By Telesha Ramnarine

USING poetry to help youths in school to find solutions to the common problems affecting them is an idea that Carlene Gill-Kerr took to the Ministry of Education. It seemed that it wasn’t going to come to fruition, but six months later, the ministry replied and granted her the funds to execute a pilot project.

“What we did was to take the poems that deal with social issues such as suicide, self-esteem, Guyanese education, and say of that in poetry, and in a way that made it fun,” Carlene told the Pepperpot Magazine recently.

She started to write since she was about eight years old and would put all of her feelings into the poems. “My dream was to use poetry as a teaching tool. Poetry for me was like a sounding board; that’s the way I would express myself. I grew up very shy, so I would put all of my emotions into poetry.”

It wasn’t until her high school days that she started to share her poems with a few friends. “As I got older and exposed my poetry to persons, everyone kept saying they’re relevant; that the Education Ministry can use my stuff.”

And that’s when she decided to put together a proposal to take to the ministry, for which she received an ‘Arts and Culture Grant.’

Carlene was able to visit six secondary schools with a team of other poets including, Keion Heywood, Gabrielle Mohammed, and Daryl Goodchild.

“We went into the schools and spoke about relevant situations and what we saw just heightened the fact that there’s a need for something like this. They kept asking when we would come back. The teachers are saying something like this is needed because this is something outside of the curriculum,” Carlene expressed.

The team only had three weeks under the grant to visit the schools and is, therefore, hoping that they can somehow continue this project. “We’d love to be able to do it on an ongoing basis, based on the results that we had. They say they didn’t realise that poetry can be so much fun. I am hoping that we can have it prolonged.”

Some of the schools visited included Ann’s Grove, North Ruimveldt, East Ruimveldt and Carmel. “The results were just amazing. You saw the need for it, and the feedback sessions were really good. We asked for feedback from both teachers and students. They all appreciated having something like this on an ongoing basis.”

As such, Carlene said she is exploring the possibility of asking other agencies to fund the project.

Meanwhile, individuals and businesses may approach Carlene for work. She does poetry for persons in keeping with themes, such as for a church service, or for someone’s birthday. In fact, she had done a poem for the opening of the energy department. It talks about the oil industry and the relevance of it.

Her husband, Melbourne Kerr who is Jamaican, would take the audio versions of her poems and add music to them, which makes them even more interesting. Some have been posted on YouTube, while some are available on CDs.

Carlene also does an annual ‘Waves of Emotions’ show with other poets who have a similar vision for poetry.