Twelve students attended the 17th Biennial Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival on a trip led by English teacher Kevin Horn and librarian Margaret Devine in mid-October.

The students attended spoken workshops by poets Sandra Cisneros and Juan Felipe Herrera. They also sat in for a conversation between poet Jericho Brown and National Public Radio interviewer Krista Tippett.

Readings and talks were held in the main concert hall of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. Students also had a chance to see the sights of Newark, including the First Baptist Peddie Memorial Church to hear former poet laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera.

Junior Sarah Hale said, “For the first five minutes I was just looking all around at the church itself.”

The close proximity to the poets themselves may have been daunting to some, but the students enjoyed the atmosphere.

Junior Elisha Stenger said, “Sitting closer and in the church just made it a lot more intimate.”

Hearing the author of The House on Mango Street and the other poets inspired a further pursuit of poetry.

Senior Madisen Snyder said, “It has inspired me to read a lot more poetry than I did before.”

The students sat front and center for the conversation surrounding poet Jericho Brown.

“Hearing his poem was fantastic but getting to hear him talk about the work behind the poem was even better,” Hale said.  “Getting to see him in person just made me want to support his work even more.”

The trip had a lasting impression on the attendees.

“I don’t think I’ll ever forget ‘Eleven,’ the short story Sandra Cisneros read,” Hale said. “If we read it in a classroom as something that we had to sit down and analyze, it would have  been out of my head as fast as it went in.”

Students agreed the  field trip was one of intense emotions.

“Poetry requires you to open yourself up with introspective thought,” Stenger said. “It can bring up emotions that you try to suppress and thoughts you try to suppress and topics you try to avoid. It’s definitely worth it to create something so beautiful.”

Mr. Horn, a Dodge Poetry Festival aficionado, has attended since 1998 and continues to bring students every year.

“I love seeing students enraptured by a poem,” Horn said. “Teachers along the way can kind of ruin poetry for students by, as Billy Collins says, ‘tying the poem to a chair and beating it with a rubber hose to find out what it really means,’ when all you really need to do is read it and figure out what it makes you feel and why.”