George School sophomore Ashley Choi has been named the 2010 Bucks County High School Poet of the Year by the Bucks County Poet Laureate Program. Ashley’s winning poems, which she produced in her George School English class, are a cycle of sonnets written as love letters between early-twentieth-century Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani and French artist Jeanne Hébuterne. They were selected from over ninety entries submitted to the Bucks County High School Poet of the Year Contest by students at twenty county high schools. Bernadette McBride, the current Bucks County Poet Laureate; and Paula Raimondo, the 2008 laureate, were the final judges of the competition.

The Bucks County Commissioners presented Ashley with a proclamation in recognition of her achievement at their meeting on April 7, 2010. She will read her winning entry at a reception on Sunday, April 18, 2010, at 2:00 p.m. at the Orangery on the Bucks County Community College campus.

Ashley produced her contest entry in response to an assignment from George School English teacher Eric Wolarsky, who asked Ashley and her classmates in Sophomore Literature and Composition to write one hundred lines of poetry each. Eric wanted the students to demonstrate that they had absorbed the forms and styles of the poets they studied in a month-long poetry unit. According to Eric, Ashley’s poems show the influence of William Shakespeare and Pablo Neruda, and reveal an impressive ability to communicate while fulfilling the requirements of the English sonnet—a form made up of three four-line sections, or quatrains, and one two-line section, or couplet, composed according to a specific rhyme scheme.

“It was clear to me that her sonnets were really terrific,” said Eric. “Instead of looking like they were hampered by the form, they looked like they said exactly what Ashley wanted to say.” Eric was particularly impressed by the rhymed couplets that conclude Ashley’s poems. “Like Shakespeare, she uses the final rhymed couplet as the perfect bow on the package. She leaves the reader with a satisfied feeling about what the poem is saying,” Eric remarked.

When she approached Eric’s assignment, Ashley looked to her knowledge of art history for inspiration. “I decided to write about what I really like,” said Ashley, who enjoys reading about art history in her free time and is currently enrolled in Pam Grumbach’s Advanced Painting and Drawing class at George School. An admirer of Amedeo Modigliani’s paintings, Ashley said that when she views them, she thinks about how the artist would have felt when he created them. Influenced by shapes from African sculpture, his portrait style often features elongated human forms with oval faces, depicted in colors that Ashley describes as melancholic. When Amedeo’s romantic relationship with Jeanne Hébuterne began in 1917, Jeanne became a frequent subject of his paintings. For her poetry assignment, Ashley set out to explore the relationship between Amedeo and Jeanne. Through a combination of research and imagination, Ashley rendered each of their voices in a series of sonnets that depicts a dialogue between the two. In Ashley’s favorite poem, Jeanne offers encouragement to Amedeo, who is depressed about his poverty and his failure to sell his artwork.

For Ashley, a native of Seoul, South Korea, writing the sonnets meant tackling a challenging poetic form in her second language. “It was really hard,” commented Ashley, who said she had not previously focused on poetry writing, though she had written poetry in both Korean and English before. “This was kind of like a turning point for me,” she said of her experience writing the sonnets. “This gave me more courage to write.”

Eric described Ashley’s word choices as evocative and musical, and observed that her poetry benefited from her careful word selection. “To be such a sensational poet in a second language and to win a contest is really tremendous,” he said.

You can read more about Ashley's achievement in the following articles:

Bucks Local News
George School's Ashley Choi Named Bucks County Poet of the Year

About George School
Founded in 1893 by members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), George School, a rigorous coed boarding and day school for grades nine through twelve, educates students from twenty-one states, thirty-four foreign countries, and a variety of ethnic, racial, religious, and economic backgrounds. Through its commitment to diversity and the Quaker values of equality, integrity, and peacemaking, George School inspires students to be led by their own truths while respecting and appreciating opinions and beliefs different from their own. George School was one of the first schools in the United States to implement an International Baccalaureate diploma program. For information about admission, please call 215.579.6547 or visit http://www.georgeschool.org.