For nearly 20 years, Sherry Robbins has been helping seniors at Avon High School take stock of their time as students, reflect on some of their most impactful memories and capture those memories in the form of a poem.
Robbins, a poet, teacher and longtime participant in Genesee Valley BOCES’s Writers in Residence program, continued her nearly two-decade streak in Avon with a week-long residency in May.
“We start with an old MySpace game, 25 random thoughts, except it’s 25 random memories just to get students talking with each other and thinking,” explained Robbins of the poetry-writing process she engages students in. “They can go back to kindergarten, I heard a lot about Catholic school, throwing up on their shoes, things that happened a long time ago, right on through to heartbreaking losses in the sports arena, so all kinds of things.”
Then, Robbins has students choose a memory from the list they feel best lends itself to a poem and encourages them to submerge themselves in the memory so they can better recall what they were seeing, smelling, feeling, tasting and hearing at the time.
If students get hung up, Library Media Specialist Suzanne Freeman has a sizable archive of poetry collections authored by Avon alumni that students can turn to for inspiration.
“We usually do read a couple of student poems from the archive to get ‘em going,” said Robbins. “So they can look up their older siblings or cousins or neighbors and see what they wrote and that usually breaks the ice too and then they sort of get into it.”
The final step is for students to create a bit of artwork to accompany their finished poems before Freeman compiles them into a collection, that’s then shared with them and Avon teachers and staff.
For his poem, Avon senior Dylan A. drew on memories of making s’mores around a campfire beneath the Northern Lights with his family.
Dylan chose to layer the words of his poem, titled “Smores and Lights,” on top of an arctic landscape illuminated by green strands of the Northern Lights in the sky.
“The thing I took away from working with Sherry this week is that poems can be about anything,” said Dylan. “Poetry allows you to revisit those fun and exciting experiences from the past and write about them in such a way that allows you to share them with other people.”
Freeman, who’s been partnering with Robbins on the project since 2013, said Robbins’ poetry residency serves an opportunity for seniors to reflect on what role the Avon community played in the young adults they’ve become.
“They remember with each other, dig deep and often find it’s the little things and the people that mean the most,” said Freeman.
Robbins was of a like mind.
“It’s a borderline time, they're going off into the unknown most of them, it’s a little scary so it’s a chance to be nostalgic about their time here or sometimes you get those ‘I can’t wait to get out of there’ type of poems,” she said. “Whatever it is they have to say, I think it’s important for them to get it down, say it, and reflect a bit on their time here.”
Avon seniors are pictured during a poetry workshop with Sherry Robbins last week.