Poet Helen Frost talks about the healing power of poetry and her latest novel

You’ve worked in schools in many states. Are most kids receptive to poetry?

In schools a lot of times, kids don’t get much poetry. Many teachers don’t like poetry themselves and think that kids don’t like it. But a lot of kids have poetry notebooks hidden away in their drawers somewhere.

Really?

I bet half the teenagers I know have notebooks. And these are not highly academic kids. The kids that I’ve worked most with are so-called at-risk populations of kids. When I meet a group of 10 kids, I can almost guarantee that one of them is going to say, “I’m a poet,” and bring in reams of poems the next week. And if I ask, “How many of you like to write poetry?” at least half of them will say they do.

So poetry isn’t a tough sell?

Not at all. I am kind of a quiet person. So sometimes if I go into a juvenile detention center, people will take one look at me and think the kids are going to eat me alive—and that has never happened. I think it’s partly because I work with other artists, and we all have a kind of presence. We support each other—so there’s a strength. We’re going in because we genuinely care for the kids. And they pick up on that, especially kids who are hungry to tell the truth about their lives—and to have some way of saying the truth.

How do you help young people do that?

The first time I meet kids, I’ll give them index cards and say, “Just write something on here that you would like to hear or say the truth about.”

What do they tell you?

It really varies: I would like to tell the truth about the fact that I smoke and my parents don’t know. I would like to tell the truth about this girl that I like. Or I would like to tell the truth about rape—or some other really serious thing. They don’t sign the cards; it’s all anonymous. Then I’ll go home—I have a big poetry library—and I’ll look for poems on those topics and then bring them in. They’ll see that other people have written about those things. And that opens up the way for them, too.

Your latest book, The Braid, is a tale of two sisters who are separated after their family is evicted from its farm in Scotland. The teenagers tell the story in alternating narrative poems—with the last word of each line in one poem becoming the first word of the corresponding line in the following poem. Why did you create such a complicated structure?

I’ve been publicly accused of insanity on a couple of occasions. The way I explain it to myself is, if I had just done that as kind of a gimmick—or a little thing to try to see if I could do it—and there hadn’t been the intensity of the story to go with it, then it would have really fallen flat. But the story itself was powerful enough to make that demand on me. I worked on it for a long time (most of a year) before I came up with the formal structure.

What I love about The Braid is that it’s a wonderful story, and you can read it without being aware of the structure—it’s not in your face.

That’s what I hope kids will take away from it, too. I didn’t want the reader to be going, “Oh, look at this.” I wanted the language to be doing its work without showing off.