US English Teacher Shares Work at Wheaton College
Heather Tone, our new ninth grade English teacher, is an award-winning poet who was featured at Wheaton College in Boston, MA last month. Heather shares with us what her experience was like, how she engages students with poetry, and to whom she credits her “remarkably smooth” transition to Austin and St. Andrew’s.
How did you become involved in Wheaton’s “Readings By The Writers” event?
I recently published a book called Likenesses, and so once in a while I get asked to do readings or workshops. In this case, one of the faculty at Wheaton College got in touch with me. Kent Shaw (the faculty member who invited me, also a poet) happened across my book and liked it enough to invite me to join two other poets—Rachel B. Glaser and Lo Kwa Mei-en—for a reading and panel discussion at Wheaton.
What did you share? How did you make this selection for this audience?
I read some poems from the book, as well as some newer poems. In this case, I selected poems based on what I thought would work for my reading time slot, which was about twenty minutes, and I also tried to figure out what might appeal to my audience. My audience in this case was mostly a group of undergrads plus the Creative Writing faculty at Wheaton. In all honesty, I think I would have adjusted my selections a little if I’d known a bit more about the audience. One of the other poets, Rachel B. Glaser, read a poem about how attached she is to her cell phone, and that went over well with this particular group. I read a couple of poems that are in part inspired by being a mom—most of my audience didn’t have kids, so I don’t know if those poems resonated as much with this group as they have with other slightly older audiences.
How are you getting students to engage with poetry this year? Are there exercises you're particularly fond of that students like?
I’m not sure how poetry is going to enter my classroom this year. In the past, I’ve spent several weeks exploring poetry with 10th graders and Creative Writing students— based on the feedback I’ve gotten from my past students, I feel confident that those poetry units have been valuable. I tend to teach poetry through reading, writing, and workshopping poetry. So, I’ll give students a packet of poems to read that includes selections from several poets—I like to include canonical poets as well as up-and-coming writers, or writers who who’ve done amazing work but who haven’t really been included in the cannon. One of my goals as a teacher is to increasingly offer students a selection of poems that represents the diverse body of poets and poetic experiences out there. Related to that, it’s heartening to see that right now the poetry community is very aware of including and supporting voices of color and voices from the LGTBQ community; as a teacher of poetry, I’d like to perpetuate this trend of inclusion.
Beyond reading, I have my students write poetry that responds to what they’ve read for class—I’ll have them mimic a certain writer or a style. Then we workshop the poems they’ve written: we highlight what’s working in the poems students write, and we also offer gentle, non-soul-crushing constructive criticism for these pieces, in case student-poets want to revise or continue to play. I do think about poetry as play—poets notice language and like playing with it to see what it can do. And when it comes to play, there are parallels between what good poets and good rap artists or lyricists do with language. I know a lot of people who would say that good rap music deserves to go down in history the way good poems have gone down in history. Last year, Bob Dylan, an incredible lyricist, won the Nobel Prize for Literature—that’s a sign, I think, that our ideas about literature and poetry can be more expansive than many high school students might assume. I sometimes have students consider rap songs alongside poems to see what these two genres have in common—students usually like that activity.
What skills do you hope students learn by reading or writing poetry?
I hope they learn to play with language a little (or a lot), and along with that, I hope they relish thinking about and using language in new ways. I hope they become more capable of close-reading, analyzing, and discussing poems. I hope they become more comfortable giving and receiving feedback from others. I hope they leave my poetry units feeling like language is a little more wild, and also that they have a little more confidence as they approach poetry (and all challenging texts) in the future. I hope that some of my students find that poetry works for them as a vehicle for expressing their deepest selves.
What attracted you to St. Andrew's? How is your first year going so far?
Before arriving at St. Andrew’s, I’d been hearing about it for a couple of years from Grace Ortman, Religious Studies Department Chair and English teacher, who has been a friend of mine for years. When I was teaching in Florida, she and I would often compare teaching notes, and what she told me about St. Andrew’s impressed me: among other things, she talked about the school’s dedication to helping students growing both academically and personally; she talked about how inspiring her students and colleagues were; she talked about the school’s commitment to service and about the mindfulness program that St. Andrew’s has recently adopted. Since I’ve arrived, I’ve found that everything she told me about the school is totally on point! I’ve appreciated all of these aspects of St. Andrew’s, and I’ve also appreciated how attentive the school is to ritual and tradition. And then on a personal level, so many of my colleagues have offered feedback about where to go for daycare and pediatricians and food and yoga—all of that has been critical to helping me and my family settle in to Austin. In short, I’ve loved being a part of this community—my transition to Austin and to St. Andrew’s has felt remarkably smooth because of the welcome that I’ve been given by others here.
If folks want to read some of your poetry, where would they find it?
Here is a link to a poem of mine that appeared in the Boston Review a while back—the link also includes an incredibly generous introduction that one of my poet-heroes, Tomaž Šalamun, wrote in response to the poem. He’s since passed, and so I’m very grateful that my work reached him while he was alive. (I will also qualify the poem by noting that it might not look like poetry that readers have encountered before.).
You can also find Heather's work at Malvern Books here in Austin!
You can also find Heather's work at Malvern Books here in Austin!
