School snubs local poet over her 'body' of work

Artist and poet Jane Hilberry wasn’t surprised when she was invited to speak at a conference at the Colorado Springs School. The poet, who’s been an English professor at Colorado College since 1988, regularly does these kind of talks and regularly visits local classrooms, encouraging young people to write and create.

What did surprise her was getting a follow-up e-mail uninviting her. They rescinded her invitation after a school employee discovered Hilberry’s “Body Painting” book.

 The  award-winning collection of poems features nudity on its cover and verse about sexual passion and same-sex attraction, among other topics.

          Hilberry is no strident activist, but neither is she a shy and retiring Emily Dickinson-type poet. After concluding that the school was practicing a form of censorship that she believed may have a “chilling effect” on students’ freedom of expression, she wrote letters of protest to school officials and encouraged her peers at CC to do likewise. She also contacted The Gazette to take the episode public.

          “If students are prohibited from engaging art that portrays the human figure or  same-sex relationships, they won’t be able to view the paintings of Michelangelo or read Shakespeare’s sonnets,” she says. “They will have a wildly impoverished vision of art.

“This episode makes me feel that I’m suspect because I’m an artist. And to hear anyone say they don’t want me around children does not feel good.”

          Representatives of the Colorado Springs School, which was founded in 1961 as The Colorado Springs Episcopal School for Girls, apologized to Hilberry for “the flaky way that we treated you” before explaining the school’s decision to rescind its invitation:

          “The bottom line is that you write for adult audiences and most of the students who will attend the conference are 11 to 14 years old,” wrote Cullan Hemenway, head of the middle school. “Once upon a time, parents trusted schools and rarely called into question the judgment of the teachers. Those days are long gone. Those of us in K-12 education know that we have to continually earn parents’ confidence. The mere allegation of impropriety can cripple a school and ruin a teacher’s career. When two people in our Communications Office looked at your bibliography, they questioned the appropriateness of the invitation, given the intended audience. I concurred.”

          Hilberry’s best known book, “Body Painting,” received a Colorado Book Award for Poetry. The poems explore a range of mature topics, including death, spirituality and sexuality.

        Colorado Springs School Headmaster Kevin Reel said Hilberry was simply a poor fit for the venue.

    “What Jane Hilberry claims is censorship, we would define as discernment," he said. "She is not  barred from our campus. We just didn’t feel she was appropriate for this particular event. And as I communicated to her, we would be happy to have her here in a different venue.

 “The bottom line for the school is that we are apologetic about the fact that an invitation went to her in advance of our fully making the decision about this. That was very unfortunate and clumsy on our part, and we apologized profusely to Jane about this,” he said.

          A Web site for the Colorado Poets Center at the University of Northern Colorado says: “Crazy Jane, an alter-ego figure, makes appearances throughout Hilberry’s work, seducing a bear, sleeping in a priest’s bed, and generally transgressing social norms. Ultimately, the poet celebrates unconventional choices — to love both men and women, not to have children, to abandon the attempt to find God in church.”

          Hilberry argues that she knows how to tailor her message in age-appropriate ways for younger audiences. “I was not going to talk to students about ‘Body Painting,’ but about poems from ‘This Awkward Art,’ a book of poems I wrote with my father.”

          Now, she won’t be talking to the students at all. Instead, she wants the community to have a dialogue about art and education.

          “I feel deeply, deeply, deeply that art has in some ways saved my life,” she says, “and the sad thing is the Colorado Springs School is not giving its kids a chance to have that experience.”

 Bettina Swigger, executive director of COPPeR (Cultural Office of the Pikes Peak Region) says that even with the risks for potential cultural clash, artists and educators need each other.

“Bringing professional artists into a classroom or school setting is a wonderful way to expand students’ creativity, deepen their intellectual curiosity and help them understand different cultures and attitudes,” she says.