Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XLVII)

Although schools emphasize endings and moving on (when the bell rings students put aside their work and go on to the next subject), Waterways looked at publication not as an end product, but as a step in the learning process. Many alternative high school students were in constant transition. Many Offsite Educational Services (OES) teachers were able to combine the Waterways publications with their classroom assignments. Waterways was designed to assist the classroom teacher, who would also be addressing the needs of the host site. The first publication from OES's Upper West Side Manhattan DAYTOP site opened with “Don’t Waste Your Life” -- which the class voted to use as the name of their magazine.

My name is David. My age is 16. I was born in October 1970. I was once a drug user. I used to use crack combined with weed. It is called “ruler”. I used it once and then twice until it became a habit. I used it every day ($200 to $300 a day). I would go out and steal things like radios, clocks, gold, etc. I also used to steal from my stepfather until one day I got a job in a crack house making $400 a day. When I got the pay it was all gone within five hours. I would smoke it up in rulers. One day I made about $800 and by the next morning it was gone! When I went home my chest was hurting a lot. I thought I might die. I began to say to myself, “I am going to die.”
My heart was beating very fast so I went outside. It was about 7 a.m. and I robbed a school teacher to get more. I got caught and I was very scared because I knew I was going to jail. My mother came and got me from the precinct. The next day I told my mother I needed help. I wanted to become drug-free and that is how I got into DAYTOP. Before smoking crack I got so thin that I was 130 pounds and a size 28. I am proud to say today I’ve gained weight (155 pounds and a size 31). Give me a couple of days and I will wear a size 32 and weigh 170 pounds! Guaranteed! I hope you don’t do crack because it is wack.

Then came “Changes” by Lucas:

Changing from getting high to being straight
Just as love changes into hate.
Life and my problems seem different today;
No more drugs to chase them away.
Courage has changed to fear.
My crutch is no longer here.
No. It’s very clear to me.
Change can control my destiny.
Adjusting to my new way,
I will change with every day.

The next issue of Don’t Waste Your Life opened with Those Winter Mornings by David (after he read Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden)

Every morning my mother wakes me by yelling out -- “It’s 7:30.
Time to get up.”
That is why I hate her.
‘Cause I would for once like to sleep to 8:00.
Maybe 8:15.
But,
She wakes me up anyway.

It was followed by Amanda’s poem, “Life”

Life is made of many things
But it has two meanings.
Life of joy and life of pain.
You have them both,
but they’re not the same.
All want one, the one of fun,
But that way there’s nothing done.
No one wants the one of pain,
For it is a lonely lane.
Life is hard
And life is fun
For both
Two meanings join as one.

Later that year, Amanda died tragically, and the first issue of Streams was dedicated to her.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XLVI)

Misael, a student at Island Academy, who had been truant through most of his school career, was labeled by the schools as uneducable and mentally retarded. That changed after the school based support team read the stories he told me his story in the computer room. As he spoke I typed out his words. He took the printout to his dorm, worked with a C.O., and brought it back with his suggested revisions.

Have you ever been in the boy scouts when you were a kid? I was...

I want to talk about the Always Crazy Crew Posse. My story of a posse that can’t be stopped. Yes, it’s the ACC Posse from Brooklyn at Coney Island.

The ACC is like a little army because we lie to fight wars. Yes. We do carry the pump shotguns, the thirty thirty Winchesters and the sawed off double barrels and the 25 automatic. Yes, to be in the posse you can’t be a chump. You’ve got to go all out. You’ve got to fight with all of us. Then you’ve got to get initiated... firewhippings on your back. You know... when you get whipped by everybody five times.

I started when my big brother (He’s the second leader of the ACC) heard me ask if I could join the posse. He told me yes, but you have to listen and learn what to do. He told me you can’t be scared of fighting. You can’t be scared of shooting. You can’t be scared of getting hurt and no ratting on where we get the guns if you get busted.

So I said yes and I took the whole test. This was no joke. It was no school. It was an army war.

The first tumble I had was at the Marlborough Projects. Yes, it started at Kaiser Park. A crew from Marlborough threw a jam at Kaiser Park. There was one girl from Marlborough who’d invited us to the party. She said there wouldn’t be any fighting. So me and the boys said alright. Everything would be peaceful, but don’t let them try to front on us. ‘Cause if they try to front on us we’re going to bust out wide open.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XLV)

Ronald King became a Waterways’ teaching artist after having served a sentence for a juvenile crime. He earned a diploma while incarcerated, studying writing and psychology. He joined Mark Crawford and Matthew Hejna-Luque to publish, Connections, a literary magazine. Poets in the Schools hired him to teach poetry to young women at the Hegeman Diagnostic Reception Center in East New York, Brooklyn and he also worked with Louis Reyes Rivera. His Waterways assignment was as teacher at the Rose M. Singer High School in the woman’s house of detention on Riker’s Island. He used his skills to teach and counsel. His student, Dorothy, was published in Streams 3.

