Abstract

Poems Unsealed is a collection of six chapters mixing conventionally fixed genres, such as nonfiction essay, short story, and poem. The chapters are infused with letters, poems, memoirs, interviews, dialogues, artwork, and teaching activities. Such fusion attempts to show the creative avenues available for writers who expand their scope to include the community. Thematically, The Runaway with Words Program threads through all six chapters. This program sends professional and graduate student-writers into shelters, prisons, and alternative high schools to conduct poetry workshops. While creative expression holds therapeutic value for community participants in at-risk environments, the professional writer is also enriched by stepping out of his academic training, and by crossing boundaries of age, race, education and class. Poems Unsealed tracks my own creative experience as a writer and teacher. The essays grow out of the central idea that writing and expression is valuable for everyone, and that words, poems, letters, and stories have communal power. Tapping this power is a creative opening—an unwrapping, or unsealing of poems as precious as they are hidden. This text aims to be artistically pleasing as well as practical in its use among fellow teachers and writers. These chapters should be seen as a resource for those interested in the craft of teaching, of writing poetry, and of sharing ourselves, and our writing, with the larger human community