Tag Archives: T&W Writers

Victor Hernández Cruz

“It is the job of writers to perceive and explain the truth. To get to the essence of things in this society is a monumental task of awareness.” – V. H. Cruz

Victor Hernández Cruz, born February 6, 1949 in Puerto Rico, grew up and went to school in Spanish Harlem New York. Cruz started writing at fifteen and his first chapbook, Papo Got His Gun! (Calle Once, 1966) was published when he was seventeen. His first collection, Snaps (Random House, 1969), was published three years later at the age of twenty. Cruz is known for blending English and Spanish into his spoken and written poetry (read about the Nuyorican Movement), and for writing about New York as a Puerto Rican. He writes as though he is a perpetual traveler, someone who has visited just long enough to feel at home in New York, California, Puerto Rico, Morocco, and Colorado.

When Urayoán Noel asked in an interview [published in the article “The Music That Is Yourself,” (T&W 38:2, 2007] about the effects of growing up with two languages, Cruz said, “It’s a limbo that I’ve learned to cultivate. I tell you, what’s more important is what I want to say. The question is, can I say it with more strength in English or in Spanish? I feel the subject itself, the content, will call forth the language it needs; the language chooses itself. …In my poetry I am also a student of history and, as I travel, I travel with that in mind. For me, traveling is just as important as investigation or reading texts because it’s seeing cultura viva (living culture)…You can see it in the kinds of food you eat, and in music influenced by this guitar or that melody.”  

In an interview with turnrow (2002), Cruz talked about how he became involved with Teachers & Writers Collaborative. “I met people [in 1968] who were important to me—Herbert Kohl, who I actually met in New York—he is an educator. … I met Ishmael Reed, the African-American novelist, who encouraged me and wrote about my early work. In California I was able to see New York from a distance, from a bird’s eye view. I usually write about places after I've left them.” In the interview with Urayoán Noel, Cruz elaborated on this:

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Anne Sexton

Passionate, confessional, inspired and distressed, Anne Sexton (1928-1974) contributed to Teachers & Writers as a poet-in-residence in 1967, the same year she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Live or Die (1966). Despite her critical and public acclaim, Sexton felt nervous as a teaching artist in the classroom much of the time, and she struggled with whether she could teach as an expert in her craft. One of her students wrote in a letter to Sexton [published in Journal of a Living Experiment (1979)], “If you think you are a failure to communicate with the kids you are wrong…If you think that you are a failure because you cannot find out what counts to us, you are also wrong…You made the students care.”

Sexton’s work as a writer in the schools followed not only her Pulitzer Prize, but also the publication of multiple collections of poetry and her collaboration with Maxine Kumin on four children’s books.  In her 1967 artist diary, which was published in a Journal of a Living Experiment, Sexton wrote, “I’m interested in what the kids like because I want to be more in touch with my real audience. I write for kids. People who grow up, half the time, most of the time, they forget how to feel.” Sexton’s diary entries are full of vivid descriptions of the kids, how they made her feel and how she and the classroom teacher, Bob Clawson, helped them to learn. She wrote, “The naughtiest kids are the ones with the most intelligence and the most creativity. They’re creating a scene in class and they can create a scene on paper just as well.”

“[Bob Clawson] said I was a poet and he a teacher, and we would keep journals and we’d like [the students] to do so if they would. One girl asked me what a journal was, was it a diary. I said yes, only longer and more truthful. I didn’t know.” Sexton was honest in the classroom and tried to teach her students by trying to learn who they were. She also struggled with poetry’s place in the classroom.  She mused, “Teaching them to be original, will it help them to get in to college? Is originality a commodity that’s useable?”

"I’m just a practicing writer. That doesn’t seem to affect [the students] too much,” Sexton
wrote in another journal entry, which was published in Anne Sexton: A Biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook (1991), “They’re not too surprised about my writing. I don’t think they’re impressed, which is all right with me. I don’t want to impress them. I want to stimulate them.”

-Sally Stark

Sally Stark held an internship at Teachers & Writers Collaborative last spring as a participant in the Coe College New York Term (www.coe.edu/newyorkterm).

Kenneth Koch

Kenneth Koch (1925-2002) is often linked to the founding of the New York School poets in the 1950s, a group that includes John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Barbara Guest. The seemingly spontaneous, cosmopolitan and exuberant poetry he wrote helped define not only characteristics of the New York School, but Koch’s work in New York City public schools.

“I was onto this new way of writing that I could tell people about, and help them to write, give them feelings of power, confidence, excitement,” Koch told Teachers & Writers Collaborative in an interview. Often, getting students to feel this excitement involved opening them up to poetry in the first place, which initially proved difficult.  "A lot of the best writers in that school already hated poetry,” Koch said, when talking about his work at P.S. 61, where he started teaching in 1968. He blamed some of this hatred on what he called “essay-poems,” poetry that was overly academic and that contained obligatory allusions to figures like Helen of Troy or Cuchulain. Koch wanted to make language fresh and concrete for his students. (more...)