Young Mothers in Jail
by Dorothy Jasper

Sweet mothers, jail moms
With stomachs big and round
Full of so much life
In such a place, a state of
Bars and slamming doors
Hard core times, young mothers
Babes with babies. Pretty moms
Used and abused. Jailed mothers
Hope your babies stay free.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XLIV)

Another incarcerated student, who worked with Matthew Hejna, wrote under the pseudonym of José Respeto. He published “A Day in the Life” in the Winter ’91 issue of Strictly Business. He begins his story of 24 hours at 7:30 a.m. on a school day.

What’s up, man? You wasn’t getting up at 7:30 in the morning in New York, but if I don’t get up now the C.O. will be by my cell in about five minutes and then I’ll have to answer to him. Man, if he ain’t have that badge on his chest he won’t be shit. If I was in New York... Damn the world, damn this place and everyone in it. Got to brush my teeth, wash my face and comb my hair. Got my fly clothes on. Gots to show brothers I’m living large. Yup, got the fly kicks on too. I’m looking proper.

Time to walk out for school. Hold up, let me just flex in the mirror right quick and make sure everything is in the right place. Yup, just as I thought. Oh man, almost forgot the burner. Can’t go nowhere without my burner. Just in case a brother try and front. Alright got some brothers checking me out. How do they do it? Oh yeah, just keep your arms pretty much still. Don’t swing ‘em, just move your shoulders and bop to the side a little. Yeah, now you got the walk, let’s work on the face I’m gonna wear for the rest of the day. Okay, keep your jaws tight, squint your eyes a little. Now, drop your eyebrows. That’s it. I’m on a roll now. Man, am I a trooper or what? Yeah, that’ll put fear in their heart. They won’t even look at me no more. They better not.

Man, I hate walking in a damn line, like we’re in grade school or something. We’re passing another house. Look hard. You ain’t new to this. A little more on the walk...right, riiight. What’s that? Mod 11? Man, them brothers are ass! Get ready, if any jump off, just keep swinging. Keep on looking hard. Yeah, they know better. Our house is the chop shop. I really could do without the riot squad though. The riot squad. Man, listen...if I was in New York...

Man, these teachers be bugging out. What I need to know all this geometry stuff for? As long as I can count my money, I’m straight. Man, what I need to come to school for anyway? I wasn’t going to school in New York. Well, I was, but it sure wasn’t for no geometry--them girls was fly. These teachers be looking good, too. Man, if I was in New York...

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XLIII)

William was a student incarcerated on Rikers Island. He came to Matthew Hejna’s Waterways editorial meetings with a story he was working on in the dorm. “Murder, He Wrote” was first published in Strictly Business (Vol. 4 No. 1) and then anthologized in Streams 7. The location was the South Bronx where the narrator related a psychological exploration of crime and punishment.

We walked in past a bunch of tires, a place where bums sometimes sleep. A lot of burnt cars were around, underneath the train tracks from where the 6 train comes out of the tunnel. This place was known to me and my man as the car cemetery. In there was a little of something: crack bottles, needles, old rags, human waste and dead dogs that either got shot or electrocuted. It was also a place to get rid of people, so my partner knew someone was going to die that night, he just never thought it was going to be him.

-------------

After he finished talking I pulled out my 38, and told him to keep walking. When he saw the gun he looked at me and knew one of us wasn’t walking out of there alive. “Why man, why me?” I remember the look in his eyes. Scared. Desperate. As if he was going out of his mind. All that came out of his mouth were begs, “Let me go, man, please, Columbia, let me go.”

“Shut up, man,” I told him, not out of anger but because his words were making me think twice about it. I felt tears accumulating in my eyes and then rolling down my face. “It’s me, kid, top of the world. Just me,” I said.

“I love you man. We are all we got.”

“Yo, Gee, I got to think of me. We all got to go someday. Your time just ended. Nothing personal, just business.”

“I’m scared, man, I don’t know what’s on the other side. Let me live, give me a chance,” was the last thing he said.

I knew if I let him go I wouldn’t last three days. That’s the type of people I got involved with. To their eyes, it’s either live or die. As I talked to him, he tried a desperate move and reached for his gun, so I shot him twice in the head.

