This article was originally published in the Spring 2024 issue of the GFS Bulletin.

 

"Love it, happy, really happy!"

This is a common refrain from Sam Sullivan to the students in his "Poetry Workshop" class, as, one by one, they share their original work at the beginning of each class. The 32-year old English teacher has even been known to bark like a dog when he's really fired up about his students' writing.

"Hands are a great place to explore displaced anxiety," he says about the imagery in one junior's poem.

"I've been waiting for this internet poem!" he quips in response to a senior whose latest verse was inspired by Amish teens' TikToks.

Since incorporating the "Poetry Workshop" elective into the English curriculum in the 2019-2020 school year, Sullivan's class has become a fan favorite among humanities enthusiasts, studio artists, social scientists, and STEM self-identifiers alike. Open to students in grades 10-12, the yearlong workshop has multiple sections and you can sign up for it more than once.

The repetitive yet satisfying format—students submit new poems before each class, which they read aloud and then mull over as a group, followed by the reading and discussion of published poems (contemporary, ancient, post-modern, whatever he feels will inspire the kids based on their recent work)—is designed for repeat attendees. Many admit to feeling shy or hesitant as sophomores, but evolve into confident and courageous poets by the time they're on the brink of graduation.

"I remember [my first year], the seniors being really good, really talented writers, and so starting at a baseline and coming in with not much knowledge of how to write poetry, it was a little intimidating," recalls Sasha Fishilevich '24 who took the workshop as a sophomore and then again this year, as a senior. "But everyone in the class made it a lot more welcoming."   

What Fishilevich is hinting at is the safe, inclusive, nurturing environment Sullivan has cultivated for his students. When they read their poems aloud, they're not allowed to make any disclaimers (no "I was really tired when I wrote this" or "This is different from what I usually write" allowed). Once everyone has shared their poem, Sullivan leads a discussion about each, but students can only give positive feedback—nothing critical, constructive or otherwise. Sullivan makes poetry fun. The stakes are low and the payoff is hugely rewarding.

"I notice this every year when I see new people joining the class like it's hard for them to share their poetry," says Mark Doraszelski '24, who is taking the workshop for the third time. "It's something that's creative, and then it's personal, right? But I think Sam makes this a really welcoming environment. People are always eager to share. And then in turn, when people are willing to share, they're like, 'Oh, this is cool. What you're doing is cool.' It sort of creates [a space] where people want to be productive and want to be literary, and I think Sam is really good at [facilitating] that."

Watching how Sullivan easily interacts with his students—the mutual respect and camaraderie, the passion and positivity, the goofy, kinetic gesticulating when he gets excited—it's no wonder that his workshop has helped propel a genre commonly associated with sonnets and dead white men to the epitome of cool. In only five years, Sullivan's "Poetry Workshop" has achieved something akin to cult status, spawning offshoots like an Upper School Poetry Club and overnight readings of verse poems ("The Odyssey" and "The Iliad") in the Friends Free Library, and elevating interest in the study of poetry across the curriculum at GFS.

Poetry Pilot

Although the "Poetry Workshop" officially launched as an English elective in the fall of 2019, the concept was piloted first in J-Term two years earlier. Then co-taught by Sullivan and English Department Head Alex Levin '93, the catalog copy described the course as an opportunity to "develop our voices as poets" and promised, "We are not going to critique writing in a negative way, but will instead focus on what works, what resonates, and what sounds beautiful." 

"Whenever I taught poetry in class, a lot of students would say, 'Oh, I've never written a poem before, I've never had the chance to try this out,'" says Levin, who has been an English teacher and department head at GFS for nine years.

"Maybe they had done a sonnet study in Middle School. But when I think about poetry writing, I think about it as a regular practice, you know, weekly, daily, whatever. Because when you write one poem, it makes the next poem, and sets it up to be written. So in other words, I just felt like it had to be happening all the time. And I knew that there were students who would be drawn to that because it's such a powerful mode of writing. I wanted to find a way to bring that forward, and to show how poetry can be so powerful within the context of a community, and how the role of poets in the community can be a powerful one."  

Levin knew that Sullivan—who joined the GFS English Department in 2016 after two years of teaching at the Wheeler School in Rhode Island and earned his bachelor's degree in English with a concentration in creative writing at Yale University—was the perfect fit to lead the workshop, citing his extensive knowledge of poetry and the pedagogy surrounding it. But what can't be underestimated is the undeniable connection Sullivan has formed with his students. His classroom is a place of deep learning, but also of fun and whimsy, of casual banter and witticisms. He has reenergized poetry for GFS students, and breathed new life into a genre that many used to write off as musty and stodgy.  

"What he has done here is changed [students'] lives, and it's profound and beautiful," says Robin Friedman, who has taught English in GFS' Upper School for the past nine years. "It has deeply changed the school and the culture of the school ... and it's just amazing. Of course, it's not just him, but it's like he seeded it ... [Sam] is a person that kids look up to—girls, boys, all genders are races; there's like this identification."

Friedman's son, Lucas Friedman-Spring '23, took Sullivan's workshop for three years. Now a freshman at Grinnell College, he's on track to be an English major, and says he was deeply influenced by Sullivan as a teacher, and by his quest to make poetry accessible and attainable. 

