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:

“[Kohl] always tells me that I was one of the first poets to go into the schools—I suppose I should take his word for it. I met him when I went to high school in Spanish Harlem. I was at Benjamin Franklin High School and he was working with a group of people in an alternative school in a storefront in the neighborhood. They came looking for students who wanted to participate in these after-hours creative writing and drawing classes and I was very interested in all of that, so I started going there to take classes. After a while I started to lead little workshops and to talk to students about writing. And this all came about because of Herb Kohl’s encouragement. …It was a good experience: It gave me a connection with those first days of Teachers & Writers Collaborative, and experiences that helped develop my teaching skills.”

When Noel asked how teaching informs Cruz’s writing, he said “When you discuss the work of other people it makes you see your own work more clearly. You learn what other people see in your work, and how your own work can be misinterpreted. …When you’re teaching in a class and talking to students, what they get out of the poem helps you see if the spirit of what you were writing got through or not.”

“When you teach writing, it’s not like teaching how to fix an electric contraption, or teaching mechanics. You teach awareness, you make people aware of the subtleties of the written and phonetic aspects of a poem, the silent spaces and musical sounds.” –VHC, T&W, 38:2, 2007.

Cruz’s collections of poetry include Maraca: New and Selected Poems 1965-2000 (Coffee House Press 2001), Paper Dance: 55 Latino Poets (Cruz as editor, Persea Books 1995), and The Mountain in the Sea (Coffee House Press 2006). Cruz is also a founder of The Before Columbus Foundation. 

-Sally Stark

Sally is a recent graduate of English and Creative Writing at Coe College (Cedar Rapids, IA); she was an intern at Teachers & Writers Collaborative last winter and spring.

The Lower East Side
was faster than the speed
Of light
A tornado of bricks
and fire escapes
In which you had to grab
on to something or take
Off with the wayward winds—

from The Lower East Side of Manhattan — Victor Hernández Cruz

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).

“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.

“When I had kids write directly –I mean directly in the sense of, when they write about what they think about the President or what they think about their block, they always wrote dull,” he said. “I obviously wanted very quickly to make people do something else when they seem to me to be stuck in other people’s language, other people’s ideas.” Koch urged students to write about their own wishes and dreams, to make things up if they wanted. “You can put in a lot of colors, wishes, lies, dreams, bananas, grapefruit, songs,” he told a class.

His success in the classroom led him to write several books about teaching poetry to children, including Wishes, Lies and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry (1970) and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? (1973).  He credits his work through the Teachers & Writers Collaborative as the seed behind these texts. “One thing I liked, that was wonderful about Teachers & Writers, was I had to keep a journal. Without that, I don’t think there would have been a book.”

Koch produced many books in his lifetime, in many genres: over 30 volumes of poetry, plays, fiction, nonfiction, and even several librettos. Still, he saw his teaching as among his most valuable work. “I discovered a way really to help a lot of people,” he said.

Still, the accomplishments of Koch’s poetry shouldn’t be overlooked. In Poetry magazine, Paul Carroll wrote that’s Koch’s works “embody the poetic imagination as it rejoices in the ebullience of its health and freedom, its fecundity, its capacity for endless invention, its dear, outlandish ability to transform everyday, pragmatic reality into an Oz or a tea-party at the March Hare’s house, its potency in, possibly, achieving a bit of immortality as a result of having brought forth some children of the soul.” Not only did Koch help bring poetry to children, but his poetry is credited with drawing out the inner child of adults.

-Lee Conell

Lee Conell lives in New York. Her writing has appeared in the Chronogram, on Women’s Studio Workshop Blog, and in The New York Times.