-------------

After that I didn’t think like a rational man. I didn’t care much for human life. Whenever I felt disrespected, I pulled out the gun and shot and asked questions later. One day I was walking across the street a little drunk. I tried to jump over a low chain fence and fell. These two girls that I knew from my block started laughing at me. I don’t know what came over me, but the next thing I knew I pulled out my gun and shot at them.

-------------

I remember I used to ask myself, “Why does he not leave me alone? He’s dead.” But the more I tried to forget about it the more I suffered. I tried to go outside, stay around people but it never worked. He haunted me. Every time I saw money, Gee’s face flashed in my mind. His blood called me day and night and I always ended up back in the car cemetery where I took his life. I used to stay there sometimes from one in the morning to sometime the next day, just smoking and drinking, crying and asking him to forgive me.

Then I got arrested. Now I think to myself how foolish I was. It was all a dream, a fantasy, nothing but a foolish lie. All that money I had and today I don’t even have a bank account. My so called friends don’t even send me a letter. They are too busy chasing their own fantasies. As for my family, well I gave them up on the first $1000 that came. I’m only 17 years old and feel older than dirt itself. To make things worse I have a 10 to 20 year sentence on my back and a criminal record the size of an atlas. I know I’m going to die in jail. I’m facing the fact because once I go up north I ain’t coming back. The brothers of people that I have killed are upstate counting the days for me to get there.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XLII)

Ray, an OES student at Odyssey House, wrote an account of street dancing and gangs in Brooklyn. The story ended with the death of his friend during a concert at the Atlantic Avenue Armory. “The Fast Life” was published in Streams 2.

Little David came walking up the Ave. with the Gates Ave. Posse. Little David was the youngest of the posse; for he was only fourteen. We let him hang with us, because he had a lot of heart for a young guy. Most all, he could dance his ass off.

David and I were the dancers of the group. But he and I didn’t get along too well, for the simple fact that we used to battle in dancing 24-7.

So David and the Gates Ave. Posse came up to us. We started really bugging. We started hooting and screaming, “Go Brooklyn! Go Brooklyn!”

-------------

Later on that night, at the Armory, there was a lot of fighting going on. It was a fight for the borough of Brooklyn. It seemed like the whole borough teamed up to fight Bed/Stuy.

But they still had no wind. We were on our turf. We had a big rumble. I got caught out there with brass knuckles over my right eye. That’s why I got a scar there.

Cops came, and the crowd dispersed. A small amount of my posse made it into the Armory. So did the other posses.

Time passed by. We started enjoying ourselves. The last time I saw David, he was getting into some beef with some dude ‘cause David was freaking the dude’s girl.

-------------

The next thing you knew, the ambulance had arrived. They went into the Armory. They came back out with David on the stretcher. Blood was gushing out of his head. They tried to stop it, but nothing worked. All of a sudden, he started having convulsions. Blood started running out of his mouth, nose and head. Then he just looked up at the sky and died.

It messed me up bad. People were screaming. The Bed/Stuy Posse started beating up everybody they saw.

I didn’t take part in it. All I thought about was a grade-A kid, who started hanging out with the wrong crowd. The streets took over. And now he is dead. I started to question myself. Will my life end like that, too?

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XLI)

A variant on Molyneaux’s Question: Suppose a person, who did not read books, be made to read in school. Could the person learn through reading to empathize more with others and come away with a better understanding of human nature?

Students struggle with words. The printed page gives otherwise silent students a voice among their peers. It is also a challenge for many to participate.

For sixteen years Streams was distributed through alternative high school classrooms. Lorraine and Tommy’s computer correspondence was published in Streams 1. She was verbal:


I know that I talk a lot, but when you respond, I hope you can give me just as much. When I came into the computer room, the first thing I said was, “Richard, do you have a letter from my pen pal?" And he told me that you didn’t finish. Don’t make me wait too long. Well, it’s time to go. The next letter is on you.

She faulted him for not being able to keep up his part of the conversation:

Lately your letters have been getting kind of ‘relaxed’. When I take out the time to write you a descriptive, fully detailed letter, I expect you to do the same thing. I’m the kind of girl who likes a challenge and lately you haven’t satisfied that need at all. You’re gonna have to come better than you have been if you wish to continue these brief conversations.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XL)

I was awoken this morning by screams from the street. A woman moans. She wants to go home. She calls to her mother, “I want to go home.” What terrors beset her? Why is she crying? She wants to go home.

Is silence an option? Will words respond to the ways and woes of the world?

