Outreach

Tecumseh Elementary School Project: Launch of Collaborative Poetry Video

Fiona Tinwei Lam

This morning, I attended the wonderful year-end assembly for Tecumseh Elementary School students and staff. The community spirit in the gymnasium was palpable. Earlier this year, staff and students were displaced and had to relocate temporarily to the South Hill Eduation Centre when their school building flooded over the winter break. Parents and staff rallied valiantly to ensure the students had supplies and support.

This assembly was also the official debut of the poetry video based on a special collaborative poem, “Ode to Vivian Jung,” made of lines that I assembled from poems written by Tom Larson’s grade 5/6 class. (I had been invited by teacher Tom Larson to facilitate a poetry workshop with his students last November to write poems about Vivian Jung.) Videographer Analee Weinberger volunteered her time to help create the beautiful video. Linnea Ritland-Tam did additional editing and post-production work. The poem and video depict how Vivian Jung broke the segregationist colour ban at a local public pool and became the first Chinese Canadian teacher hired by the Vancouver School Board. A beloved teacher and award-winning coach, she worked at Tecumseh for 35 years. The first annual Vivian Jung Award was given out by her daughter, Cynthia Kent, to a deserving student.

The poetry video incorporates artwork by students from Divisions 3 and 5 under the tutelage of AIRS artist-in-residence Julia McIntyre. Archival newspaper headlines and materials appear in the poetry video, alongside wonderful photos provided by Vivian Jung’s daughter, Cynthia Kent, with additional school photos discovered by Division 6 Teacher Thomas Aaron Larson, who also recorded his class reading the poem. I love the exuberant finale where the whole class chimes in!

You can find the text of the collaborative poem in a booklet of student poems and artwork published by the school to raise funds for a school mural that will be produced next year with local artists, Janet Wang and Stella Zheng. Find out more about how to purchase the booklet here. A sample of three of the student poems can also be found in Ricepaper Magazine. There are also audio-recordings of some of the individual poems written and read by these four students:

“It all starts small” by Kaiden Campos

“Standing Up” by Shikira Wu

“Standing Tall” by Tyler Higuchi

“What makes a good teacher” by Hans Go

Host Margaret Gallagher of the CBC Radio program, North by Northwest recently interviewed teachers Tilia Prior and Marion Elizabeth Collins who are on the anti-racism committee that is spearheading the Vivian Jung Mural Project at Tecumseh Elementary School, as well as myself.

If you’re curious to know more about the context and history, I wrote an article for The Tyee about Vivian Jung’s background, based on interviews and newspaper articles and other researched material. (Thanks for advice, tips and assistance from researchers Shona Lam, Olenna Hardie and city historian John Atkin!)

The 1945 incident (where the coach and fellow classmates of student teacher Vivian Jung challenged the segregation rule) could have happened at either Crystal Pool in Vancouver or Crystal Garden Pool in Victoria, according to an interview with Vivian Jung in the documentary, Operation Oblivion. There were subsequent student protests that followed in 1945 that ultimately led to the repeal of the bans in both Vancouver and Victoria. Although it’s unclear whether those actions, letters and protests were directly informed by Vivian Jung’s incident, it would appear that the seeds of social justice and equality had finally taken root in the wider community to render segregation less acceptable and to provoke a sufficient public outcry. My article also mentions Vivian Jung’s husband, Arthur Jung, and her brothers-in-law who fought in World War II for Canada and helped paved the way to Chinese Canadians finally obtaining the right to vote.

For those interested in writing and teaching, I discuss the process of writing and revising the students’ poems about segregation and social justice in the Tyee article.

Putting together the cento (which is the basis for the poetry video) took me several hours over two days. I cut out specific lines from a print-out of each of the students’ poems, then tried to find a way to make them flow together in terms of images, rhythm and narrative.

I made slight adjustments to ensure a consistent point of view and verb tense, and added a bit of poetic mortar here and there, including the last line. And voila!

Then, of course, it just made sense to produce a poetry video! Videographer Analee Weinberger is my long-time friend from Eric Hamber Secondary who volunteered her time and expertise.

