry Wooten, the northern Michigan poet who visited Justus Gage Elementary School this week for workshops and a "circle" for parents Wednesday evening, coaches with words like "poem shape," as in "think long and skinny."
He taught Sue Meloche's fourth graders Sept. 27 to achieve poem shape by paring unnecessary "nerd words" so that they could pack their verse with "power words" and similes bursting with imagery energy.
"Long and skinny" refers to his penchant for punctuating free verse like breath patterns.
Poems he has been creating for 23 years are like songs that are spoken after carefully selecting words that make pictures in the mind's eye.
Nouns and verbs "I never think about when I write," said Wooten, who is a storyteller as well as an author ("When the Bear Came Back: The Whole Story").
"I see words as having energy to make you see pictures in your mind."
Besides publishing poetry, he performs from 504 poems he committed to memory, as he did for Justus Gage students Monday.
Wooten hails from Elk Rapids, near Traverse City. This is his fourth visit to Dowagiac.
"I was down here eight to 10 years ago at the high school," he said. "Years ago, coming up from Chicago, I did McKinley. Last spring I was here at Young Authors Day. Now I'm here (four days) working at Justus Gage, Kincheloe and Patrick Hamilton."
Presenting a poetry workshop to fidgety fourth graders an hour before lunch proved challenging.
"But is the most dangerous nerd word of all," he said, unleashing giggles among the children whose minds see "butt."
"You're cracking up, no pun intended," he says without missing a beat.
Wooten tries to help youngsters polish their rough drafts by circling power words.
He shows a poem by a Traverse City fifth grader named Chantel who ably ended each line with impact:
Walkin' the horse
Wind was howlin'
Hoofs soundin'
like rollin' thunder…
A Grand Rapids student is now in college, but his description of riding a lumbering rollercoaster up that "steel mountain of doom," and his one-word transition from the summit to the plummet – turning – lives on in elementary classrooms across Michigan.
Students craft some powerfully poignant poems with the word necklaces they string, like Wooten's favorite from 23 years by a boy named Shawn that begins "Riding bikes/in the street/There was a car/coming like a Batmobile…"
Some Dowagiac students aren't far behind. One girl depicted her cousin's drowning ("When least expected/it happens"), another her kitten Smoky perishing in a fire. Fourth graders wrote on memories, while third graders tackled watershed critters.
A girl who wrote about how her first soccer game "sucked" was gently prodded by Wooten to pull out some more tangible descriptive details, such as she tripped a lot while playing offense, defense and ball-blocking goal keeper.
"Yours is not written yet," he pronounced, sending her back to her desk to try again. "Someday, when you're old like me, it's a captured moment of your life that you might not remember anymore."
A boy described the fire at China Garden. A girl told about her baby brother playing with a little car on the sidewalk by Save-a-Lot.
Trevor Wright succeeded at placing power words at the end of each line of his ode to pepperoni and sausage pizza, but football practice prevented him from returning for the public forum of the poetry circle.
Wooten called two students, a boy and a girl, up to the board to help polish their prose as their classmates watched before they got a blank sheet of paper and 10 minutes to revise their own rough drafts.
Ethan Downey reworks his words to "After school/at my grandma's house/I saw a dog/in a cage/It was a girl/It was mine/I called her Maggie/I took her out of the cage."
Brittany Brooks recounted moving day, although Wooten suggested she move her strongest line to a more prominent position: "We are a family now/Yesterday I moved/into my new house/on Lester Street/We have a big yard/My brother and I /can play football/I love my new house."
"Actually, the third graders were more focused," Wooten said afterword. "Fourth graders are the kingpins of the school."
He told them that writing stories is harder than the more-established tradition of telling them orally because of the concentration and focus it requires.
Wooten found his own way to poetry through a teacher in seventh grade. Wooten lived his first 18 years in Marion, southeast of Cadillac.
Justus Gage this school year is encouraging students to enjoy and create many different styles of poetry by each month featuring a different grade level as featured poets.
These students develop a poem to be exhibited and shared with other students and staff.
In addition to Wooten, John Archambault of Yorba Linda, Calif., who has collaborated on a dozen books with Bill Martin Jr., will be at Justus Gage March 6, followed on May 22 by Tim Smith, creator of the Buck Wilder series that teaches children about fishing and the outdoors.