In 1986, the Waterways Project of Ten Penny Players rushed into print many instant publications. My week was scheduled so that I visited a different social service agency each day. On Tuesdays I visited Educational Alliance’s Project Contact. At the time, it was housed in a large loft on Lafayette Street near Astor Place. Students came for outpatient substance abuse treatment, high school classes and counseling.

The Waterways Project was offered as part of the public school's Offsite Educational Services’ arts and literacy initiatives. It also fit with Project Contact’s multi-disciplinary approach to treatment. Pity, fears and joys were expressed in lines of poetry.

From Contact Charisma (1986)
Broken Dreams by Robbi

Dreams are a part of the future, past and present.
The past sets off pain and feelings that are sent.
They are thoughts of broken dreams.
The winds of love say, “I’ll dress you in the morn,
so you can conquer life
and all its strife.
I’ll rest you in the evening,
so that things are good
and done right.
I’ll quench you with with love,
so you never have to thirst again.”
But, I have struggled with strife.
I was dressed in mistrust and deception.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
I pleaded, “Wind why do you do me so?
I thought we were a team?”
The wind did not answer.
I turned and walked. I knew
it was just another broken dream.

Students published pieces to help their peers address past traumas and cope with the present:

“Father, do you see what I am going through?
Sometimes it is hard to say how I feel about you.
The boy in me still feels the pain; the trouble you have caused...
There is no one to blame.”

“Come to me with eyes most discerning.
Acknowledge what has happened.
Don’t lose sight of lessons past.
Don’t allow negative distracting thoughts to last.”

Students wrote computer pen pal letters to students in other programs.

“My hobbies are girls, basketball, bicycle riding, and partying.”

“I just finished going hysterical, because I never knew a person who would like poems. Being that I come from Brooklyn, you don’t normally hear things like that. You know what I mean? I really would like to see one of your poems; and in turn I will show you a couple of my own.”

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XXXIX)

Patterns
Structural Awareness

Our minds seek out structure. As I began teaching writing at alternative school sites, I scheduled visits to sites around the city. Each week would repeat the pattern.

Teaching became a matter of gaining the trust of students so that they were willing to share their work. I could help students find space, in the classroom's public arena, to verbally express their urgings and concerns. The street vernacular mixed with the language of the classroom. Expressions of fear and pity in public served as catharsis and bridges of empathy.

One of the classroom exercises was the group sestina. I picked that up from sitting in on Bob Holman’s St. Marks in the Bowery poetry workshop. It meant patterning the group to play with six words, six lines and six stanzas.

Here’s an example of two stanzas from a sestina composed at Project Contact’s Lafayette Street loft.

“I’m pregnant, Ace,” cried Rosy.
“It’s all because of Ramon.
‘Cause he raped me at the Series.”
“I’ll pull out a pistol,” said Ace.
“And he shall be chastised
And be called Ramon the late.”

Ace said he had to leave, because he was late
for his mission. So later for our Rosy and for Ramon.
Rosy began to cry for Ace,
while Rosy’s mother looked for and chastised
Ramon. As her crying daughter Rosy
looked for Ace and found him at the series.

The sestinas may have been fragmentary and sketchy, but they gave the group an opportunity for structured play with words.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XXXVIII)

What writing, creative expression, or poetry would the Waterways Project of Ten Penny Players find in classrooms set up by Alternative High Schools and Programs to serve youth taken from their homes and young adults living in shelters? In this city with so much misery, could the voice of the hurt communicate to a world of mainstream and traditional values? Would sharing the expression of students’ anxieties, complaints, concerns and joys establish an empathy to bridge the gap between communities isolated within the city

The student wrote to express an inner, often terrified, voice. Writing took form from painful areas -- the death of a friend or the loss of a home. Would writing about their problems help students cope with their lives? Would schools give solace to the students by providing an audience for their poetry?

Publication was a new experience for the alternative high school students in 1980’s. Was their literature the writing of victims? These students were not victims, if they took control, acted, and wrote. They needed to advocate for themselves and articulate their sense of justice.

Beyond discovering the talented writers, Waterways wanted to enable new writers, to gain the trust of the silent students, who had yet to share their writing. Students, who mistrusted the schools, did not come to class with work they wanted to share. Concerned alternative educators reached out to these kids, hoping to change minds and amplify understanding.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XXXVII)

The pensive man . . . He sees the eagle float
For which the intricate Alps are a single nest.

