April is National Poetry Month. Celebrations for this art are taking place across the state of Illinois. An award-winning poet from Flint, Michigan spent time with students from an Illinois high school.
Jonah Mixon-Webster visited Illinois Valley Community College last week. He spoke to a group of teachers and high school students about some of the lows in his life. But he reminded everyone that life’s beauty is equally important.
Mixon-Webster said for every new form of pain we need to find a new form of beauty. Nature is one source of beauty for him. Another source of beauty is when he focuses on the joy in his childhood. He said this helps him retrieve parts of his soul.
“Trying to take it back to like, what made me laugh when I was a child?" he asked. "What made me happy when I was a child? What, you know, before anything painful happened to me before I knew the horrors of this world. What brought me joy?”
During the lecture Mixon-Webster read poetry from his award winning book Stereo(TYPE). This work won the PEN America/Joyce Osterweil Award. Mixon-Webster didn’t shy away from sharing the painful moments in his life. He was molested as a child. He wrapped his words into verses as he recollected this dark moment. (insert poem)
He also shared how he felt when he was ostracized for being gay at 9 years old and the water crisis in Flint.
Mike Phillips is a geology teacher at the college. He is also an environmental geologist. He said Mixon-Webster’s poetry about the water crisis in Flint was extremely useful to him. He said sharing the numbers is abstract and it doesn’t show the human side of things. But he now has something he can take back to his students.
“And so, to have that expression,” Phillips explained, “where he talks about how it smells, how it looks, what it does to his skin -- that's the kind of thing that makes it more tangible, more real to a lot of folks.”
Ellen Herrmann is an English teacher at Hall high school in Spring Valley, Illinois. She chaperoned a group of students to the event.
“And we thought that this would be the perfect opportunity,” she said, “to hear an example of that. To listen to someone who has something so passionate that he cares about, use his voice and his words to get a message across.”
After the talk, students ran up to greet and take pictures with Mixon-Webster. He said the event was pivotal because this was his first time speaking in front of a group of high school students.
“It made it worthwhile to be honest and be real, because I feel like that's really what teenagers needed at that point in time,” he said. “Right, you know that we have to be sheltered by so much, or people try to shelter us from so much at that age.”
Mixon-Webster said people should work on making life beautiful. And as long as they continue to look for splendor, they will find it.
- Yvonne Boose is a current corps member for Report for America, an initiative of the GroundTruth Project. It's a national service program that places talented journalists in local newsrooms like WNIJ. You can learn more about Report for America at wnij.org.
