Denver Students' Poetry Anthology Revived for DPS STEAM Expo

Ready for a little good news about American education? About public schools, especially, beleaguered as they are by unfair attacks and radical underfunding?

On Saturday, May 3, Denver Public Schools will deliver just that at the third annual DPS STEAM Expo. It's a day-long event that focuses on Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Movement and Media Literacy (thus the acronym) that features DPS students from around the city to showcase their projects, engage with hands-on activities and explore how STEAM can inspire action and drive positive change. The event is free and open to everyone, and will take place from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the CSU Spur Campus (4777 National Western Drive). For more information on the event, see the DPS STEAM Expo page on the DPS website.
One of the highlights of the event will be a poetry reading to help launch the return of the annual anthology featuring the poetry of Denver students, this year titled denverpoets, Volume One.

The collection is a relaunch of a highly successful program initiated by retired DPS teacher Steve Replogle, who organized seven similar collections starting with 2008's Our Hearts Are Woven Into Words. Now, DPS Library Services Coordinator is bringing it back. The new edition — hopefully the first of many — will premiere at the DPS STEAM Expo.

DPS Library Service Coordinator Pete Fey came across the poetry books and felt inspired to bring the project back to life. "Which he has, with determination and good energy! And true heroism," effuses Replogle. "Libraries are under siege by cost-cutters, and are always the first to lose funding and personnel. That’s why Pete is a hero. In the middle of these difficult circumstances, he has forged ahead for the kids of Denver."

Replogle volunteered to help with the selection process for the new book, working closely with Fey and a handful of others to choose the best of an impressive crop of writings. "Steve was an inspiration," says Fey. "None of this would be happening now without the good work he began." 

But it's really about the kids and their work, insists Fey. "One of the great things about poetry is balancing the artistic freedom with certain limits. Form, most traditionally. But with kids this age, sometimes the limits are their own understanding of language. They're still learning, right? And sometimes, the combination of those limits and the passion they have and the emotions they're trying to express — that can produce some very cool things. The book has a lot of examples of that."

Fey himself is no stranger to poetry; along with his advanced degrees in library sciences, he also received a Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Kansas, and has had some of his own work published as well. His wife, Katie Foster, has two books of poetry of her own, most recently Major Diamonds Nights & Knives with Boulder's Trident Press. All of which is to say: poetry is a big part of Fey's life.

"I've really seen how [poetry] can come to affect the way people think," explains Fey, "and how we approach problems and can work to solve them with abstract approaches. I recognize it in my own life, and I've seen it happen for students too. So when I became aware of the work Steve had been doing, it seemed a shame that the project would end."

So Fey reached out to Replogle to talk about reviving the poetry publication, get his advice as to how he'd gone about bringing those books to shelves. Fey wrote a grant and got some funding through the Denver Public Schools Foundation. Once he'd worked his way through the jungle of institutional approvals and publishing requirements, Fey was able to get the book ready to go and opened submissions from all over DPS.

They received over a thousand poems and countless illustrations from which to choose.

"And that's even considering that we weren't able to cast as wide a net as we could to get all schools involved," Fey says. "Next time, I'll have the time to make even more inroads in schools that didn't get the word in time. And principals will see the book and think, 'Hey, I didn't know about this,' and put it on their radar. I'm expecting the response next year to be double, even triple what we saw this first time out."

Fey says that he feels strongly about presenting student work for a lot of reasons, but one of them is definitely that denverpoets, volume 1 is a purposeful strike against those forces that are trying to quiet and quell free speech and the free dissemination of information that libraries in general represent in history.

"There are some poems in this collection that are really hard to read. Really difficult," says Fey. "Those are the feelings and thoughts that people who are attacking libraries want to distance us all from. I want people to read what these students have to say. They're thinking about the same things we as adults are thinking about. That's why it's called denverpoets. I want someone to pick up the collection and read a poem and be affected by it and only then maybe notice who wrote it. It's going to take all of us — the youngest of us and the oldest of us — to ensure our freedoms. Speech, Information, Assembly, even the freedom to maintain third spaces like libraries themselves. It's going to take all of us, and all the power we can bring collectively."

Poetry is just one way to do that — but it's a good start.

Student poets will read from denverpoets, Volume 1 at DPS STEAM Expo, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, May 3, at the CSU Spur Campus, 4777 National Western Drive. For more information,see the DPS STEAM Expo page.