Wallace Stevens, Connoisseur of Chaos

The surprise is to arrive. Our hearts beat hard. The decoded message sublimates our anxieties. The Waterways Project of Ten Penny Players in partnership with the Office of Alternative High Schools and Programs began publishing Streams in the spring of 1987. The pages that follow will tell the story of Waterways’ work with schools and its role in the emergent field of arts in education.

The snow, that fell last winter, is no longer on the ground. It’s the middle of spring. Barbara, Thomas, and I walk our dog, Chewbacca, about the hills, trees, homes, and parks on the north shore of Staten Island. We’re an unconventional family living in an old house filled with pets and papers. Our relationship has structured our way of thinking, working, and writing.

I come to this moment with my fears and hopes--

all the despair and the making music
something like wave after wave
that breaks on a beach
something like bringing the entire life
to this moment

Muriel Rukeyser, Poem White Page, White Page Poem

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XXXVI)

Along with looking at the mechanics of writing, Waterways teachers watched how students responded to peer writing. Responses would differ according to the students’ social awareness. Waterways could model social awareness through discussions of Streams anthologies in family groups at alternative schools.

Thought and language are transformed through social interactions. A person’s individual perspective and self awareness grow in relation to the surrounding community. Students were surprised to find themselves studying the informal communications between students. A floppy disk and a computer facilitated correspondence between students attending class in Alternative High Schools and Programs. A GED student, reacting to the “irresponsible attitude” of a pen pal letter by a resident in a drug treatment program, wrote a response which Waterways published.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XXXV)

The teenager asked, “How come I'm not in this book?”

“Well you can be in it if only you’d sit down and write.”

The teenager, “What will I write about?”

“Anything that comes to your head.”

“Is that poetry? I can’t write well.”

“You can if you share what you think. If you can think you can write. If you breathe perhaps you can think. Respiration leads to inspiration.”

What about the people in the hospital? The young lady who could not communicate. Who was a alone in her bed. Her body was no longer capable of gesture or movement.

“I can’t write. My fingers won’t move.”

Or the communication disorders associated with echolalia, autism, cerebral palsy or dyslexia?

“I can’t make my tongue move. It’s locked in my mouth.”

The tongue articulates thought, but Stephen Hawking, the physicist with ALD, communicates through a machine. Special educators have used computers to assist other students with a range of disabilities to speak. The computer has given the writer access to other readers.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XXXIV)

In 1983 Chancellor Anthony Alvarado set up New York City’s Office of Alternative Schools and Programs, providing support for the small schools that were lost amidst the city’s large traditional high schools. Superintendent Stephen Phillips and his assistant, Marcia Brevot, oversaw many of the cutting edge alternative education strategies which innovative educators shared.

Waterways combined individualized student centered strategies with the use of computers, word processing, and photocopiers to create many inexpensive student publications. Teaching artists shared publications and carried floppy disks between program sites. Anything students wrote would be published. Peers studying the writing would raise questions as to what made for good writing and poetry.

“In pursuing poetic discoveries there is no need to rely on the support of rules, even those decreed by taste, and seek a quality classified as the sublime.”

Guillaume Appolinaire. The New Spirit and the Poets
translated by Roger Shattuck

We brought the publications outside the community where the authors attended school. Publishing was part of the process of sharing writing. The educational process didn’t end with the publication. After publication, the material was read aloud, put on stage, and translated into other languages or media.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XXXIII)

Along with the transformations of individual students, classrooms, and schools that took place at the onset of the Twenty First Century were changes in the body of literature as well as the community of readers and writers in the greater society. There was a greater interest in hearing diverse ethnic voices and learning about the diversity of cultures, including the cultures of persons with disabilities. City and state leaders in education were discovering that the kids, who had been written off as triage, were students with something to say.

Students were writing for their peers as well as for their teachers. They were inspired by what they read, and their writing in turn inspired other students to write. The work of Ten Penny Players was influenced by other New York City writing projects that were happening contemporaneously, including Poets In The Schools, Poetry In Public Places, New Youth Connections, The NuYorican Poets, Teachers And Writers, Bank Street College, and Columbia University.

We brought the independent alternative of small press publishing into the classroom. As students published their work they learned that their writing could effect interpersonal relationships. As New York City's Alternative High School and Program students in the 1980’s began using the computers to creatively compose, they also recognized the influence of their written work which they performed at the Waterways’ publication parties and book fairs.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XXXII)

Raising consciousness, from withdrawn silence
to the public statement, one step at a time.

At the Waterways book fairs children and adults performed together. They were published together in the magazine that documented the event. When Ten Penny Players brought the Waterways Project into New York City public schools, we found that the educational administration had isolated diverse communities of learners, particularly those with learning disabilities and/or behavior problems. The Waterways publications could help to bring their voices back into the mainstream.

