The Craven Early College high school students might tell you you’re not alone if you don’t like poetry, but their experience with poetry during the 2020 school year may tell a different story. Amanda Smith, their teacher, would tell you not to write it off just yet. In September students entered the Bank of the Arts’ annual Ekphrastic Poetry Competition. For several years this juried art exhibition and accompanying poetry competition has been a classroom staple when teaching poetry. “Ekphrastic” poetry is poetry inspired by art, so students explored the exhibition’s photographs, paintings, and sculptures (online of course) then wrote poems in response to the piece of artwork they chose. encouraging students to discuss their artwork choices and workshop their poems with their teacher one-on-one and then with each other. For a week the class discussed how the interpretation of an artist’s title can alter how we see the art, or how the details and medium mattered more with time and exploration. The students’ peer reviews and time spent “workshopping” their poems deepened and intensified not only the conversation but the poems themselves. See the exhibition here: CravenArts.org/2020-national-juried-exhibition