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Christina Mortellaro wrote a new post on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 4 months ago
Every high school has one of those mythological teachers–the one who is a life-changer, a challenger, and possibly immortal. I had that teacher during my senior year of high school, Mr. Trosey, and it was in his AP Lit classroom where I first really fell in love with crafting poetry. It’s hard to explain him in one blog post so I will try to give some key details about him: he worked at my high school for 30+ years and had students and their children, he looked like hadn’t aged a day, he wore tailored suits (light linen ones in hot weather), he spoke barely above a whisper, he had us analyze Emily Dickinson’s “The last night that she lived” for 7 months (line by line, punctuation mark by punctuation mark–perhaps that’s why I love m-dashes), and he was a notoriously hard grader. I heard from previous students that he was mysterious and probably a vampire. What was he hiding in those classroom closets? (Pillows.) You, gasp, sat in a circle for discussion and there were pillows and blankets in the middle of the circle if you wanted to sit in the “cave.” I could write pages and pages about this teacher but he was one of the first teachers who really encouraged me to enter English and creative writing. And although many students hated his poetry assignments, he was my first exposure to writing a mini-collection of ekphrastic poetry.
Despite getting ready for the AP Lit exam, he truly believed that learning how to write would also help you learn how to read and critically analyze literature. Therefore we wrote poetry all year long. The best poems would enter our class’s publication Stained Glass and be immortalized there. (I ended up becoming the co-editor for Stained Glass and like Erika Meitner and other poets, I followed a similar method of organizing the collection. My best friend [the other co-editor] and I laid out all of the poems on the floor and moved them all around. We repeated this countless times when Mr. Trosey explained there were too many dead grandparent poems in a row.)
I can’t remember our first writing prompt but I think it was related to Maxfield Parrish paintings. We were reading The Great Gatsby at the time and since Parrish was an active painter around that time period, it was fitting His paintings were dreamy, soft, and impossible; Trosey explained it was sort of like an extension of Gatsby’s dreams. He had a slew of large prints and we chose our individual picture and then sat down and wrote. We continued writing poetry this way with other artists too (Monet for example) but sometimes we had to bring in a special object or a photograph.
There was the infamous prompt we all waited for at the end of the year–the candle poem. Our class took a trip to the biology classroom down the hall and we sat down at our tables while he glided around the room handing us candles. From there he lit the one candle and we had to pass the flame on to each classmate. Our job was to sit there in the darkened room, stare at the candle, and write a poem about love. It didn’t have to be a romantic love poem but after 30 minute or so, we extinguished our flame and we were able to keep the candle as a memento. Although it may not be technically ekphrastic, it was still an iconic moment of my high school career. My upperclassmen friends always talked about the candle poem. It was as much of a rite of passage as getting the flour sack baby in health class (which my health teacher didn’t do my year…so disappointing).
Although some people in my class complained about the class, many of us reveled in it. If I dabbled in poetry at all, it was solely based off of my feelings but never anyone else’s. Writing ekphrastically was a lesson in empathy. I took on speakers who were different than me and I had to think like them. How could I render their imaginary thoughts and stay true to the style and content of piece of art I was working off of? Every now and then if I’m stuck for a poem idea, I go look at artwork somewhere–mostly online–and let that inspire me.
Mr. Trosey was romantic in the literary and emotional sense when it came to literature. He was like a John Keating who actually taught. I think that passion was really useful in instilling a love (or at least appreciation) of writing in each of us. For years in high school I was always hesitant about committing to the English major and after discussing it with him, he helped me realize that it was a really good fit for me. I loved reading, writing, revising (well maybe I don’t love revising), and discussing literature. He helped build my confidence and taught me some of the technical skills to pursue my love.
