From the top of the page to the bottom, the young students eyes skimmed the 29 stone-cold statements from a son, Aaron Smith, to his mother. Smith wasn’t one of the poets visiting for this event, but this work played a major role.

Smith’s sentences ranged from the relatively innocuous — “I wiped the booger on the wall” — to the angry — “I hate the shame you taught me” — to the explicitly raw.

“I remember when you told me to get AIDS and die,” Smith writes, “that if I were gay you’d never want to see me again.”

The poem is entitled “Things I Could Never Tell My Mother.” And as part of the first-ever Listen Poetry Festival organized by the Adirondack Center for Writing and Planned Parenthood of the North Country, these hundreds of local young students crafted their own “Things I Could Never Tell” poems.

Lauren Whitehead reads an anecdotal poem to students Tuesday afternoon at the Listen Poetry Festival at North Country Community College. (Enterprise photo — Antonio Olivero)

“I’m pretty sure those are some of the things I’d never tell my mother,” one female North Country Community College student said as she looked up from Smith’s poem, before continuing to write her own.

With the Listen Festival, Adirondack Center for Writing Executive Director Nathalie Thill hoped the raw and impassioned nature of the spoken-word poetry and writing workshop would reverberate with local young people. Those in attendance included the senior class from Saranac Lake High School and the sophomore class from Lake Placid High School. Students from other Essex County public schools such as Westport and Newcomb attended as well.

To Thill, this was the only way that made sense to help young people understand the harsh realities of sexual assault. She and Deirdre Loftus, Planned Parenthood of the North Country’s sexual assault prevention educator, said the festival’s pairing of an arts organization with a public health organization is the only program of its kind in the nation.

Thill conceived the idea when one of the festival’s poets, Jon Sands, read his poem “The Basement” to local high school students at another recent event. Replaying Sands’ performance on video, Thill noticed how a group of high school boys giggled and elbowed each other as Sands read the poem about a high school hook-up.

Then, when the tone of Sands’ poem went from playful to painful, informing the audience that he had unknowingly made an un-consented advance on a female, the giggling of the teenage boys stopped.

Carlos Andres Gomez speaks to students Tuesday afternoon at the Listen Poetry Festival at North Country Community College. (Enterprise photo — Antonio Olivero)

“That moment when he says, ‘asleep,’ and the poem shifts,” Thill said, “they all stop laughing and they are all still 100 percent listening. And I think that poem is so important because there is joy in it. He’s very open and honest about what he did, but there is also, you don’t feel shameful when you listen to it. And I think there are very few poems by men about these topics.”

At Lake Placid High School, it was the school’s health department that urged Superintendent Roger Catania to send the 10th grade class to the festival, as issues of sexual, domestic and spousal abuse are part of the school’s health curriculum. The superintendent said the trip was voluntary and parents were notified in advance.

And when the Lake Placid students took part at the Lake Placid Center for the Arts on Monday, Sands’ “The Basement” was one of eight poems read aloud by the quartet.

“This is an opportunity to do it in a different way,” Catania said, “to really capture kids through the arts, through their emotion and connect with them at a deeper level than you can really do in a classroom.”

With April serving as both Sexual Assault Awareness Month and National Poetry Month, Thill didn’t struggle to find her three other New York City-based poets.

Jeanann Verlee reads her poem “Swarm” Tuesday afternoon at the Listen Poetry Festival at North Country Community College. (Enterprise photo — Antonio Olivero)

Much like Sands, they’d all penned heartfelt pieces about sexual assault, boundaries and relationships. But Thill was especially excited about this group she put together as each could write about sexual assault from a different perspective.

Excited about the fresh idea, the quartet signed on and brainstormed over several months, crafting which poems they’d read and what their writing workshop would look like.

“I firmly believe there is no other way to have difficult conversations, whether it be about any hot topic, if you don’t involve poetry,” Thill said.

“(The poets) didn’t want to be shaming or (put on a) kick-in-the-stomach type thing,” Thill continued. “They wanted to be real and honest. Because of the kind of poetry it is, suddenly very difficult, very awkward conversations, people were having those conversations. They were willing to talk about race or sexual assault or things like that, especially high schoolers or college kids.”

High school students took part in the festival sessions at the LPCA Monday and Tuesday mornings. The college sessions took place at Paul Smith’s College Monday evening and at North Country Community College Tuesday afternoon.

Writer Jon Sands receives an applause from North Country Community College students Tuesday afternoon before he reads his poem “The Basement” at the Listen Poetry Festival. (Enterprise photo — Antonio Olivero)

The poets, who read two pieces each, included two men and two women, a purposeful 50-50 selection by Thill.

There was Sands, the shaggy-haired Brooklynite who, while reading his anecdotal pieces, just as easily made the students laugh as cry.

There was Carlos Andres Gomez, the blue-eyed tall, dark and handsome writer and part-time actor who penned the coming-of-age memoir “Man Up: Reimagining Modern Manhood.”

There was Jeanann Verlee, the tatooed former punk rocker who bared her soul and elicited a heartfelt, eyelids-shut response from the crowd and her fellow poets when heart-wrenchingly reading her poem about setting boundaries: “Swarm.”

“Pull back your lips,” Verlee read aloud, “bare the teeth you have sharpened to their perfect points, flick your stinger tongue, set free your swarm.”

And then there was Lauren Whitehead, the Columbia University-schooled, African-American writer and performer who was a driving force in the festival’s writing workshop.

It was at the workshops where the gravity of the moment registered for local students. To help guide them, the poets took them through a step-by-step process, including Whitehead writing the word “authority” on the chalkboard.

From there, the students shouted out different authorities in their life, from parents to lovers to themselves. The students then took several minutes to choose an authority and write things he or she was too afraid to tell that person or entity, much like Smith had done about his mother.

For Thill and the quartet of poets, the brutally honest nature of telling their traumatic stories provided an instant connection with the students. After one session at LPCA, two boys showed their intense and vulnerable “Things I Could Never Tell…” poems to Gomez. Sharing work like this wasn’t expected, though some did. Others posed questions, including one to Verlee inquiring if she relives certain experiences every time she reads her poems.

“Kind of,” she said.

One student asked Whitehead how long it took her to write one of her poems.

“In one way it took me 14 years,” she said, “and in another way, 12 minutes.”

As Tuesday’s final session concluded at NCCC, so concluded the group’s goal of aiding students by helping them answer this question: “How do you take an experience that intense and put it on paper?”

It was meant to be educational, inspirational and healing. And all three of those were touched on when one student asked Whitehead the following:

“Do you ever regret writing about your personal experiences?”

“I think regret,” she replied, “is just our reaction to when we tell a truth and someone responds in a disappointing way.

“That’s regret.”