"You have to be a little more careful," my host teacher implored.   

During my four years of service as a UA Poetry Center Writing the Community Teaching Artist at the CAPE School at the Youth Detention facility on Ajo Way, at times my lessons had fallen flat, but never before had I felt that my choice of lesson content was irresponsible.   

I'd created a lesson on rap battles.  However, though I attempted to properly vet all video clips for the lesson, it turned out that I had inadvertently left in a clip that made an obscure reference to violence that I hadn't understood.   

You could almost hear the proverbial turntable scratch as my fellow teacher abruptly stopped the video during the lesson.  I knew something had gone awry, but I didn't understand exactly what until chatting in the hall afterwards. 

The understandably strict protocols of the space meant that many different kinds of references to street culture are prohibited during lessons, even when the teaching artist is too uneducated in street language to realize the meaning of the problematic reference. 

I apologized profusely, determined to make it up to everyone, but still uncertain how. 

Teaching at a youth detention center has been an eye-opening cultural experience for me since day one.  As a middle-class, educationally privileged, white woman with a strong familial safety net,  I have stepped foot into this institutional space with young men who have potentially very different backgrounds than mine. 

But after teaching English in high schools with populations of students from a wide diversity of backgrounds for the better part of sixteen years, I have learned that in most important ways, young people are the same: if you offer them a chance to share, if you treat them with care and respect, and if you give them the message that their perspective and experience is valid, most of the time, they will respond with some measure of willingness to open up and take risks to be more present, engaged, and receptive than they might have been without the encouragement.   

A teaching artist is constantly learning.  So I dusted myself off and drew upon my own roots in poetry writing to prepare my “comeback” lesson.  My favorite class while earning an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona was Poetic Forms with Boyer Rickel. He'd assigned Paul Fussell's Poetic Meter and Poetic Form to our class, a book which still has a special place on my shelf.  I had discovered the paradox of working within form early on: rather than being confining, the introduction of limits and structure instead offered a foundation to build upon.  

Still, it worried me that offering lessons on forms might unhelpfully amplify the theme of confinement in a place like the Detention Center, where an extensive playbook of rules undergirded the prevailing atmosphere. Wasn't freedom something the youth all had too little of?  Would they embrace the rules of poetic forms as giving potentially constructive expectations to meet, or would poetic forms reinforce the sensation of being trapped and caged? 

I decided to try it out.  I purposely chose two different forms that struck a balance between structure and freedom: the ghazal and the pantoum. 

With the ghazal, an ancient Arabic song form, there is a suggested syllable length per line (12), a pattern of word repetition across couplets (the radif), and a rhyme scheme on the penultimate word or phrase in every second line of the couplet (the qafiya).  A name self-reference by the author can also appear in the final couplet. And while I taught these rules to the students, I emphasized through my model poem examples and my verbal instructions that by no means did they have to strictly adhere to anything that impeded their creativity. I explained that with poetry, one can break the rules if it's for a good reason, the reason being their own freedom as writers.  But I kept the tension in place, inviting them to try to follow the structure.  See what happens, I said. 

And they did. I'll share some poems below that they wrote using the ghazal form. We also read a few different ghazals by published poets as inspiration, included within the slideshow I created to teach the lesson. 

Brother by Chance P.

I want to be free with my brother  
I can't wait to leave with my brother  

I drive real fast I won't stop  
You wanna know why  'cuz I'm with my brother  

I get phone calls to my fam  
and always ask to speak with my brother  

I know I ain't coming home  
So I got to stay strong with my brother  

I write these songz  
My name is Chance and I'm always with my brother 

Ghazal Poem  by Cesar Y.

I went to the zoo to see the giraffes they  
looked kind of funny it made me laugh  

Although they were in Flagstaff I enjoyed  
the time we have because the giraffes made me laugh  

But behalf the gorillas made a bar graph  
It was quite interesting But it still made me laugh  

I looked at the monkeys and they were  
getting fed by the staff and they all had laughed 

Then I left and I was sad that I couldn't  
see the animals to make me laugh. 

My Poem is About My Superwoman by Dimonde B. 

Every time I see my mother I feel beloved, my Superwoman  
I love the feeling when I feel so above, my Superwoman  

You're the strongest woman I know in the whole world  
with your presence I always feel love, my Superwoman  

You always been supportive my best friend I pray  
You will forever feel God's love my Superwoman  

You never left my side through hard times  
I would never in a million years get rid of, my Superwoman  

Nothing would ever make me hate you that's true love  
You're always so confident and strong that's safe love, my Superwoman  

I always look at you and see myself in front of, my Superwoman  
I would do anything and die for you in terms of, my Superwoman 

Grandma and Her Skillet  by Tysiaus B. 

She was the Black Panther don't  
mess with her she has the skillet  
Write about love or something about  
love and loving someone so much  
that will you will die for them with  
relief. 

My grandma loves to cook. With  
her skillet she has a lot of things in  
her skillet and she uses oil for her  
skillet because she love all food  
from her skillet she is like a  
Black panther with her skillet when  
she uses her skillet. Because she  
just loves her skillet. 

