Cornell M.F.A. students in creative writing drew on life experience, imagination and writing exercises for their work in a chapbook being printed for the upcoming Poem in Your Pocket Day in New York City.

Six students in Kenneth McClane's graduate poetry seminar submitted poems for the book, to be distributed April 29 at a public event in Bryant Park in Manhattan and to all students at Food and Finance High School, a Cornell partner school. "Poetry in Your Pocket 2010" is the third Cornell poetry chapbook produced for the annual event.

Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers said two of her earlier poems were selected for the book -- "A Map of Shanxi," written in 2007 while she lived in rural China, and subsequently published in StorySouth in 2009; and "On Green," written when she was 19 for an Oberlin College class with poet Martha Collins, currently a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell.

"Shanxi" is "all about being displaced in a foreign country and not knowing the language," Rogers said. "I had a fellowship there and was teaching; I'd never been out of the United States before. I lived in the middle of nowhere for two years, and it's actually in one of the poorest areas in China -- it's heavily polluted. … But Chinese people are so friendly, they don't want you to feel sad. It really made me want to learn the language even more. I really wanted to connect with these people."

"On Green" is a definition poem, "where you go in the dictionary and look up all the meanings," she said. The poem will also appear in The Comstock Review's upcoming spring/summer issue.

"'Green' today has all these new meanings because of the environment, but it also has the sense of being naïve," Rogers said. "I think it's a good poem for high schoolers … I wrote it practically when I was in high school."

Benjamin Garcia said he based "To the Unborn Sibling" on a family trip across Texas through "small and angry towns."

"It was about just being really young and understanding that my parents were afraid of this trip," Garcia said. "They weren't citizens, they were permanent residents. … It was advice to someone else coming into this weird but fun situation, and it was an adventure. It was picking up on something your parents feared but you were protected from. I always understood this as racism, but [it was] interpreted by my parents in a different way. It was 'oh, this place is closed' or 'we can't eat there.'"

The other contributing poets in the seminar are Tacey Atsitty, Zachary Harris, Christopher Lirette and Anne Marie Rooney.

McClane said he encouraged his students to keep younger New Yorkers in mind when they submitted poems for the project.

"I thought that it would be wise for them to think about the audience, as all writers need to," he said. "This was an opportunity to speak to people who are not far removed from them in age nor in their interests."

Poem in Your Pocket Day, held in celebration of National Poetry Month, is organized by the New York City Mayor's Office and its Department of Cultural Affairs, and the city's Department of Education. Partners in the event include the American Academy of Poets, Bryant Park Corporation, Metro New York, and the Poetry Society of America.