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Thursday, May 3, 2007

With Verse - He Helps - Kids - To Read

By Lee Ross
Mountain View Telegraph
    One East Mountains resident wants to promote literacy in children through poetry.
    "I'm afraid that we're losing our language ... I want to see the kids hang on to (language and) preserve it for themselves... . In our book (poetry) is the most powerful expressive art in the world," said Zachary Kluckman, who co-founded New Mexico Poetry Tangents with Jessica Lopez.
    NMPT is an organization that promotes both literacy and poetry.
    On Friday the organization will hold a book release and celebration for its first publication, "Earthships: a New Mecca Poetry Collection," starting at 7 p.m. at the Manzano Mesa Multi-Generational Center at 501 Elizabeth SE in Albuquerque.
    The book includes work by authors ranging in age from about 60 to Kluckman's 8-year-old son, Calvin, the youngest contributor.
    "It was not nepotism, I swear," Kluckman said.
    Calvin's poem is called "My Shadow."
    "It's this child speaking about reacting to his shadow in a dialogue ... the metaphor was tremendous," Kluckman said.
    He said Calvin has also read poetry in front of an audience at a competition and had "nerves of steel."
    Kluckman and his son live near Cedar Crest, and Kluckman also volunteers as a slam poetry coach at McKinley Middle School.
    Slam poetry is performed and scored at a competition. Kluckman's team performed at New Mexico's second annual middle school poetry slam on Saturday at the National Hispanic Cultural Center.
    The McKinley team placed third out of 24 teams from Albuquerque, Santa Fe and elsewhere in New Mexico.
    "... there were a couple of times while those kids were performing that I thought my heart was going to break," Kluckman said.
    He volunteered to coach the team because he is passionate about helping children express themselves, he said, and for one of the same reasons he and "Earthships" co-editor Lopez put the book together: to promote literacy throughout New Mexico.
    Kluckman and Lopez received more than 1,500 poems from all over New Mexico, including a few entries with return addresses in ghost towns, Kluckman said.
    Along with relatively unknown poets, the book includes work by Jimmy Santiago Baca, Sandra Cisneros and Ana Castillo. Even Deanna Sauceda from KRQE-TV News contributed to the book, which includes 81 poems and five flash fiction pieces.
    Flash fiction is short works, generally around 500 words as opposed to traditional short fiction, which can be 10,000 words or longer.
    An exceptionally short example of flash fiction is Ernest Hemingway's six-word story, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
    Sauceda contributed a piece called "Love Hurts," her first published fiction, about a man who cut off his finger for love.
    Like much of her creative work, the piece was inspired by someone she'd met, Sauceda said.
    "As a journalist, I'm very observant ... I have a twisted view, but it's a fun twisted view. It is very human," Sauceda said.
    "Earthships" was published in April through Horse and Tiger Press and costs $15.50. It is available through the NMPT Web site— http://nmpoetrytangents.com— as well as most major local booksellers in Albuquerque.
    Kluckman said he hopes to extend the activities of NMPT to the East Mountains. He also hopes to coach a slam team closer to home, possibly from Roosevelt Middle School, and would like to see more poetry-based events in the East Mountains, an area for which he said he has a special fondness.
    "I'm very much a mountain man," Kluckman said.