By Joseph Sapia
HOLMDEL – During a visit to the White House, Eileen Huang and a few other high schoolers got First Lady Michelle Obama snapping her fingers in admiration at a poetry reading.
“It was pretty cool,” said Eileen, 16, of Holmdel.
Eileen and four others could pull this off because they are the country’s five National Student Poets, each representing a region of the country. Eileen represents the Northeast Region of New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.
In its fourth year, the National Student Poets Program is bestowed by the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, Institute of Museum and Library Services, and Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, whittling 20,000 high school poets to the five honored.
In her role, Eileen is beginning a year-long service project on writing and reading in the Northeast.
A sophomore at the Monmouth County Vocational School District’s High Technology High School on the campus of Brookdale Community College in Lincroft, Eileen has been writing since middle school. She writes poetry and fictional short stories.
“I don’t even consider myself a writer,” Eileen said. “(More so) a kid who writes.”
In her freshman year, Eileen submitted a poem, “Cities,” a poem about what cities would be like if they were people, to the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards competition. In March 2015, she won a gold medal in the contest and became one of 35 finalists – seven per each of the five regions.
Then, Eileen submitted three poems, “Gargoyle,” about the negative impacts of beauty standards place upon women; “Piano,” about thinking about her sisters – Alice, now 14, and Maddy, now 8 – playing piano, while she had quit; and “Confluence,” comparing subjects of Tang Dynasty poems, which she studied during a year abroad in China, and her life.
Part of the submission package was her biography and a video talking about her love of poetry and writing it.
Over the summer, Eileen found out she won the Northeast Region.
In October, she read “Confluence” at the White House, which, Eileen said, was “very surreal.”
“I actually sat next to her (Michele Obama) during the ceremonies,” Eileen said. “She made comments (about the poems during the readings). She was real nice.”
Eileen also draws, paints, programs computers and enjoys physics. So, she combines art and science.
“The more I learn about the literary world, the more I learn about the science world, they’re really not different,” she said. “I think there shouldn’t be that divide.”
Eileen said she does not know what she wants to do for a career. Her parents, Sandra Liu and Xinyu Huang, are engineers.
When she spent 7th grade in China, she volunteered at an orphanage. Now, she tutors Long Branch elementary students in English and mathematics.
A Renaissance person?
“Not really,” Eileen said. “I’m trying to figure it out.”
Through her National Student Poet position, Eileen got to meet national poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera. Yet, she noted, her life is juxtaposed with “going to school, doing all these teen-age things.”
Huang will be speaking at the TEDxNavesink 2016 Makers conference, to be held on April 9th from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Monmouth University’s Pollak Theatre. The conference will feature talks by 30 pioneering makers from New York, New Jersey and around the globe.
CONFLUENCE
By Eileen Huang
Tang dynasty poems
are four lines
each,
breaks between cadences
each character a curve,
iron hook, slicing black
scissor slashes against
textbook paper. I am no
Li Bai, for instead of wine
I drink the laws of thermodynamics
and I pass time under the home screen of
a Nokia rather than moonlight, the foot of my bed nothing more
than a scuffing of
crushed cockroaches. I do not need lullabies
when I can recite
stanzas in my sleep, their four beat,
jumping voices
buzzing like dragonflies in hollow ear canals.
They speak of rivers, looping islands,
yellow brown mud sloshing behind
rocks in the shapes of warriors
who jumped across gorges
in pursuit of wild tigers.
I do not need to press knees against littered plastic bags
and feel them crunch like insects under bare feet,
I do need to pretend
that I am standing at the edge of a river,
one toe in the flowing mud,
arm resting against the sandbanks. And I do not
need
blankets when I have the
lisping voices of Su Song
to sing me
to sleep.
