By SARA GREENE
Leader staff writer
Poetry written by a dozen students and two teachers at Cabot High School has been published in “Anthology 2005” published by the Arkansas Council of Teachers of English and Language Arts.
“Last year when I started teaching the unit on poetry, I could see some of the students were really struggling with it so we started out with refrigerator-magnet poetry,” said Kelly Dollarhide, an English teacher at Cabot.
According to magneticpoetry.com, Dave Kapell, who founded Magnetic Poetry in 1991, was suffering from writer’s block while trying to compose song lyrics. Kapell wrote down interesting words on pieces of paper and glued them to magnets he placed on his refrigerator.
Before long he noticed that when friends were over they would move the magnets around to create poems. Kapell made kits with words on magnets to sell at a craft fair and since then Magnetic Poetry has sold more than three million poetry kits. The original kit contain 440 magnets. Now there are kits for romantic poems, erotic poems, pet poems and more.
Dollarhide entered poetry by her students, short poems as ‘fillers’ to go between essays and longer poems in the anthology, paying the $5 entry fee for each submission out of her own pocket. English teacher Cyndie Sebourn also entered her students’ work in the anthology and both teachers entered their own poems.
“Students fear being condemned for expressing themselves about something they feel passionate about,” Dollarhide said. “I was walking in the clouds when I found out they had been published a couple of weeks ago.”
The students from Cabot High published in “Anthology 2005” include Ally Cagle, Osker Campbell, Jack Spells, Lee Harrison, Jessica Seat, Corey Jackman, Daryl Murphy, Daniel Charlton, Jared Walls, Joey Coaley and Steven Davis.
“I’m so proud of our students,” Dollarhide added.
Another student published from Cabot Middle School North is Dollarhide’s daughter Abby.
“It’s nice to have mom and daughter published in the same book,” Dollarhide said.
