Bellport High School students brought the printed black and white words of poems from the page to the stage during a Poetry Alive! performance and two workshops. A grant provided by the South Country Education Foundation provided the special English language arts activity that was hosted virtually by the Poetry Alive! performance group out of Asheville, North Carolina.

During the performance, Poetry Alive! presented popular and not so well-known poetic verse as theater and transformed poems into scripts and the students as actors. With the high school library as a stage, students participated in an interactive experience that sparked their interest in the poetic word. Students enrolled in English Language Arts, English as a New Language and public speaking and debate classes learned to express themselves through such poems as Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” and Langston Hughes’ “Harlem.” Many of the students had the opportunity to try their hand at blackout poetry, a way of changing the meaning of a poem by blacking out the words of a poem except for a select few.