THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, August 6, 1996 TAG: 9608060034
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ALETA PAYNE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 107 lines
JENNIFER Dominesey Saunders works full-time and takes a full load of classes at Virginia Wesleyan College.
That doesn't leave her much time for iambic pentameter, haiku or even the occasional free verse.
Still, Saunders recently became a published poet, as did 45 other current and former Virginia Beach public school students. Their works appear in a slim, brightly covered volume of poems called ``Ten-Second Rainshowers'' (Simon & Schuster), collected by Sandford Lyne, a visiting poet-in-the-schools for years in Virginia Beach and other cities.
Poems by students at Francis Asbury Elementary School in Hampton, along with others from around the state; the Washington, D.C., area; and even a couple from Idaho are also included. The book is an amazing collection of innocent observation, unexpected humor and candid emotion.
Saunders, now 23 and married, not only remembers writing ``No Secrets in the School Yard'' as a ninth-grader at what was then Independence Junior High School but she also remembers the name of the adolescent crush mentioned in the poem.
``And I'm not going to say who it was,'' she said with a laugh. ``It sounds like typical goo-goo-eye stuff. It's not too bad, though. It's not too cheesy.''
Lyne, 51 and a resident of Bethesda, Md., didn't see ``goo-goo'' when he looked at the poems being produced by his young charges. He saw a freshness and candor often missing in work by older poets.
That discovery almost didn't happen, however.
Lyne was used to teaching big kids at the University of Virginia when the possibility of working at the elementary and secondary levels opened up to him through a friend who was already a poet working in Beach classrooms. Initially, Lyne recalled, he was reluctant because he wasn't convinced he could teach younger students.
``The first schools I went into were in Virginia Beach,'' Lyne said. ``Virginia Beach opened the door for me.''
Lyne began working with Beach students in 1983 as part of the now defunct poet-in-the-schools program, which brought visiting poets in to work with students. He would go on to extend his efforts into other classrooms and other divisions, but he continued to spend two to three months a year in the Beach program until it was eliminated in 1992 for budgetary reasons.
``(Younger students) quickly became my favorite writers. They had a freshness that was very appealing,'' he said. ``They don't have what I call the thought pollution adults have. There's less junk in there.''
Helen Waid, a former secondary school English instructional specialist now retired from the division, first brought Lyne into the Beach schools.
``The people loved him so much. We just had to bring him back year after year after year,'' she said.
Lyne persuaded students to write about real life experiences, Waid recalled, but she also believes that part of his success lay in his approach to students.
``He talked to them as if they were equals,'' she said. ``I loved the way he was with the kids. He was so gentle and caring, and he treated them with such respect.''
Many of the poems included in the book were written years ago by students who have graduated, married or otherwise gone on with their lives.
Georgina Bruer, a graduate of First Colonial High School who attends Mary Washington College, wrote her poem while a third-grader at Shelton Park Elementary School. The motivation for her pithy, untitled opus was that time was running out on the assignment and all her friends were done.
``I spilled something out really quickly,'' she recalled recently. ``Just whatever came to mind.''
Now a political science major, she said poetry has not been her calling.
``My sister was always more creative than I was,'' she added. ``I could sit down and write a thesis, but creative stuff, no way.''
Lyne's experiences in the Beach schools changed his life. Before his first stint in the area, he had plans to leave creative writing and even had a job lined up in advertising. Instead, he's made teaching younger students and teaching their teachers his life's work since 1983.
He conducts workshops for teachers through the Kennedy Center in Washington and spends nine months of the year in classrooms, mainly in Virginia and Maryland.
The idea of a book occurred to him early in his school experience. ``I could see the richness of the work,'' Lyne said.
Years after he and the students started, the collection is complete, but Lyne's work in other cities' classrooms continues.
``I keep wondering if there's a burnout point, but I don't think I'm even close to it,'' he said. ``The poetry writing is always new to them. The fact that it's new to them keeps it new to me also.''
For Saunders, an English major who is working on her credentials for teaching kindergarten through fifth grade, the idea of being a published poet is humorous. But then the teaching instinct kicked in and she saw an opportunity.
``I thought, `Oh my God, this is an excellent resource for my kids!' '' she said. ILLUSTRATION: Photo of book cover
No Secrets in the School Yard
As the wind blows
The clouds drift overhead.
I put the collar of my heavy coat
on my neck up higher.
I can faintly hear calling birds,
and laughter fills my ears
from all directions.
A gruesome boy is teasing me,
playing with my emotions
about a certain someone.
Jennifer Dominesey
Grade 9
Poems by Virginia Beach Students Included in "Ten-Second
Rainshowers" by CNB