Precocious poets to get movie-star treatment
The poem that Alexa White produced in preschool mixed childhood reverie with anxiety beyond her years.
“On the surface, she was still being 3 or 4, and then, wow,” said her mother, Ericka.
Alexa, now 6, is one of the 10 “preschool poets” whose work will be featured in a locally produced film that will be screened at the Wexner Center for the Arts on Friday.
The kids will get the movie-star treatment: They’ll arrive by limousine, walk a red carpet and have their photos snapped.
It’s the culmination of local poet Nancy Kangas’ project to join the words of children with professional animation into a work called "The Preschool Poets: An Animated Film Series." It includes behind-the-scenes footage of the kids by Kangas’ collaborator, Josh Kun of Oakhouse Films.
I wrote about Kangas a year ago when she was launching a Kickstarter campaign to help finance the project.
Kangas worked with students at Columbus Early Learning Centers, coaxing poems out of them by asking questions. At the time, Alexa’s grandmother, Janie Mae White, was being treated for ovarian cancer that eventually proved fatal.
Alexa’s poem begins with musings about playing with bubbles, but all of a sudden shifts into this:
Ericka White said she thought Alexa was coping with her grandmother’s illness about as well as could be expected of a preschooler. But “big explosion” and “mommy-sister” implied otherwise.
“She was suffering as much as we were,” White said.
As a result, Alexa received some counseling. She still turns to writing when she feels sad about her grandmother’s death.
Other children’s poems reflect poverty, loneliness and violence, along with happier themes. They are accompanied by animations done by several artists, plus music by some veteran Hollywood composers, such as Jed Kurzel, who did the score for “Alien: Covenant.”
Kangas said some musicians donated their work when she told them she intended to show the film to Ohio state legislators as evidence of why it's important to fund arts programs in schools.
Sometimes children will behave in
bewildering ways when something is weighing on their minds. Kangas said the film project taught her there's at least one reliable way to identify the cause.
“It shows in their poems.”