With a helpful online rhyming dictionary at hand, I suggested they develop a list of words that they could put into the position of the rhyming qafiya. I also invited them to choose the radif or repetition word as the topic or theme of the poem.  Once they had these building blocks picked out, the composition process was just the next logical step of putting it all together.  To help them follow the structure even more, I projected an example poem (slide 19) I’d written on the screen throughout the writing time, complete with color coding to indicate the elements they were tasked to emulate.   

I noticed that using a form had made it possible for more of the students to compose a finished poem within the given hour we spent together.  While most students start writing a poem in our time together and many are undeniably influenced by the lesson ideas I bring, the formal approach gave all students something concrete and specific to aspire to, which helped them achieve a feeling of success.

The pantoums (separate slideshow) they wrote turned out just as well. This second form comes from Malaysia and involves a weaving structure of cascading repetitions of lines, with no requirements for rhyme.  

Essentially, the way I like to boil down the rules is, once you write the first four-line stanza, the next stanzas partly write themselves.  The repetition pattern involves the 2nd and 4th lines of the first stanza being repeated as the 1st and 3rd lines of the next stanza, with a new 2nd and 4th line being composed to fill in.  This pattern repeats, with the 2nd and 4th of the next stanza becoming the 1st and 3rd lines of the following stanza, and a new 2nd and 4th being written to fill in.  A pantoum can have as many stanzas as one likes, but the final stanza is predetermined: the penultimate stanza's 2nd and 4th lines become the final stanza's 1st and 3rd, but the final stanza's 2nd and 4th line are recycled back from the first stanza's 3rd line coming in as line 2 and the very first line of the poem repeating as the last in the 4th position.   

Of course, that sounds far more complicated than it looks; when you write the formula up on a screen or on a handout (slide 7 of the slideshow), it becomes almost a simple, plug and play, mathematical, rubix-cube like experiment.   

I added another experimental monkey wrench to the lesson by giving the writers a pile of "cut words" from various magazines, newspapers, and other literary sources.  They were encouraged to build their pantoum's lines using these fragments, making them into their own coherent sentences, and plugging them into the predictable, rhythmic pattern of the mesmerizing pantoum's structure.   

We also read several example pantoums to provide inspiration, included as part of my slideshow for the lesson.

Here's what they wrote: 

EZ Made Life by Elysiah C. 

Life and death it's part of a cycle but it's up to you how you live your life  
When it starts you're young and full of energy  
And then it starts to fade away  
Then before you know it you're old and thinking about them days when you were young  

When it starts you're young and full of energy  
Having fun not worrying about what could happen at the end  
Then before you know it you're old and thinking about them days when you were young  
Sitting there in your room peacefully waiting for your time to come  

Having fun not worrying about what could happen at the end  
Every day living it up to the fullest just knowing one day it might come to an end  
Sitting there in your room peacefully waiting for your time to come  
Carefree, regret free, fully embraced to the concept of death  

Everyday living it up to the fullest just knowing one day it might come to an end  
And then it starts to fade away  
Carefree, regret free, fully embraced to the concept of death 
Life and death it's part of a cycle but it's up to you how you live your life 

Black-Tailed by Jesus A. 

The whole of the earth  
At least I have the flowers of myself  
Hell must open like a red rose  
You would turn from your own fit paths 

At least I have the flowers of myself  
And my spirit with its loss  
You would turn from your own fit paths  
I who had lived unconscious  

And my spirit with its loss  
Such terror such coils and strands and pitfalls  
I who had lived unconscious  
Dead cinders upon moss ash  

Such terror such coils and strands and pitfalls  
Hell must open like a red rose 
Dead cinders upon moss ash 
The whole of the earth 

Heavens, Hell by Cesar Y. 

Lord, I was Alone, Alone, Alone, 
She Failed to see, into   
Heavens Atmosphere, 
I was Alone, Alone, Alone, 
That lay in between, into 
Heaven’s Atmosphere, it 
was not yet fledged, that 
Lay in Between. Who’s the 
Heartless Young man, it was 
Not yet fledged, dead people, 
Upon moss of ash. Who’s 
The heartless young man  
He failed to see, dead  
People upon moss of  
Ash, My only wish was 
to get the last laugh 
Lord, I was alone, Alone, Alone.  

My host teacher at CAPE even wrote his own poems alongside them, and said that he thought the lessons in forms went particularly well.  We both marvelled at how a little structure ended up offering a source of strength for their writing process, not an impediment as I had feared it would.   

Working with young men and the symmetries and possibilities of poetic forms this semester, I was reminded of the oft-referenced "rose through concrete" image created by Tupac Shakur.  For surely, I have learned from no one better than these young poets at CAPE what it means to become beautiful under limitations.  To bring forth the diamond from the coal, the lotus from the mud, I have witnessed the best of what cages can do: challenge roses to grow through their resistance. 

Artwork by Jesus A.