The little books Waterways brought into the classroom presented student voices that had not been represented by other books. The students who were removed from the mainstream and marginalized could read and respond to their peers. The publications were not ends in themselves, but would be used to motivate reluctant learners to read and write.

Students attending alternative classes in rehab or prison programs were writing to understand their lives and the world about them. Studying their own and peer writing would be a transformative process and part of their education.

From 1988:

Streams 2

From 2000:

Streams 14

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XXXI)

New York City’s Alternative Schools and Programs addressed the affective nature of learning. Compassion was modeled at the beginning of each school day in Family Group. Small groups of students discussed the issues that were on their minds and other issues raised by peer writing.

Matt Hejna, the Waterways teaching artist working with incarcerated students at Rikers Island Educational Facility, met with students in the principal’s office. These students formed the editorial board of their magazine, Strictly Business, and spoke to each other about their writing. They would criticize and take the criticism. Back at their dorms they worked on their writing.

Did the written word express what the authors wanted to say? What was going on in their minds? One of Matt’s students wrote of the increased paranoia of a drug dealer in a society plagued with drugs. It was good writing. The communication took on a social relevance. Many “reluctant learners” were responding.

Strictly Business Vol. 3 No. 1

Strictly Business Vol 4 No 1

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XXX)

Participants came to the weekly Jefferson Market library workshop to discuss the aesthetic impulse. The need to make room for poetry in their lives. I brought in poetry based on my readings in historic period or poetic style. Each person around the table spoke for a minute. Everyone would have a say.

At the same time Ten Penny Players began working with Alternative High Schools and Programs. I brought the format established at the library into the classrooms at the Muse School, the Harvey Milk School, Odyssey House, Phoenix House, DAYTOP, YWCA, LUCHA, Veritas, East Harlem Music School, PRACA, and Project Contact.

After reading from peer writing from other sites, the students wrote. Then each student spoke about what was on their mind for a minute. The class would listen, but not comment except in writing. They spoke about issues in their lives. The kids spoke about being homeless, being locked out, getting picked up, and asserting their identities. They needed to speak out, get counseling, and learn from their peers.

Not all teachers were comfortable with open discussions in the classroom. Some kept a quiet atmosphere and focused on studying for exams. Their attitude was that the students did not want to be in school, so they wound up in alternative sites. Against their will, but for their own good. These teachers also appreciated the kids and wanted to help. But what could they do for the really reluctant youth who did not want to be in school?

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XXIX)

After studying the starving poets in the Village garrets of the Twenties, the Jefferson Market Library workshop looked at poetry magazines that emerged during the Great Depression of the 1930’s. A major resource for information about the period was The Dream and The Deal: The Federal Writer’s Project, 1935-1943 by Jerre Mangione.



We looked at the Federal Writer’s Project efforts to publish a magazine of contemporary poets. Kenneth Patchen, Maxwell Bodenheim, and Harry Roskolenko were poets involved in the project. The first hand experiences of workshop participants shed light into the period. Some of the participants knew the poets we discussed.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XXVIII)

At the Jefferson Market Library, the weekly poetry workshop discussed the writers and the small publications from the Greenwich Village. I brought photocopied samples of work from the first quarter of the Twentieth Century that included poetry by ee cummings, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Maxwell Bodenheim, Djuna Barnes, Robert Clairmont, Peggy Bacon, Theodore Dreiser, Josephine Bell, Max Eastman, Mary Carolyn Davies, Harry Kemp, Helen Louise Merritt, Alfred Kreymbourg, Lola Ridge, Eli Siegel, and Kay Boyle; and pages from presses that published poetry such as Bruno’s Bohemia, The Quill, Egmont Arens’s Playboy, and The Masses.

We traced the transformation of the Masses into the Liberator and the New Masses. We followed the editor of The Quill, Arthur Moss. Upset with Prohibition, he left the U.S. and Greenwich Village for Paris and the left bank where he published another bohemian literary magazine he called Gargoyle.

My friend P.J. (Paul Johnston, 1899-1987) was a fine press printer who arrived in the Village shortly after the First World War. He recalled how Edna St. Vincent Millay challenged the sexual mores of the nation in the days before she left Greenwich Village for Paris.

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -
It gives a lovely light.
(Millay in "A Few Figs from Thistles" 1920)

P.J. lived across the street from the Jefferson Market Library in an apartment that in 1920 belonged to his friend, the publisher of the first Playboy (1919), Egmont Arens.

