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Mary Ellen Ciganovich, of Ooltewah, talks about her poetry Thursday before a reading to students at the Chattanooga School for the Liberal Arts.Photo by Tim Barber.
After writing poems for a school project, 40 eighth-grade students at Chattanooga School for the Liberal Arts listened to local poet Mary Ellen Ciganovich talk about her life and poetry.
Reading from her book "Healing Words: Life Lessons to Inspire," Ciganovich told the group Thursday how she spent one weekend trip to Atlanta writing poem after poem to clear her mind and understand her life.
She wrote her first poem, "Anger," while in the car with her husband.
"I am angry / with you. / No, with myself. / I am projecting it at you / to save myself."
She said the writing helped her understand that the real reason she had problems with others was because she had problems with herself.
All of CSLA's eighth-graders spent the fall writing 10 poems based on a theme.
Grace Vander Werf wrote her poems on love and happiness, but her poems weren't like Ciganovich's. While Ciganovich's didn't rhyme or follow a specific meter, the students had to try a number of different poetry styles, writing haikus, limericks and rhyming poems.
"She was inspiring," Vander Werf said about Ciganovich. "[Her poems] were different. They were shorter."
Ciganovich was invited to speak to the students by her friend and neighbor Nancy Huston, a French and Spanish teacher at the school.
Andrew Pantazi is an intern at the Chattanooga Times Free Press who says that when he was 7 he knew what he wanted to do for the rest of his life: play hockey for the Colorado Avalanche. Unfortunately, he says he wasn't any good at hockey, so he became a journalist instead. He writes about the lives we hide, like the man who suffered a stroke but smiled, or the football walk-on who endured 5 ...
There once was a poet from Tennessee Who wasn't so burdened as you and me The lesson this chick should really be giving Is "learn to do something where you'll make a living."
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