Carolyn Marie Souaid is a teacher and author of four books of poetry. But as a teenager, she hated poetry.
“I was a good English student. I knew how to write papers. But when there was a poem on the final exam, I always freaked out,” Souaid recalls. Poetry was like a mystery to be unlocked—and only the teacher seemed to have the key.
Today she helps students unlock that mystery, by showing them that it’s okay not to understand every detail in a poem, but to simply enjoy the imagery or the atmosphere. She is “taking poetry to the streets,” to show people that poetry is not just the domain of “dead white guys,” but that it can be alive, dynamic and current.
So how did a poetry-hater become a published poet and poetry advocate?
As a kid, Souaid was overweight and not very popular. She’d take solace in writing short stories and poems. Although she was too young in the 60s to really understand what was going on, she started writing a soap opera about a group of teens living together in a commune. At age 12, she’d go outside and read these stories to kids on the street. They would give her feedback and eagerly await the next installment. “But I really had no idea what I was doing,” said Souaid.
At age 16, she reread everything she had written so far, realized how bad it was, and held a manuscript-burning party. “I was writing about things I knew nothing about,” she explains. “I felt I had nothing genuine to say.” So she stopped writing.
Then, in her late 20s, after earning a teaching degree at McGill University, Souaid got a job teaching in Northern Québec for the Kativik School Board. She stayed there for three years. “When I came back, I felt I had material. I wrote a poem about the North, and sent it off to a literary magazine. It was accepted.”
That gave her encouragement to continue. She started a Master’s degree in Creative Writing at Concordia University. That’s when real life started putting her to the test.
At the time, she was trying to have a child, but it was not working. She began infertility treatments, but still, nothing. Finally, she went to Lebanon, the country of her parents’ origin, to adopt a child. Her Master’s thesis therefore became a book of poems about this experience.
Upon her professors’ encouragement, she sent the manuscript to a publisher. It was published in 1995. A description from Souaid’s Web site: “Swimming into the Light is a sequence of poems charting a woman's struggle with infertility and her entry into motherhood through the back door of international adoption. The book traces these events in a connected narrative, from her frustration and despair over infertility to the uncertainty of international adoption and rescuing a new life from a war-torn country, and finally to the quiet reflections on motherhood.”
Since then, Souaid has published three more collections of poetry: October, Snow Formations, and Satie’s Sad Piano. She is a substitute teacher for the Riverside School Board, and she is frequently invited to participate in festivals and do workshops in classrooms across Canada.
POETRY TO THE PEOPLE
“My goal in the classroom is to demystify poetry for students,” she says. First she tells them about her own background and how she hated poetry, which gets their attention. Then she reads a bit from her own work. She has tried to write in way so that even if people don’t understand every detail, they get a sense of the atmosphere and general idea. “I use a lot of imagery and narrative—people follow narrative more easily.”
Then she does activities with the students. But these are not typical classroom writing exercises. “I try to find a trigger to force them to write in a way that they will create something fresh and original,” she says. Here is one example. She has students make a list of 6 words: a colour, a fruit, a profession, a city, a pizza topping, a favourite word. Then she tells them to look at their shoe, and says, “You have five minutes to describe your shoe, and you have to use all the words in your list.”
Of course, the students protest: “But Miss, that doesn’t make any sense!” “Just write,” Souaid answers. When they finish, she shows them how to turn their paragraph into a poem, such as by breaking up the lines. “We read the poems out loud and discuss them. It’s really interesting to see what the students come out with.” Inevitably, some will have used a simile, which she’ll point out: “My shoe smells like pepperoni.”
She tells students that it doesn’t matter if they don’t understand every detail in a poem. “It’s like music. You don’t always understand everything the artist is saying or referring to, but you can still like it and relate to it.”
Souaid is trying to spread the word not just among students, but among the general public, too. In the summer of 2003, she hooked up with poet and playwright Endre Farkas, who teaches at John Abbott College. He was trying to rekindle a Poetry-on-the-Buses project. The result was “a moving anthology of 20 contemporary Canadian poets, in both official languages,” Souaid explains. “For the entire month of April (2004), National Poetry Month, 800 Montreal buses crisscrossed the city carrying poems.”
Their creative collaboration has continued. In the fall of 2004, Souaid and Farkas began the Circus of Words/Cirque des mots. “We were tired of your typical poetry reading, so we created a show.” The show features 6 to 8 artists, each with a 15-minute act. Each mixes poetry with another medium, such as music, dance, lighting, visuals or sound. The popular event is now in its third year.
FROM PERSONAL TO GLOBAL
Souaid continues to use real-life as the backdrop to her writing. Recently, however, she has shifted from writing about personal experiences to becoming more politically and socially engaged. Last year, she was part of a Canadian delegation of poets who did evening readings at an international conference in Paris denouncing inhuman conditions in Turkish prisons.
“I feel a poet has a responsibility to society and to the world,” she explains. “I judge a lot of contests, and you get tired of hearing about me, myself and I.” This is something she talks about with students. At the same time, she tells students that their personal experiences are valid. “Many are going through heavy things—divorce, death, relationships. They don’t realize that to put their experiences on paper and make it real for someone else is valuable.”
In a way, this is how she came to appreciate poetry. “It has something to do with distilling the pure joy of living—even in its darkest, bleakest moments.”
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For teacher reports on some in-class workshops with students visit:
http://www.nald.ca/ateq/enote_articles/carolyn07.htm
http://www.nald.ca/ateq/enote_articles/carolyn.htm
