For a few years after I first moved to New York City I worked for two institutions in service to schoolchildren and to the arts: the Coalition for Hispanic Family Services After School Arts & Education Program, and for Teachers & Writers Collaborative. The first is located in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the second (with offices in Manhattan) sent me to work to various neighborhoods in Queens. But both were equally rewarding experiences as I stood in front of mostly immigrant kids of all backgrounds, ages 6 to 10, and communicated in our common language: poetry.
Children are unafraid of poetry and such sophisticated concepts as synesthesia. With a little prodding, they’re suddenly swimming on their own: “brown sounds like horses running”; “lemon tastes like cars screeching.” But then something happens in middle school and in high school, where poetry occupies two spaces—the private (that is, writing for the self) and the academic (reading the boring dead white guys—nothing wrong with it, except when they’re the only representatives for poetry). The artistic impulse vanishes or becomes suppressed. And if these young people make it to a college writing classroom, the poetry teacher spends the semester on, among other efforts, damage control.
That’s why I’m particularly fond of programs like the aforementioned TWC and also Youth Speaks, Urban Word and Community Word Project, which my dear friend Michele Kotler founded. Having these valuable programs around is like having an early intervention mechanism, not to mention a wonderful and liberating introduction to the arts. (And I do so encourage you to check these websites out and to consider a tax-deductible donation!
I don’t remember ever being exposed to poetry outside of memorization exercises during my early education in Mexico, where it was part of an elocution curriculum. So when I work with young people now it’s with a bit of envy that they get to practice the art many years younger than when I had the chance to. My turn came late in high school, as part of an assignment made possible by the fact that somebody threw a writing contest and nobody came forward to compete. So the burden fell on those enrolled in the advance English courses.
Without much of a context about how to write a poem, I resorted to the forms I had been reading all along—sonnets, rhyming quatrains and couplets—and somehow I coaxed a poem out of the night—literally. Firstly, I had to do all my homework in the kitchen, the only light my grandparents didn’t object to at the ungodly late hour of 8 pm, and secondly, as I sat there pondering the subject matter, all I could hear were the damn dogs barking all over the housing project. So I wrote a poem about a dog. I remember I used the word “yowl.” To rhyme with “howl.”
I place third or fourth. I don’t remember. But what stood out for me was the teacher’s neglecting to announce the title of my poem, which was “Cemetery Dog.” I had wanted to connect the dog to death, because dogs always howled at the ambulance sirens, and then there was the old Mexican superstition that dogs could see ghosts through their canine eyes.
I took the teacher’s oversight as criticism, maybe even censorship, because I had seen him mumble the title uncertainly under his breath. So I never displayed the trophy I received, but I did spend the cash prize immediately on paperback books at the Goodwill Thrift Store, the only place I knew sold books I could afford.
The poem became lost over the years, but not the memory of that early dabble in word play. And the teacher, Mr.—, and what his response was to my work? That I will never forget.
Any other spaces or essential institutions out there for young people? Mine is a very New York-centric list, I realize. But I know this type of outreach exists at the national level. What’s out there? Where can I find out more about it?
This is also very–as you call it–”New York-centric” but when I was a senior in high school, I entered the annual City College Poetry Contest. They accepted entries from elementary through high school age students. There was a poetry reading designed for those who won, with Cornelius Eady that year, and a book was published of all the winners, signed by Barry Wallenstein (the director of the program/contest, I believe). I still have mine.
-GK