Poetry, Youth, and Accomplishment: Poetic Youth and Poetry International Event of Poetry for Youths

Poetic Youth and SDSU’s Poetry International is hosting a free poetry reading tomorrow Friday, December 5, 2014 at 6pm.

Poetic Youth is a recently unleashed program affiliated with SDSU that aims is to offer free poetry workshops to under-served communities in San Diego. The program is led by SDSU graduate and undergraduate students, and held in collaboration with Dr. Ilya Kaminsky and Jenny Minniti-Shippey, Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor for PoetryInternational.

This is not just any poetry event; this one involves students and youth from Hoover High School, San Diego Global Vision Academy, Monarch School, Sudanese American Youth Center and the Ubuntu Poetry Project reading poetry and demonstrating the positive effects of poetry in youth of under-served or under-represented communities. It’s also a great way to show support to those leading the program, for all their hard work and bringing artistic forms such as poetry to young people who may never have been exposed to it otherwise.

This event is open to the public and complimentary refreshments will be served. 

Chapbooks of students’ work will also be available for purchase.

Please join Poetic Youth and Poetry International on Friday, December 5, 2014 in TemploMayor Room 231 in the new Student Union Center at SDSU.

For any question please email poeticyouthprogram@gmail.com

Living Writers Series with YA Author: Matt de la Peña

The Creative Writing Department at San Diego State University will be hosting a Hugh C. Hyde  Living Writers series tomorrow, October 22, 2014, in the Malcolm A. Love Library featuring acclaimed YA author Matt de la Peña. de la Peña will be reading from his latest YA novel The Living which was released last November.

Matt de la Peña is a SDSU alumnus who received his MFA in creative writing and currently teaches creative writing in Brookyln, NY where he resides. de la Peña is also author to five critically acclaimed young adult novels: Ball Don’t Lie, Mexican WhiteBoy, We Were Here, I Will Save You and The Living and author to an award winning picture book, A Nation’s Hope: The Story of Boxing Legend Joe Louis.  

Ball Don’t Lie was de la Peña’s first novel, published in 2005, and made into a major motion picture released in 2008.  The author also worked alongside award winning Brin Hill in developing the screenplay for this film. This movie included actors such as Rosanna Arquette, Nick Cannon, Ludacris, and Nick Chinlund. Needless to say the book inspired a great movie and both movie and book tell a genuine high school basketball story.

In 2002, The New York Times covered a story regarding de la Peña’s Mexican Whiteboy banning in Tuscan classrooms. The issue was political and Mexican-American studies became a controversial topic during this time. Regardless, de la Peña went to speak to the students of Tucson High not about the politics of race but about his story and what it took to get him to where he is today.

If you are interested in this event or would like more information on this author please check out the links below.

This event is free and open to the public! Matt de la Peña will be reading on: Wednesday, October 22nd at 7 p.m. at the SDSU’s Love Library in Room 430.

Notes:

• SDSU’s Living Writer’s Series: http://mfa.sdsu.edu/events.htm
• More About Matt de la Peña: http://mattdelapena.com
• Ball Don’t Lie Motion Picture Information: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0906727/?ref_=nv_sr_1
• The New York Times article “Racial Lens Used to Cull Curriculum in Arizona”: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/education/racial-lens-used-to-cull-curriculum-in-arizona.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2&

The Prolonged Youth of "Once Upon A Time"

The theme of PAMLA this year was “Stages of Life: Age, Identity, and Culture," which, as you can imagine, brought out a wealth of discussion on the many variations, formations, and instances of children, childhood and youth in literature as a whole (children's or otherwise). One of the ideas that I saw emerge throughout the conference is the idea of rebirth -- a rediscovery of childhood, of innocence, of youth. Admittedly this popped up in my own paper, but the notion that childness manifests itself in a myriad of ways that can be seen across all stages of life bubbled forth from numerous panels. And directly from that idea came the image of the prolonged or eternal youth.

I caught myself thinking about this in particular when I listened to a panelist discuss the nature of kids stepping out of their structured lives into an adventure. This specific topic discussed the hobo culture for children, and brought up an interesting commentary from the 1930's that concluded that children -- boys and girls alike -- ought to go out for an adventure, to escape and live "like hobos" but only for a few months (six at most) otherwise they will become "spoiled." The child may go "rotten" by experiencing too much of the so-called real world. He or she needs to retain some amount of innocence and unworldliness it seems.

How about flipping that idea, inverting it to think about a person who remains in youth, who tries to prolong his childishness, youth or appearance of youth. Elements of cultures are built around this concept (the image of eternal youth that defines Hollywood, for example), and it plays at the forefront of many YA novels now. The idea of the immortalized teenager, whether by vampire's bite or dystopian technology, suddenly presents these issues in a new light. Prolonged youth eventually leads to a rotten soul, perhaps?

Or if we allow ourselves to go further -- does it turn them downright evil?

Is that the belief spurring what's been done to Peter Pan, particularly in the reenvisioning on the current television series "Once Upon a Time"? The show represents the movement to reclaim fairy tales for adults, evidently by pitting the heroic adults against someone more devious, dangerous, and cunning than the dark Rumpelstiltskin, that someone being the eternal child Peter Pan. Depicting him as a threat to adults and children alike also troubles the usual adult/child binary that his story usually enlists. But in its place, do we now have the opportunity to critique Pan through the deleterious effects of eternal youth? Just something to think about.