UB's Creeley helps City Honors develop own Web site on Internet

With the help of Creeley, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of English and Samuel P. Capen Chair in Poetry and the Humanities at UB, City Honors is now one of only two schools in the Buffalo Public Schools that has its own Web site on the Internet. The other is the Dr. Charles R. Drew Science Magnet at the Buffalo Museum of Science.

The City Honors project was funded through a three-year grant to Creeley from the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund designed to create public programs to foster an exchange of ideas and a greater appreciation for contemporary literature.

The Wallace Fund required grant recipients to partner with not-for-profit cultural and community organizations. Just Buffalo Literary Center administered the program and hired UB graduate student Ken Sherwood to oversee its implementation.

The Wallace Fund purchased the equipment necessary for the school to make an Internet connection. NYNEX provided a free dedicated phone line, and extra computer equipment and software was provided by the school district.

Sherwood, a poet himself, helped set up UB's Electronic Poetry Center and is the co-editor of the UB Poetics Program's on-line journal, "Rif/t." With Creeley, he helped City Honors Internet Poetry Club to develop and publish "CHOPS"-its own Internet literary group (http://cityhonors.buffalo.k12.ny.us/city/CHOPS/) and publish an electronic literary magazine, "chopstyx."

School newspaper is on-line
While Creeley sparked the project, City Honors and its students took it several enthusiastic steps further. They developed what Creeley calls "a usefully diverse Web site" that not only publishes four literary journals, but assists with the school's educational programs and offers news and personal pages. Five hundred of the school's 839 students now have e-mail addresses.

The school newspaper is on-line. All three of the school's sixth-grade classes have developed e-mail correspondence with students around the world-a few students are writing in French. Another class in evolutionary biology is researching the Web to create an evolution bibliography. Math students are researching college math department Web pages; biology students are playing "The Blackout Syndrome," an interactive biology game about disease diagnosis.

"This is a great big thing for us," said Ron Astridge, City Honors' computer instructor. "We had computers, but we didn't have the money or equipment to connect to the Internet. We just had an in-house computer network that was limited in its application, and so wasn't used very much.

"The kids are very much involved now in on-line publishing, communication with other schools and developing creative educational projects in class and on their own. It wouldn't have happened without Bob Creeley. He was very much involved in this project from beginning to end," Astridge said.

Creeley says the City Honors Web site is more lively and more fun than most school sites he's visited.

"They've really enjoyed themselves here," he said, "and these kids and teachers have produced a lot of remarkable information and articles that are fresh, artful and intelligent."

Astridge worked with Creeley and Sherwood to complete the project.

"Bob was an invaluable help to us," he said. "Because of him, the kids' use of the Internet for research, writing and world-wide communication has increased and improved in a variety of ways."

Creeley calls Astridge "an absolutely dear man. He's not only very patient, but he just loves this stuff. It's wall-to-wall kids in that computer room. I give City Honors' administrators and teachers a tremendous amount of credit for the success of this project.

"As teachers," Creeley said, "we naturally want to give students more 'input'-easier access to information-and the Internet is great for that. But to give them the license and authority to produce output? That's very unusual."

One example he cites is the school's on-line uncensored publication of a story titled "First Kiss," in which a gay teenager described being set upon by straight schoolmates.

"Very straightforward," said Creeley. "And very moving."

"I have great respect for this school," he added. "Naturally, they expect the students to keep civil tongues in their heads, but beyond that, they don't muzzle them. They routinely encourage exploration, debate and creativity."

"Students and teachers also needed some hands-on help to implement educational projects like those now under way," Astridge said, "and we were able to provide that one-on-one help with the assistance of Bob and Ken. The results are pretty amazing."

The school's alumni association has created a directory of alumni e-mail addresses and will be placing them on-line. The site is used not only by students, but by teachers, administrators and clubs like the Debate Club, which uses the Net to research debating topics.

Because the City Honors project got up to speed much sooner than expected, Creeley will finish there at the end of the semester-a year early-and will spend the last year of the three-year grant period working on a poetry-and-art project with Niagara University's Castellani Gallery.

Poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist and editor, Creeley is a writer of international reputation and co-founder and member of the core faculty of UB's Poetics Program, which was developed to encourage the exploration of language and its capacity to express and represent human experience.

Despite a very busy schedule of teaching, writing and speaking to audiences throughout the world, Creeley has a long history of involvement with Buffalo and Western New York writers, writers' organizations, publications and artists, whom he has supported and encouraged in many ways, including the sharing of his time, money, creative assistance and presence.

Creeley was one of the originators of the "Black Mountain" school of poetry, along with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov. Black Mountain established a new and anti-academic poetic tradition that has been reflected in the work of many poets who have come to occupy significant places in the 20th-century literary canon.

PHOTO BY DON HEUPEL