Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
uncertainty can be just as important as finding solutions an unfamiliar concept for many
young people.
We asked Smith, a Harvard Graduate School of Education Ph.D. candidate, to read one of his
poems with us a selection from his debut collection Counting Descent. We also asked him to
talk about how he approaches poetry in the classroom and as a writer. Watch the video here, and
I think that so often kids can feel paralyzed by writing because it feels like they have to know
something, that there has to be some level of sanctimony, and that they have to have solutions or
ideas to offer the world or their teacher or their peers. But poetry doesnt mean you need to have
There can sometimes be this tacit, even unconscious presumption that spoken word is lower on
the literary hierarchy than that of other more traditional poetry. One of the first things I seek to
do when I come into the classroom is seek to disabuse students of that notion. It wasnt until the
advent of the printing press in the mid-15th century in the west that poetry was even considered
I tell kids, So much of what you consume now, whether its hip hop or whether its other forms
of oral performative storytelling, comes out of the oral tradition of poetry at its root. You are
already a poet in many ways. And I think once that cage that they have in their minds around
how they define poetry is unlocked, it opens up room for them to think of themselves as writers
and as poets. It gives them an access point. They realize poetry isnt something that is done by
this type of caricatured white man sitting by a fire in the 15th century. It is instead something that
I think theres an antiquated and largely false notion that people have that every poem should be
about the trees and the flowers. And thats fine I think theres lots to write about trees and
flowers but I think writing about those things simply because you think you shouldnt be
The work of the artist has never been more urgent than it is in our new political era. We are
entering a phase in our history which demands that artists and thinkers and writers and teachers
respond to the world as we see it the world as its going to evolve over the next four to eight
years in a profoundly different way, and I think people have to be honest and urgent and deeply
committed to truth.