Playboy 1919

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XXVII)

There is a mystical moment of inspiration and recognition that bridges the gulf between poetry and prose. Could the muse be tamed to inspire poetry during a 90 minute workshop? It may happen during the process of writing, reading, rewriting, and rereading. My approach to the poetry workshop was to present models, explore structures, and play with spontaneous verbal and visual statements.

Waterways eschewed the neatly polished matte or glossy look of journals that took themselves much more seriously. We relied on the technology we had at home in our loft. Barbara did the editing and proofreading. We turned our teachers salaries into the project to keep our printer going. We published only poetry, and no advertisements. We trusted our reactions to the work. Barbara did most of the reading and set standards for Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream. No haiku. Seldom publish rhyme. No gratuitous sex or violence, since Waterways was aimed at a mixed audience of children and adults.

The workshop in the library grew. There is a videotape of a workshop where we discussed a Wordsworth sonnet that concluded with the sestet:

Wisdom doth live with children round her knees:
Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk
Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk
Of the mind's business: these are the degrees
By which true Sway doth mount; this is the stalk
True Power doth grow on; and her rights are these.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XXVI)

In the 1980’s, Barbara and I taught weekly workshop at the Jefferson Market branch of the New York Public Library. Barbara worked with the children. The adults studied Greenwich Village poets and publishers of the early Twentieth Century.

After 1910, the Village began to assert itself as the cultural cauldron for American artists and writers. The Masses, whose editorial offices were once located in the Village not far from the library, was in the forefront of a series of publications that presented a community of poets and artists.

A creative community of writers emerged out of the Jefferson Market library workshop which continued for fifteen years. The participants were open to new work by new writers with different values. There was a willingness to look for the experience that makes a poem work whether in a group or as an individual.

Many of the participants in my workshop were older than me. The participants in Barbara’s workshop were children, although many of our friends who were senior residents of the community would sit in and listen to poetry the children wrote. As facilitators, We’d learn from the community of writers that came to our workshops, which were open to the public in a public place where all might be comfortable and feel included.

Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream Vol. 2 No. 2 Jefferson Market branch NYPL

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XXV)

The Jefferson Market Library workshop met weekly to explore the history of Greenwich Village poets and poetry publications to which “Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream” was a very recent and very small addition. We published both child and adult participants in theme issues, which included an annual valentine to the Village. Through amiable participation in open discussions about poetry, publishing and history, the group learned from each other.

For a discussion of poetry from the Masses leading up to World War I, our photocopier printed enough copies of poetry excerpted from the magazine for the group to share. Participants could look on the text as it was read aloud. The Masses, whose editorial board included Max Eastman, John Sloan, and Witter Bynner, published socially engaged art and poetry. It took an anti war stand, and encouraged resistance to the draft. Our group discussion included Dorothy Meyer, a retired teacher. She shared with me her husband’s book, “Hey, Yellowbacks!” Ernest Meyer was a progressive journalist from Wisconsin who was jailed in Forth Leavenworth for refusing military service as a conscientious objector during the First World War. In the workshop, Dorothy shared anecdotes about her acquaintances with the poets and writers of the Village who summered in Provincetown. She recalled the time she mended the trousers of the hobo poet, Harry Kemp who had been living out in the dunes.

The participants loved literature and good company. Dorothy’s friend, Josephine recited in Latin the opening stanzas to Virgil’s Aeneid. Another participant, Gertrude Morris, was quick to correct me any time I misquoted a line from T. S. Eliot. My friends from the community poets also came to participate in the workshop. Barbara Holland came most frequently. We were also visited by Emilie Glenn, Matt Laufer, Richard Davidson, and Sidney Bernard. My friend, Paul Johnston, who published the Poetry Quartos in 1929, lived across the street from the library and paid a visit to the workshop.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XXIV)

In 1973 Suzie Kaufman and I taped a small poster on a lamp post at the corner of West 85th and Columbus Avenue. It announced an open poetry reading to be held that evening in the brownstone where we lived. The result was the Scribblers. A series of weekly poetry readings were held in the Upper West Side apartments of Vincenetta Gunn, Arlene Rosen, and Mary Seltzer, all along West 85th Street between Central Park West and Amsterdam Avenue. The next year, Rissa Korsun arranged with the Goddard Riverside Community Center for the Scribblers to hold workshops and print a broadside in a West 88th Street brownstone. Norman Bright set up a series of Scribblers’ readings at the English Pub on 57th Street and Seventh Avenue across the Street from Carnegie Hall which continued until 1975.

