As a young child Robert Glück wrote poems to please and impress, quite a feat for a dyslexic kid who couldn’t read. Time taught him to find his own language, and to recognize its difference from that of his teachers. Later, early in his long writing career, when a public arts gig brought him into the local elementary schools to teach the “Poetry Playhouse,” Glück was excited to find the children booing—”boooo poetry”—and writing childish jokes. “In general,” he writes, “I don’t like ‘fun-with-poetry.’ I thought it was a disservice to children.”
His brief recollections here convey a series of recognitions, taught to him by the elementary school kids and, later, his son, about the necessity of owning one’s own language and the inevitability of any new literature departing from its previous forms. “I wanted to create a situation in which children for once in their institutional lives experienced language as though it belongs to them,” Glück recalls. “Teaching children creativity should only incidentally include teaching them to master adult forms. It should not (as a goal) produce art-objects to delight adults. Most important, we should find ways for children to own language and image.”
1 March, 2022
