I’m Barb Clauer, a faculty member teaching literature and writing classes at LCC since 2001. In October 2017, I attended the Imagining America Conference at UC Davis with three other colleagues. It was my 2nd conference after becoming full time at LCC in 2012, and the very first session I attended, “Constructing a Community-Generated Poem”, as I state on the Poetry Project website I’ve created, with the help of Jim Luke via OLL, “would change my professional and creative life.” During that session, I volunteered to be part of a small group of poets who took the words conference attendees had written in response to creative questionnaire prompts and, collaboratively, wrote a poem titled “Imagining America” read at the closing plenary. After that exhilarating, creative experience, I was overwhelmed with ideas about how to implement something similar at LCC with my students as the poets. From that impulse, what I’ve titled the LCC Community-Generated Poetry Project has grown and evolved, with immense help and support from Melissa Kaplan, an interdisciplinary wizard, in her role as Academic and Arts Outreach Coordinator, from something I did in my ENGL 201 Introduction to Poetry course Fall 2017, when I returned from the conference, to various projects — both semester-long and one day activities. These projects have included the input of over 1100 LCC students across at least 100 sections, with the help of dozens of faculty in various disciplines. As of the end of Spring 2020, 200 poets (students, LCC faculty and staff, and community members) have written 34 community-generated poems, many of which the poets then performed at StarScapes each semester. Poetry Project work has included poems written for and performed in Judy Allen’s Fall 2019 play I Have a Name that also inspired THEA and DMAC student productions, poems written in connection with the 2018-2019 One Book One LCC The Hate U Give, poems written by faculty and staff during a Professional Development session, one-day activities in collaboration with the Black History Awareness Committee as well as activities for multiple Student Summits through the Office of Diversity and Inclusion. The work from the Spring 2020 project “The Vote and Your Voice” has already produced poems, and is also ongoing Fall 2020. What I have learned from this work is that we have an amazing, creative, and open community here at LCC. People just keep saying yes to Poetry Projects! Ultimately, my learning from this work has coalesced around three principles that drive the Poetry Project: Trust the students/participants, Trust the process, and Trust each other.