Want to see more City Poems poetry videos about local historical, cultural and ecological sites? My previous blog has a resource list for teachers with a selection of site-based poetry videos from the City Poems Project that relate to Musqueam history, Japanese Canadian internment, the Komagata Maru incident, a historic Black neighbourhood of Vancouver, the gentrification of Chinatown, unnamed Chinese workers buried in Mountain View Cemetery, Vancouver’s lost streams and St. George Greenway, and the infamous collapse of the Ironworkers/Second Narrows Bridge in 1958.

Poetry at Tecumseh

Fiona Tinwei Lam

I had a lot of fun visiting Amanda Low’s split grade 3-4 class and Marion Elizabeth Collins’ grade 6 class at Tecumseh Elementary School in East Vancouver on January 31! The visit was sponsored by the national Poet in School program run by the acclaimed non-profit organization, Poetry in Voice.

I was so impressed by the openness and enthusiasm of the teachers and students! This was my second time visiting Tecumseh. Last June, I gave a certificate of recognition to teacher Tilia Prior and her grade 7 class to thank them for all the poems that the students had submitted about Hogan’s Alley in Vancouver’s historic Black Strathcona to the City Poems Contest. Grade 7 student Sharon Pan won third place with her poem about Vie’s Chicken & Steak House.

(Note: The Vancouver School Board’s first Chinese Canadian teacher, Vivian Jung, was hired by Tecumseh in the 1940s. (Over half a century of racial segregation had prevented Asian Canadians, Blacks, and other visible minorities from various professions including teaching.) A lane is named after Jung in Vancouver’s West End, near the former “public” Crystal Pool (long gone) at Sunset Beach where she was famously barred from entry during a time of informal segregation in the city, prior to Asian Canadians finally getting vote in 1947 and 1949.)

For both classes, I read my poem “Z” (that was selected for TransLink’s Poetry in Transit program a few years ago), and handed out bookmarks based on the bus poster. It’s a light-hearted, accessible poem that employs metaphor, personification, alliteration, assonance, rhyme and half rhyme, and is meant to encourage and empower readers and writers of all ages to have fun with words.

With the split grade 3-4 class, we focused on concrete, visual or shaped poetry. I showed some of my plastic-themed poems shaped like a cup, bottle, and artificial/cut-out Christmas tree, as well as the short animated poetry video, “Plasticnic” (a wry commentary on the plastic used at picnics) that I made with talented ECUAD graduate, Tisha Deb Pillai. We looked at a few concrete poems by other poets, including ones shaped like a spider and a flowerpot too.

Fun with Concrete Poetry (Grade 3-4)

Next, I asked the students to think about a favourite thing—e.g. a creature, game, food, activity—and then try to create a picture using phrases or words associated with that thing. There was a fabulous array of word-pictures created related to a variety of topics: bunnies, cats, birthday cake, cherry blossoms, basketball, video games, TV, sleep, bubble gum, the city of Hamburg, and a stuffed toy duck, and much more! Here is a sampling of some of the students’ poems below:


After the other kids had gone outside for recess, one student with special needs stayed behind to proudly present his poem about his stuffed toy duck to his teacher, teaching assistant and me in front of the classroom! (Concrete poems seem to engage kids of all backgrounds. I had a similar experience last year with a split grade 5-6 class at David Lloyd George Elementary, where several students with learning challenges were inspired to create and present terrific pieces.)

With the grade 6 class, we looked at two of my poems and how I collaborated with animators and a filmmaker to turn them into poetry videos. “Merry” (made in collaboration with second year animation students Quinn Kelly and Lara Renaud) is about overconsumption, plastic pollution and the climate crisis, and “Utility Pole” (made in collaboration with Ontario videographer Mary McDonald) is about the 130 millions of trees logged to make telephone poles and the issue of deforestation. Students loved the slide of the beautiful lyric shaped poem by Luann Hiebert in the League of Canadian Poets’ anthology, Heartwood.

Collaborative Tree Poems and Poetry Videos (Grade 6)

Next, I asked the students to stand and to pretend to be trees by doing the tree pose in yoga, first rooting their feet, then balancing on one leg, then the other, trying to stand still and then to sway as if it were windy with their arms held up like branches. Energized, the students then paired up to read aloud excerpts of their recent class assignment where they pretended to interview trees. Each partner would listen and suggest a favourite line or two that would be written from the point of view of a tree on strips of paper. After my visit and their lunch break, the students continued to work in larger groups to assemble and order their lines into collaborative poems that you can see below:

They went even further and made terrific poetry videos based on their poems with the help of their teacher, paying attention to integrating sound, image and voice. These poetry videos can be found in an Update that is posted below!

