Jesse Miller creates website ‘Poems for Boston,' featuring creative writing students’ poetry
Students in the spring 2013 creative writing course taught by adjunct faculty member Jesse Miller, M.F.A., took part in a student poetry project that has resulted in a website titled “Poems for Boston.” Poems by the freshmen students Emily Corey, Krista Burr, Jordan Desousa and Britney Broderick are featured on the site.
Days after the Boston Marathon bombings of April 15th, Miller introduced his students to the poetic form of the pantoum, a poem that follows a strict pattern in which the second and fourth lines of each quatrain are repeated as the first and third of the next.
Miller felt that the emotions stirred by the recent tragedy lent themselves well to expression in the pantoumic form. He explained: “the pantoum is an exquisite form to coax out and formally articulate on the page deep psychic concerns, as well as hard-won emotional keepsakes. In the pantoum, the tingling, ineffable work of the mind turning over thought after thought, trying to arrive at something, some kind of meaning, can be voiced.”
Burr agrees that the poetic form worked well for the subject matter. “When people experience a traumatic event, such as the Boston bombings,” she said, “they tend to play it over and over in their heads, and after a while, the event may be seen in a new light, just as a pantoum repeats back, often with a different message that brings hope to a seemingly horrific situation.”
Miller’s incorporation of discussion on the Boston Marathon bombings into his class was much more than a convenient teaming up of a current event with a lesson in a particular poetic form, however. According to Miller, the emotional impact of the bombing on him was profound, and he felt a genuine need to process the feelings of loss alongside his students and “to do something productive with these feelings.” He explained: “I set out to talk with my students about what had happened. Even though I wasn’t sure at the time what would come out of this class session, I wanted us to do something. More than anything, I wanted to give my students a chance to make some meaning out of this event, even if it was just articulating a small idea, or putting together a little poem, there might be something created out of the chaos and sadness.”
Michael Cripps, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of English, suggested to Miller that he create an online gallery of poems, an idea that Miller’s students strongly supported. “I think what Jesse did was amazing,” said Desousa, “because with one simple assignment, he brought the entire class closer together and shared our hard work with the community.”
For Miller, the creation of the “Poems for Boston” has influenced him as a teacher. “I intend to continue something like this next term as a way for my students to have more opportunities to have their work seen by people in and around the 51Ʒcommunity and beyond. For me, knowing how this project started adds a more potent germ to any future project of this nature.”
The “” website features five poems, some of which are not pantoums but were inspired by Miller’s class discussion and exercise in pantoum-writing.