Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part LXV)

Poetry is a primal experience as Louis Reyes Rivera explained in his essay, “Inside the River of Poetry”

‘Poetry, you see, is as old as breath itself. For when human beings across the planet simultaneously uttered that first initial sound, they gave rise to the same echo heard in the wail of every newborn child. The sound of that cry might be onomatopoeic, but its meaning is quite literal. "I am here, now!" This is the essential affidavit that serves as testament inside every person's compulsion to give voice to the voice, as condition urges vision, vision provokes thought, and thought pronounces the name of God: "I matter, too!"’
The quotation by Louis Reyes Rivera is from his essay appearing in In Motion Magazine (2002)

Students have an intrinsic desire, an impulse, to express themselves either through music, visually, kinetically, or through writing. Musician, artists, dancers, athletes and writers need a stage to practice on. That practice, including poetry and the small press experience, is sine qua non to the school’s curriculum.

Though some modern educators may wish to relegate poetry to a minor place in the classroom, it has historically assumed a larger share of attention.

Harry Smith in his essay, “Can Poets Conquer the World?” wrote that since Genesis,

“poetry was the whole world and all mysteries of being. It was the history of a people, definition of humanity, and book of knowledge; law and government, philosophy and theology, nutrition and hygiene, and guide to love. Such was true for the primal poets everywhere. This earliest literature was not only the entire character of many peoples but one of their primary entertainments too.”

In another essay “Naïve Manifesto” Smith stated,

“Our images are alchemy to transmute consciousness.”
Quotations by Harry Smith's are from the book of essays, The Word and Beyond: Four Literary Cosmologists (1982)

American educators prepare future citizens to exercise their right to free expression. Schools that teach poetry and the small press publishing experience can connect that with how students authentically learn.

Richard Kostelanetz wrote, “What Waterways does is provide aspiring writers with playing fields and thus the opportunity for informal peer review. Obviously, the young writer who wins more readers will be a bit further along, much as the young athlete who earns more fans or gets chosen first when teams are put together has accomplished a career step.”

Richard Kostelanetz' essay, Notes on Waterways Pedagogical Project, first appeared in Home Planet News (2000)