UPDATE – Poetry Videos by Tecumseh students

Here are some of the videos that the students put together. Click on the images to go to Vimeo and then click the play icon to watch the videos.

High School Collaborative Moon Poems!

Fiona Tinwei Lam

Earlier this month, I visited Ms. Luice Kim’s grade 11 and grade 12 English classes at Royal Canadian College high school in South Vancouver as part of the Poet in School program. (Photo of the grade 12 class below.)

The Poet in School program is run by the wonderful non-profit organization, Poetry in Voice, that provides resources for teaching and learning poetry in Canada with the mission to inspire students to read, recite and write poetry. Through Poetry in Voice, I’ve visited a number of schools, either online (during the earlier part of the pandemic) and in person, as well as participated as a juror in the online national recitation contest this past spring, and as a judge for the live team regional recitation competition in the past.

After a quick overview of the components of sound, structure and imagery in poetry, we looked at how to create metaphors and similes. With the image of a full moon projected at the front of the room, each class was asked to create three different metaphors and similes about the moon that I could collate and turn into a collaborative poem. I urged them to come up with wild and weird comparisons to challenge me. And they certainly did!

I did a follow up visit via Zoom so I could share the process of how the students’ various metaphors were grouped together to develop a kind of narrative and lyric thread with tonal shifts between stanzas. They could also see what was added as mortar to make all the different parts cohere as the collaborative poems were built from the ground up. I thanked them for inspiring me!

Below are the two collaborative poems assembled with metaphors generated by each class, accompanied by an audio-recording of my reading each one! (I’ve put the students’ metaphors/similes in bold-face type.)

MOON I

(Grade 12 Collaborative Class Poem at Royal Canadian College High School with Fiona Tinwei Lam)

Moon, you shining beast,
sometimes your ball of light
hangs suspended in the black sky
like a disco ball
that makes the night dance.

Sometimes, your light is like a big Camaro,
blocking up the shimmering
of the stars we long to see.

Other times you flicker
like a candle or a broken light bulb,
your faraway desert and plains 
barely visible.

Sometimes, you’re like the white face
of a person staring at me,
with eyes that scrutinize
my every flaw.

But I see your flaws too, Moon.
Last winter, you were ugly—
like a bald head under a flashlight
or a light bulb covered with dirt.
You were like a muddy snowball stuck
in someone’s fence. And last month,
like an overripe banana.

But this spring, you’re different!
You’re like a brand new eraser wiping out
daytime mistakes from everyone’s pages.

You’re like a big fat cheese pizza,
a vanilla-frosted birthday cake, or just
a pretty white porcelain bowl full of rice
for everyone to eat.

MOON II

(Grade 11 collaborative poem at Royal Canadian College High School with Fiona Tinwei Lam)

On hungry nights
when you hang in the sky like an empty plate,
let’s pretend you are a mooncake
or a plump rice ball.

On nights we can’t sleep,
you seem most like a sugar cube, corners dissolving
in a cup of black coffee.

Sometimes you’re adorned in white silk,
or the sun’s gold yarn,
or opaque with an icy lake’s grey palette.

Are you lonely? You’re so separate
from the stars, rolling in slow motion
like a single wheel or silver tire
across the night, glinting
like the last shiny bullet in the pistol
of a man pondering suicide.

Some nights, you’re a scythe
or a sickle slicing away darkness.
Other times, a sharp hook holding up the black sky
that blankets this sleepy world.

Maybe you are the eyeball
of a poet staring down at us,
a mirror of our dreams
and nightmares.

But for tonight you are a shy girl
hiding behind the clouds,
suddenly appearing in the dark,
a smiling face.

