The guild staged the reading in honor of National Poetry Month.

"I'd encourage you guys to read more poetry," Bellarmine senior Jon Clark told the audience. "It's like music: There are lots of different styles."

Many students read poems they'd written for a class assignment at Bellarmine.

"In my poetry and prayer class, the teacher put a weird picture up on the screen and told us to write about it, so I did, but I don't think it's what he wanted," Jon said. "I call it 'Uninspired.' "

"Believe me, if it were in my power, you'd be hanging up in backwater, black water Missouri, decorating the walls of some God-shunned pictorial asylum where nothing grows or shines."

Sean Dinno, an Almaden resident, penned "The Story of My Name" for an assignment:

"It's a short name/one with few letters/I wish it were different though/Like Mar or Myron/something Aramaic/to show the world that Dinno is not Italian."

"My grandpa was born in Baghdad," Sean said.

After the reading, Jon praised Sean for his observational skills.

Jon said Sean's works always take the reader inside the setting of the poems.

In "The Battle for Baghdad," Sean wrote:

"Iraqis rally together in the center of town/in order to bring a statue of Saddam down.

The American soldiers help drag the figure to the ground/but ungratefully flag the sculpture they downed."

Rhyming, Sean said, is hard work.

"That's why I like free verse. You can express yourself in your own way without fitting one pattern."

Sean said he tries to be succinct in his writing, with "no extra jib-jab."

"I'm the opposite," Jon said. "I throw in a little fluff in between."

"That's why I like your writing," Sean told him. "For the tangents. [You use] as much imagery as I could hope to write in a lifetime."

In "The Roll of the Dice," Jon wrote:

"I've never seen the stars/or heard music/or had random, awe-inspired thoughts/I've only felt an itch in the square of my back that I can't reach."

The poets agreed that listening to each other's work can be inspirational.

"There's a huge difference between reading and hearing poetry," Jon said.

"You're not only hearing someone else's point of view; you're processing it in your own way," Sean said.

Neither poet is ever very far from his notebook, so they're often putting pen to paper, although their efforts don't always produce the desired result.

"The hardest thing to do is not write about the 'Big Two'--'I hate the world' and 'I'm in love,' " Jon said. "Words make you think because there's more than one way to take them. It's almost better to have people comment [on a poem] before you explain it."

Sean said Bellarmine's writer's guild has helped him hone his style.

"It's taught me that each poem doesn't have to be your best ever," he added.

"You fall down a lot when you write," Jon said. "Sometimes a whole poem is garbage except for one line."

He added, "Don't fight it when you write poetry. Just let it flow through, then edit mercilessly."