In 1975, my brother, Dennis, suggested I explore the possibility of presenting poetry at St. Clement’s, on West 46th Street. I arranged to meet with the vicar, Henry Sturdevant and members of the the church board. As a result a series of weekly poetry readings were scheduled to start after 10 pm on weeknights in a small theater space. The church also made available a 200 seat theater and sanctuary for marathon benefit readings. Steep and narrow stairs led to the third floor where a room was set aside for a small press library and in 1979 a poetry workshop led by Janet Bloom. By that time I had turned the running of the poetry program over to Mary Clark.

In 1980, Barbara Fisher and I approached the librarians at the landmark Jefferson Market Library (19th century courthouse on 6th Avenue). We offered to conduct weekly poetry writing workshops, one for children and one for adults. A table was set aside for us in the children’s room. Barbara led the children’s workshop and I worked with the adults. During the 15 years (1980-95) I facilitated this workshop it was held in the children’s room, the upstairs staff lounge, and the auditorium. When I left, Phyllis Braun took over the coordination of the program.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XXIII)

Educators have to confront the persistence of low performing students and resistant learners. Traditionally schools have failed, suspended, or expelled, while alternative and special educators have reached out to their troubled students. To achieve the goal of universal public education, educators needed to recognize the value in all learners and all learning. From 1986 to 2003, through publications and peer review Ten Penny Players motivated and challenged New York City Alternative High School students to write creatively.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XXII)

“When old and familiar things are made new in experience, there is imagination. When the new is created, the far and strange become the most natural inevitable things in the world. There is always some measure of adventure in the meeting of mind and universe, and this adventure is, in its measure, imagination.”

John Dewey, Art as Experience

“Though fashion may imitate the tone of innovation and exploit the myth of its value, the aim of fashion is standardization the goal of fashion’s creators is a successful formula. The avant-garde artist, by contrast, is interested in discovery and self-transcendence.”

Richard Kostelanetz, The Avant Garde Tradition in Literature

Nurturing transformative creative experiences, since 1979 Ten Penny Players has published expressive writing by students from New York City’s five boroughs in magazines, anthologies, and chapbooks. Often the books provide the inspiration that propels the student beyond constant mimesis or repetition of what was done before. Developing new audiences for poetry, the Waterways Project of Ten Penny Players made books available for free to students. The costs of publication were covered by contributions from schools and foundations. Ten Penny's co-directors, their friends and family also contributed funds and labor to sustain the work.

Ten Penny Player’s mission is to engage and include communities in creative experiences. Many students, who had been ignored by the public schools, were published in, and reading Streams and other Waterways publications. Students, who had never written in class, asked their teachers why they weren’t included in the books. The voices they read were familiar. Reading peer writing motivated the reluctant learners.

Beginning in the early 1990’s, students in Alternative Programs (VTC, OES, CEC, Island Academy, Brooklyn Literacy Center, and West Side High School) participating in Learn and Serve America, discussed and wrote about their service experiences in reflection periods where they read what their peers published in Waterways chapbooks and anthologies. Waterways facilitated the sharing of individual experiences, observations, and hopes through reading, writing, and publishing poems.

In his poem, “Endure the Beginning of Terror Which Leads to Beauty,” Ephraim wrote:

For I am terrified, but goodness sets its place

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XXI)

Ten Penny Players’ small photocopier printed site based magazines in editions of between fifty to one hundred copies that Barbara and I collated and saddle stitched.

“Our goal as teacher-learners becomes not so much the delivering of knowledge or even of skills. It is to re-form or transform people’s orientations-as-a-whole to personal, work, and civic life. Prime subject matter become that implied in perceiving and evaluating any experiences, as they occur in the contexts of classroom subject matter, student interactions, in home street, anywhere.”

Rachel Lauer

Theodore Roethke’s poem My Papa’s Waltz inspired Athena to write,

Even though the many kids
Dread his heavy hand
They hang on his every word
His wish is their command.

Generous with his money
Til all of it is gone
When the pockets are cold and empty
He works with his friend John.

He works real hard to make it right
And give his kids their every delight

The Waterways Project of Ten Penny Players curriculum grew out of the diverse voices from New York City’s Alternative High School students. In reading, writing, publishing, and discussing poetry, we asked the student to hear what they were thinking, listen to their words, and use those words as material in the creation of art.

Ten Penny Players’ small poetry press publishing curriculum and the advent of desktop publishing came at a time when public schools sought to include more students and meet the needs of students with disabilities. The small site based publications were used in classrooms as vehicles for private introspection, to reinforce academic subjects, and to reflect on providing service for others.