By Isabella Ying
Just as ideas in English class tend to arise, Ms. Rosenstein and Mr. Smith’s “Pots and Poetry” project was inspired by a book. In this case, it began with a “Christmas gift” left on Ms. Rosenstein’s desk with a note signed by ceramics teacher Mr. Smith. The gift was a book called Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person, written by Mary Caroline Richards. Pots and Poetry is a part of the “U-Pick-the-Poem Project/Presentation” in her course, AP English Lit & Comp: The Mind is a Fascinating Thing.
Originally, Ms. Ro believed that Mr. Smith approached her about the project because his ceramics class’s pots would look more interesting for the Signature magazine. But she understood that Mr. Smith intended there to be “a whole other level” to why he wanted to do this.
Ms. Ro believes that just like the author of that book, Mr. Smith sees “a very philosophical, almost spiritual connection…between poetry and pottery and human beings.”
Creating art, according to Mary Caroline Richards, a poet herself, is about feeling “connected to everything and everyone. It’s philosophical.” Seeing that the project requires students to choose a poem that “speaks to you,” perhaps engraving poetry onto a pot actually does, after all, serve a purpose—that being to connect humanity with words and art.
Once Mr. Smith and Ms. Ro conjured this idea, they had high hopes for the ceramic–literary art fusion to be “engaging” for the students. Their hopes were fulfilled during the fourth and fifth periods of Wednesday, March 11th, in the ceramics classroom.
For the last period of the day, Mr. Smith started period four off by explaining the artistic process. You must choose a pot, perhaps perfect, or else with “wabi-sabi” (a Japanese term connoting the beauty of impermanence or imperfection) from the array produced by the ceramics class, then carefully paint or engrave lines—a few favorite phrases, or all of them, or just one—from your poem. The goal: to speak to the world about how your chosen poem speaks to you.
He picked up several pots as examples, these having been made during period five. He held them out, some with and without colors.
With that, Mr. Smith released the AP Lit students to explore their artistic prowess and voices. With, of course, a word of caution. “Be careful… they’re soft so you can carve into it, but they’re also very fragile… use two hands to pick them up,” he reminded the seniors.
First, the students crowded around a table at the front of the classroom to decide which pot they wanted to inscribe their poem on. Once the students had settled in, pots rotated on pottery turntables as they assessed how to dress them, a humming chatter becoming a steady background noise for the period.
As Siena Raponi worked on detailing her pot with her chosen poem, “The Moment” by Margaret Atwood, she reflected on how ceramics provided a “creative outlet” to visually represent the poems, based on “how you can express your color, or what it means in your own person.”
Hollis Fann, like Siena, used colors to connect her poem and pot. She painted colors in a pattern to match the rhyme scheme of her poem, “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. Hollis grew up reciting poems and, having written about this one for her college essay, she was emotionally attached to it. The poem is about “the choices we make in life and coming up onto a divide in the road and having to decide between two different paths,” despite knowing that the “wrong” path could lead to unwanted endings.
An imperfection in her pot that Hollis found was a ridge, which she used to symbolize the “bend in the path.” Based on Mr. Smith’s instructions, he clearly would approve of the sculpting error that Hollis capitalized on, as he observed how students tend to “want to make perfect pots, but for this, I told them to embrace imperfection of things.”
To show an example, he displayed a pot that wasn’t the most visually appealing, but was very “interesting” because the student had etched their poem’s lines in a wavy spiral around it.
Ms. Ro, along with Mr. Smith, assisted the students with their ceramics endeavor. When several students asked her how many lines they needed to add, she assured them that “I want you to do what feels good to you.”
Blake Waller, who happens to be the only boy in the entire class, had another interesting representation of his poem with his pot. Blake wrote his poem circularly around the rim, “so it comes full circle.” His poem was “I, too” by Langston Hughes, and his father recommended it to him.
The following Monday, students had to present their pots and poems in English class, and Blake explained how Hughes expresses hope for “a new day when Black people will be seen as equal in America.”
While Blake believes that progress has been made since the time of the poem’s writing, much is still necessary to complete the full circle that Blake etched the poem in on his pot.
He acknowledges that Hughes’s piece is “definitely aspirational,” with its high hopes for the future. It’s “a product of his time,” seen in “how Langston Hughes conceptualizes the future.”
After the project, Ms. Ro reflected that she would love to return to ceramics for similar escapades in the future. She recounted fondly how at the end of her fifth period class, “there were four kids up here and at 1:22 or three, they’re like, ‘I didn’t know the bell rang for lunch.’ And to me, that’s like a teacher’s dream, right?”
Ms. Ro looks forward to “bugging [Mr. Smith] again next year” about the project, and briefly pondered whether the students could use their own poems on the pot.
But, upon asking “excellent student” Olivia Simms if she’d want to engage in that, Olivia responded with a firm head shake of disapproval, Ms. Ro accepted defeat.
