This spring, the Teen Poetry Workshop was held on April 16th at the Artesia Public Library.
The night was designed to help poets find their inspiration leading up to Beat Poetry Night. We ended up adding a second workshop on April 17th due to popular demand! Workshop participants played a collaborative poetry game called The Exquisite Corpse. In this old parlor game, each person writes down a sentence or phrase, putting the last word on the next line and folding their paper so that only the next line shows. The paper gets passed to the next person who must develop a phrase or sentence that begins with the word from the previous player. The paper continues to be passed along until everyone has added their phrase/sentence. Each group reads their resulting collaborative poem out loud. Some were unexpectedly powerful and some were hilarious! Instructor Kirsten Mauritsen did a wonderful job!
After this warm-up exercise, participants read a poem and then listened to a recording of the poet reading the piece before working on their own poems.
The much anticipated Beat Poetry Night was held on April 23rd in the lobby of the Artesia Arts Council’s Ocotillo Performing Arts Center. We had an all-ages group to cheer on, or rather, snap for. (We went for authenticity!) Local poets James Grayford and Kirsten Mauritsen read their original works. Kirsten then led everyone in a Blackout Poetry community project, using pages from discarded books. The poet picks out select words and/or phrases and blacks out the rest of the text to create a poem!
This event was sponsored by Creative New Mexico, an arts advocacy group that works with the state to secure funding and support for the arts. We also had wonderful local partners: Artesia Public Library and Wendy Kilpatrick, Artesia Arts Council, Artesia Chamber of Commerce and Hayley Klein, Artesia MainStreet, Artesia Public Schools, New Mexico Arts, Kith+Kin Roasting Company, and local writer Kirsten Mauritsen.
