On May 4, students from around Vermont attended the Share Your Heart, Share the World poetry event in downtown Burlington. This program is an all-day event that provides students with poetry writing workshops and readings. 

Nathan Archambault’s poetry class and Larissa Hebert’s American Literature class attended the event along with classes from Vermont Commons School, Burlington High School and the Center for Technology Essex. 

The day started off with a brief introduction to what the day would look like. Students were then sorted into groups to attend various poetry workshops. Once two workshops ran, students joined again for lunch and sat to listen to the keynote speaker, Vermont poet Bianca Stone.

Samuel Boudreau (15’) was asked to attend the festival and run one of the workshops. “It just sounded like a  great opportunity to work with students more closely… I come in [to BFA] and [help students prepare for] Poetry Out Loud, and that’s great, but to actually engage with writing is even more fun,” Boudreau said.

Boudreau added, “I think young people are really utilizing [poetry] to move not only themselves forward but everyone else.”

At the end of the day, the floor was open to students and teachers to perform their own poetry pieces. Hazen Kellner (’23), Elio Haag (’23), August Hawkins (’23), Bug Galuszka (’23) and Jasmine Duncan (’23) shared their personal poetry pieces. Asher Ballantine (’23) recorded their readings; you can watch the video here.

When asked about how the Share Your Heart poetry event could help better engage students in poetry, after Covid, Boudreau said, “I think poetry is gonna have its renaissance… [I think that] students and educators are going to invest more into poetry because it is a way to express individual identities, and it can engage in a way that is really affirming and wonderful and powerful.”