After traveling to Japan, English teacher Emily Moore found inspiration in a seventeenth-century Japanese poet’s writings and travels, and had her poetry workshop classes take journeys of their own.
Moore’s students wrote haikus on circular, stone-shaped construction paper and displayed them at locations within the school, starting the week of Monday, October 22.
“The haikus are about our journeys, mental or physical; about a place in Stuy or a place in the outside world,” senior Amanda Chiu said.Haikus are Japanese poems of three short lines of five, seven and five syllables. They attempt to capture a single mood or feeling, and are often terse and witty. “They take one beautiful moment and separate it,” Moore said.
The haikus, which can be found on escalators, benches, the bridge, the photo darkroom and in many other places, use the environment in which they are placed as their subject matter.
For example, a haiku placed outside room 207 read, “Lost your clarinet/ jacket, ipod, cell, or watch?/ Try room 207.
”The haikus are unsigned by their authors. “Signing our full name on the poems would take away from the haiku experience for the readers,” Chiu said.
“[The project] allows people to see certain aspects of Stuy in a different way,” junior Manpreet Kaur said. “Now, when a student walks into the back corner of the library, they can experience someone else’s feelings about the area. Or, there may be a hall you walk past all the time and after reading someone’s haiku you realize it plays a great role in your Stuy day.
”Moore was inspired to start this project after she traveled to Japan under the Japan Fulbright Memorial Fund, a program that pays for teachers to travel and apply their cross-cultural understanding to their teaching. There, she learned more about the poetry of Japan.
This particular assignment is based on the work of a famous seventeenth-century Japanese poet named Bashö, who journeyed all over Japan, composing haikus and carving them in stones along his way.
Moore wanted to her students to take a similar journey through Stuyvesant and write their own haikus. Students in her poetry workshop classes wrote the poems on construction paper in the shape of Bashÿ’s haiku stones.
This assignment is a part of a larger project that the poetry workshop classes are working on. “The project is to write a Haiku Journey, a selection of five or more haikus interspersed with prose,” senior Emily Banks said. “One of them has to focus on a place in the school.
”Moore said the haikus will help students think of their environment in a more lyrical and personable way.“Stuyvesant is such a hard place to be a student or a teacher, [with] grueling long days, 10 flights of stairs, exhaustion and hard thinking,” she said. The haikus will help students relax and alleviate some of the stress and tensions they have.
Students who are not in Moore’s poetry workshop class may also submit haikus or haiku ideas in room 1025.
