blueprints

198 | toolkit: an idea, a pencil, and paper
In his essay, Luis Rodriguez writes powerfully about how he came to
poetry after leaving prison and how this experience led to his making a
connection between poetry and freedom. “The first move from chaos isn’t
order,” he writes, “—it’s creativity.” Through his work with Tia Chucha’s
Centro Cultural & Bookstore, he comes to understand the transformative
power of poetry in drawing together the members of an underserved community
and in connecting that community with the values of freedom and
civic discourse. He tells of one young woman in his neighborhood who
was literally saved from taking her own life and so restored to herself and
her community through an accidental introduction to the Centro.
Patricia Smith talks about how the Chicago slam provided her with a
passionate experience with poetry and connected her with a larger community.
In particular, she recalls how Gwendolyn Brooks, who served as a
sort of presiding spirit for a memorable Chicago event, helped her understand
how she could express her experience as a young, African American
woman from Chicago’s West Side—and how she could do so as a member
of a larger poetry community.
And Sherwin Bitsui writes about poetry as the vehicle uniquely able to
help young Navajo students connect with school by encouraging them to
bring the rich language and stories of their own culture into the classroom.
Rodriguez, Smith, Bitsui, and Boskoff have the experience of working
with and in communities in which people may feel isolated and alienated,
socially or geographically, by poverty or segregation or other factors. In
these cases, poetry itself isn’t the point so much, at least at the beginning; it’s
more a means to an end. In a way, isn’t it always? Even those of us who are
animated by a passion for poetry are so animated because we’ve had the
experience of poetry’s power to change our lives and our relationships with
our world and ourselves. But to achieve any of these ends, we still have to
create the conditions for the intimate experience that is poetry. We still
must come to the question: How does one create the conditions for the
“falling in love,” for the restoration to self and thus, perhaps, to community,
to occur?
Recognize that your passions and your values are intimately connected
Articulating what you are passionate about and why can help you identify
and articulate your values and perhaps answer the next question: Why
me? Do you value and want to create the conditions for individual, transformative
experiences with poetry? Do you value and want to create a