Both classes also participated in a class exercise to write poems inspired by ordinary objects. After reading one of my odes to ordinary things, “Ode to Chopsticks,” I asked them to choose an item to write about from the array of ordinary objects I’d set out on a desk. With the grade 11 class, I asked them to pretend to take on the character of the object itself, and write as if it were speaking. With the grade 12 class, I asked them to do mind maps first, writing out sensory associations they had with those words (taste, touch, texture, sounds, smells, colours, etc.) before trying to write a short draft poem. I looked at the draft poems that were created afterward. I was delighted at the wonderful, humorous and whimsical pieces that emerged–these objects took on personalities! Here are a few examples from the grade 11 class–one about a tiny yellow canoe, another one about a candle and another about a pine cone (with some moon metaphors on the page behind it).

Voices of the Street on the Climate Crisis

Fiona Tinwei Lam

The incredible team at Megaphone Magazine organized the launch of their annual Voices of the Street anthology on Wednesday! This collection focuses on the theme of the climate crisis.

The week before the event, I enjoyed meeting the readers during a workshop on effective performance tips that I co-facilitated with my colleague, Wax Poetic Host, RC Weslowski at the request of Megaphone staffer, Holly Sakaki.

The launch at SFU Woodward’s unfolded with moving readings and speeches by James Witwicki, Horace Daychief/Bear Whisperer, Henry Doyle, JT Sandu, Ghia Aweida, Yvonne Mark, Peter Thompson, Stephen Scott, Gilles Cyrenne, and Louise Boilevin.

Yvonne Mark read a piece about her childhood and talked about the transformative influence of Megaphone.

I felt honoured to be asked to say a few words of commendation for the readers and the Megaphone team. I also read a tree poem from my last book, one that is reprinted in the tree anthology, Worth More Standing, edited by Tofino Poet Laureate Christine Lowther. It alludes to a history of deforestation and short-sighted logging practices, and the urgent need to protect our precious rainforests in face of the relentless pace of the climate crisis.

Megaphone staff and volunteers were cheering the readers on, alongside a warm and receptive audience of supporters. It was a wonderful and special evening.

Grade 7 Class Writes Moving Poems about Hogan’s Alley

Fiona Tinwei Lam

I visited teacher Tilia Prior’s terrific and talented grade seven class today at Tecumseh Elementary School to thank them for submitting poems about Hogan’s Alley to the City Poems Contest!

The entire class of 25 students learned about this historic and significant Black community in Strathcona that was gutted in the late 1960s by the municipal government’s freeway plan to modernize transportation routes. Strong community resistance prevented the plan from being fully implemented, but the Georgia Viaduct was still built, razing Black homes and businesses.

Tilia Prior was inspired by acclaimed local writer and instructor, Wayde Compton, who was doing daily tweets with facts about Hogan’s Alley during Black History Month this past February. She showed the class poetry videos and short documentaries about the area too, and encouraged every student to write and submit a poem for the contest. She taught them about various poetic techniques such as repetition and alliteration.

As a result, the poems were moving, thoughtful, and written with care. Vivid images rose from the pages. It is incredible how poetry works like a magic spell to bridge time and place: here were students born long after the demise of Hogan’s Alley, who were not Black, who may never have even visited that part of town, learning about and empathizing with Black residents of the era. In fact, student Sharon Pan’s poem about Vie’s chicken House won third place in the youth category!

An interesting fact to note about Tecumseh Elementary School is that Vancouver School Board’s first Asian Canadian teacher, Vivian Jung, was hired by the school in the 1940s. Over half a century of racial segregation had prevented Asian Canadians, Blacks, and other visible minorities from various professions. But the activism of Jung and her classmates led to a breakthrough in 1945.

She taught at Tecumseh as a beloved teacher for 35 years. A lane is named after her in Vancouver’s West End, near the former “public” Crystal Pool (long gone) at Sunset Beach where she was famously barred from entry.

(Some Canadians might not be aware that segregation wasn’t just a US phenomenon. Racial segregation was actively practiced in Vancouver, in BC, and elsewhere in Canada at that time—in “public” pools, movie theatres, restaurants, hospitals, housing, civic employment, and more.)

It was cool to see this kind of interracial solidarity being forged in the present about the injustice faced by the community of Hogan’s Alley in the past, paralleling the interracial solidarity that Vivian Jung and her classmates marshalled back in 1945. Kudos to Tilia Prior and her amazing grade seven class!