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Christina Mortellaro commented on the post, When Journalism Meets Poetry, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 4 months ago
Attica is really close to where I live. My mom remembers hearing gunshots in the air as a kid so that was really scary. Once you know about the Attica riot, it’s referenced pretty frequently in media when people […]
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Christina Mortellaro commented on the post, Introductions to Poetry, Old Friends and Daydreams, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 4 months ago
I read your friend’s poem and I really liked the casual tone mixed with this highfalutin language interspersed throughout the poem. *thumbs up*
Who inspired me to get into poetry…hrmm…in general I think it […]
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Christina Mortellaro commented on the post, American vs. British Spelling: Why? , on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 4 months ago
I love “grey, “dialogue,” and “catalogue” but I’m all about “color” and “favorite” and omitting other “-ou” words. I remember discussing this with my best friend from high school. She was miffed because she was a […]
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Christina Mortellaro commented on the post, “Three Things I Know Nothing About…, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 4 months ago
Fun fact about that sword fighting scene: originally in the script, Harrison Ford was supposed to sword fight. But that day, he was feeling really sick and kept having to run to the bathroom so in order to get the […]
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Christina Mortellaro wrote a new post on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 4 months ago
When Erika Meitner visited our last class, we began with a small exercise: name the least poetic place you could think of. There were lots of bathrooms, gas/truck stations, bureaucratic places like the DMV and […]
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Christina Mortellaro commented on the post, The Twitterverse & Journals, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 5 months ago
Wow, Amy this is incredibly useful. I’m such a bad Twitter user. I maybe tweet something once a month. Usually I try to use it for contests. But I think I might definitely start following some lit mags and […]
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Christina Mortellaro commented on the post, Fixations in Poetry, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 5 months ago
Well last year it was all about that food. *Cue song* Also there was a lot of the color red which I didn’t really understand why. I just had many shades of red too. But this year I found myself gravitating towards […]
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Christina Mortellaro commented on the post, What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 5 months ago
I’m going to steal this book from your room. It’s not stealing because I just told you. But actually, I wanted to read more of LeDuff’s work anyway and I, too, was really excited when his name was listed in the […]
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Christina Mortellaro commented on the post, “Why is Modern Poetry so Bad?”, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 5 months ago
I think what frustrated me most about this article in response to the Harper’s slam on modern poetry is that it thinks that poets are too timid to make any grand statements. We are supposedly afraid to use “we” or […]
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Christina Mortellaro commented on the post, Back to Basics: Poetry as a Genre, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 5 months ago
I didn’t read that but I read The Boyfriend List and Dramarama back in middle school, hahahaha. I don’t remember much from those books but I don’t think I took a step back and thought, “This is great, complex […]
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Christina Mortellaro commented on the post, Finding Poetry in Anything, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 5 months ago
Ah, I’m so sad I missed her lecture. Stephanie was my TA in my Engl 170 with Doggett. I went to her office hours on a weekly basis to get help on my response papers. She was always so well-spoken! It would have […]
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Christina Mortellaro commented on the post, This is Just To Say I Started An Experiment, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 5 months ago
Update: my roommate said that everyone thought the note was funny but no one knew that it was a poem.
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Christina Mortellaro commented on the post, mewithoutYou, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 5 months ago
Thanks for the link! I enjoyed the song. I love how it has a really great narrative quality to it. I guess that makes sense because of the topic.
I love bands or artists that have a great lyrical quality to […]
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Christina Mortellaro commented on the post, Getting Lost in Translation, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 5 months ago
A couple of years ago, Brazilian poet Salgado Maranhão and his translator, Alexis Levitin, did a reading in Geneseo. I remember they were talking about how Alexis had worked with Salgado to try to convey the right […]
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Christina Mortellaro commented on the post, Sad Poetry, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 5 months ago
I found that for years I would just write sad poems or just dark poems but I don’t want to be stuck doing that. It’s never intentional and I’m not even in a bad mood when I write them. In fact when I’m in a […]
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Christina Mortellaro wrote a new post on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 5 months ago
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Christina Mortellaro commented on the post, When to Stop Writing, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 5 months ago
When I’m writing and I reach the end, I just sort of feel it. It sounds really lame but most of the time I’m like, “Yep. That’s it. Bye. You’re done.” And then I put the poem away. Usually if I think it’s an […]
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Christina Mortellaro commented on the post, Hairston, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 5 months ago
Hairston’s poem gave me chills. It’s really hard to explain because it looks very weird on the page but I think the line breaks even with the density creates this chaotic space where sometimes you don’t know who […]
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Christina Mortellaro wrote a new post on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 6 months ago
In class today, Lytton quoted Aristotle and his views on what makes a narrative and whether or not Myung Mi Kim’s Dura fits this definition or not. Kim defends the collection and says that it has a clear narrative […]
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