Monday, June 29, 1998
To read this article on the New York Times website, click here.

Writers Who Could Be Teachers
by Robert Pinsky
Robert Pinsky is the Poet Laureate of the United States.
In April, I went to a poetry slam with the First Lady. That is, the two previous Poet Laureates,
Rita Dove and Robert Hass, and I accompanied Hillary Rodham Clinton to an event at the J.
Hayden Johnson Junior High School in southeast Washington.
The most impressive thing about this occasion was the performance of the seventh- and ninthgrade student poets. As one who has attended perhaps more poetry readings than any humanbeing should have to, I can testify that the writing and delivery were extremely good. Thesestudents wrote not in Standard English and not in Black English, but each in an inventive,individual and pungent version of English, grammatically right and eloquent. The range ofsubjects was great: I remember a comic poem of extravagant boasting, a poem pitying ahomeless derelict, a poem of metaphysical reach about space exploration, a love poem, a poem
kidding self-pity, an homage to Duke Ellington.
The oral delivery, especially considering that the First Lady and the three Laureates were there,
not to mention reporters, photographers and television cameras, was relaxed and forceful. The
children seemed protected from nerves or intimidation by two factors: they were young, not
yet as embarrassment-prone as older adolescents, and they knew that they had appliedthemselves to do something well.
Almost as impressive as the student poets was how the First Lady handled the occasion. She
swiftly made contact with the teachers, with the principal and with Kenny Carroll, director ofD.C. Writerscorps, the program that arranged the poetry slam. (Writerscorps, a project of the
Humanities Council of Washington, D.C., has received support from Americorps, the nationalservice program advocated by President Clinton.) Mrs. Clinton spoke with the student poets,and despite the artificiality of the situation, there was actual conversation between some brightchildren and an adult who, they could sense, genuinely respected what they had done andcared for them.
Although our presence there was contrived, the children and their ability were quite real, andthe poetry event was not staged for us; it had been scheduled long before the White House
called. Very clearly, the students had been taught with respect and skill by their classroom
teachers and by the special poetry instructors, Nancy Schwalb and D. J. Renegade. This occasion
defied stereotypes about city schools, the kind we call, in code, "inner-city schools."

What was going on in that classroom, and how might it be bottled for export? I don't have all
the answers, but it did occur to me that the 15 or 20 students who read that day, and theothers who held up Olympics-style scoring cards, as judges, had been taught by a couple ofpoets.
In my professional world, it is commonplace to complain about the "proliferation" of graduate
writing programs and to deride the large numbers of poets and fiction writers who come fromthose programs with "useless" degrees and hopeless expectations of literary glory.
I have for a while suspected that this derision has a class bias: poetry, which used to bepracticed mainly by a leisured elite, has become another part of the American range of middleclass opportunities. I know more bad things about the creative writing industry than mostpeople, but I also know that it brings the art I love to many Americans who crave it.
What if those allegedly superfluous graduates of Master of Fine Arts programs were able toteach children like those in Johnson Junior High? Right now, because of the professional
education lobby, the writing graduates cannot easily get work in a public school system. The
writing program at Boston University, where I teach, accepts 12 students in poetry each year
and 12 in fiction, from a pool of 300 applicants. When they graduate, a number of them go toteach at elite private schools, but relatively few can teach in the public school system without
more schooling, in the form of education courses.
Can it be that bureaucracy is depriving public school students of the chance to learn from thesegifted writers, who go on to work at St. Paul's or Exeter? American schools in the past havebenefited from various social phenomena -- for instance, the limited opportunities once offered
to talented women and the sense of mission created by religious feelings and vocations. Both ofthese historical circumstances provided a pool of talented teachers.
The alert, competent students I met in the city of Washington that day left me with no doubtthat education in art is practical -- in fact, a vital necessity. The eagerness and skill of thoseyoungsters also made me wonder if we need more graduates of creative writing programs -- ofprograms in all the arts -- and more imaginative ways to use their ardor and their talent.
GRAPHIC: Drawing (Catherine Lazure)
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