"[Sam] makes students want to be engaged," says Friedman-Spring. "He really makes them see the value in what they're doing, to want to participate and be invested in their own work, and in the work of others, and in the concept of poetry itself."

When Sullivan speaks about his love of teaching poetry, it's clear why, as an educator, he has resonated so profoundly with his students. His extreme literariness and fierce intelligence, the way he bounces between topics with ease and expertise, creates a gravitational pull like moths to a flame. Although his own tastes lean toward poets of the 20th century—Langston Hughes, Carlos Bulosan, Claude McKay— and "young peoples' work," and he is "not obsessed with the form," he is passionate about putting language into a rigorously intellectual context that's "not academic per se." 

"People see English and writing as a purely utilitarian exercise instead of language as something that is a volatile medium," says Sullivan. "I think that the 'Poetry Workshop' allows people to put pressure on language and see it as something that's a bit chaotic and capable of bringing them fear and pleasure and things like that. We don't really have access to that landscape necessarily in a regular English classroom ... But I think that creating a space for students that's intellectual without being academic is a fun place to be pedagogically."   

Beyond the Workshop

Even beyond Sullivan's popular workshop, poetry is alive and well at Germantown Friends School. English teachers have moved away from the idea of poetry "units" in class, a few weeks dedicated to the study of Whitman or Dickinson, Frost or Blake; now, it's integrated into the year-long curriculum, poems are read in connection with novels and composed alongside literary criticism.

"It's in the air" is how English teacher Alex Guevarez, who worked as an assistant editor to principal editor Mary Jo Salter on the Sixth Edition of the "Norton Anthology of Poetry," describes it.    

"[Poetry] doesn't just live in a book," Guevarez says. "It lives very often, for me at least, in conversation in the hallways, out on the street, when [English teacher] Adam [Hotek] quotes something that just came to him, or Alex [Levin] sends me an email about so-and-so poet in The Paris Review. It's very casual. It sort of lives in our bloodstream and it's in the air, rather than a stodgy sort of pierogi on the plate."

This is a noticeable shift from just a decade ago. When Friedman arrived on campus in 2015, she felt that poetry seemed like something from the past, "something kind of cryptic" that "needed to be decoded." Students were not as engaged as they could be.     

"Now, no one blinks an eye if you ask them to write a poem," she says. "I'm always asking kids to write poems—use this line as a starter, share your poem, share the first line of your poem ... We're all going to share and it's just completely the culture of the place. Nobody says, 'I'm bad at poetry, I can't do this.' Across the board, I feel like there's a big shift."

That shift—in students' understanding of, appreciation for, and comfort with reading and writing poetry—can, in large part, be attributed to the evolution of Sullivan's "Poetry Workshop." Allyson Katz '22, a sophomore at Barnard College who took the workshop for three straight years at GFS, credits poetry as a crucial element in helping her understand literature and language in general. 

"Poetry informs how I came to look at language and the way that language works," she says. "The idea of ambiguity that poetry fosters, I think that's something that became very important in my understanding of literature, and that ambiguity can, when employed correctly, be something that can make meaning ... [Poetry] definitely helped me when it came to texts, or poems, that were more challenging, knowing that, OK, I don't have to feel like I understand everything. I can just go in there, go with my gut, and that will be OK. Basically, [poetry] gave me a lot more confidence when I was approaching complicated things."

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"When you read a lot and consume a lot of poetry, it's all about wanting to understand somebody else's story, someone else's perspective," adds Katz, who was awarded the Dorothy Sugarman Poetry Prize as a first-year at Cornell University last spring (she transferred to Barnard in fall 2023), and is currently enrolled in a writing workshop with poet Alex Dimitrov at Columbia University. "I think cultivating a place where people want to do that is then also cultivating people who want to hear other people's stories."  

A Kind of Salvation

Bill Yang '23, a freshman at Harvard University who is currently taking a poetry class with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham, will go as far as to say that Sam Sullivan and his "Poetry Workshop" changed his life. An international student at GFS who arrived in ninth grade and had some initial challenges acclimating, the workshop gave him a sense of community, a feeling of belonging. 

"[Sam] was a role model for me ... I was in this weird foreign country and I was a guy and I was into poetry, and I didn't find a lot of people who were like me ... and he taught me how to deal with my passion and my love for the humanities and my internationality, because it's hard to carry that around in high school."

Perhaps Sullivan knows something that we're all just beginning to figure out: that in a fast-moving world dominated by technology and artificial intelligence, perhaps the simplicity of a poem, the process of playing with language and stringing words together to create meaning and emotion—connection—is a kind of salvation.

"I think young people can sense a kind of crisis in the arts," he says. "They see that despite all of the frothy spew of technological advancement, 'I can still feel absorbed by a very small poem. I can still feel like that's a complete artifice, like a beautiful artwork, that involves me totally.' You know what I mean? So I think that part of what's going on is that they're figuring out what the forms of the future are going to be. And they see that poetry is implicated in figuring that out."

-Meg Cohen Ragas '85