Poetry and Childhood: An Interview with Richard Lewis

Richard Lewis is widely known as an anthologist, teacher, writer, theater director, and lecturer. Among the many books he has edited are Miracles and There Are Two Lives, both collections of poems by children; anthologies of oral tradition poetry, I Breathe A New Song and Out Of The Earth I Sing; and verse collections representing literate cultures from around the world. His latest anthology is The Luminous Landscape: Chinese Art and Poetry. As founder and director of the Touchstone Center, a decade-old experimental learning project based in Manhattan's P.S. 9, he has worked with children and teachers to develop a great variety of new approaches to learning both in and out of the traditional classroom. The following interview is based on a series of conversations at the Touchstone Center during the spring and summer of 1980.

LM: When did you first become aware of poetry?

RL: I became aware of poetry when I was about 12 or 13, when I was challenged by someone, walking down a road in the country. It was a friend of mine and he said that he could write poems and I said, well I can write poems too. So I went home and wrote a poem. And then that next year I began reading a great deal of poetry and also writing poetry.

LM: Had you been given poems to read in school before then?

RL: Not really. I mean they tended to be pretty mundane. I think my real sense of poetry developed when I began doing an enormous amount of exploration of the library shelves.

LM: Which poets did you end up reading then?

RL: I remember being attracted by T. S. Eliot and by some of cummings.

LM: Their work is very different . . . .

RL: Very different and I think I was attracted by the differences.

LM: Did you have a teacher or someone else who influenced you in your choice of work?

RL: In high school I did have one teacher, in fact I dedicated a book that I edited of Greek lyric poetry [Muse of the Round Sky ] to him because he was the only teacher I had who was tolerant of my inability to concentrate in class. He also read poetry magnificently out of a deep mellow voice and I remember being tremendously taken by his presence in the classroom and by his enthusiasm for poetry. I remember that on a test he gave at the end of the year, which was basically an essay, I felt absolutely incompetent at answering the questions, and so I wrote poems instead. His comment when he gave the test back was simply that he appreciated the fact that I was trying to deal with the questions in a poetic manner but that I mustn't ever forget that to be imaginative one also needs facts and there is a balance between the factual and the imaginative. It has always stuck with me as a wonderful bit of wisdom. He was very supportive, really gave me a feeling that I was not the oddball that I thought I was, that somehow it was important to be concerned about poetry.

LM: There are two brief passages in Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space that I want to ask you about: "It is on the plane of the daydream, not on that of facts, that childhood remains alive and poetically useful within us." And: "To read poetry is essentially to daydream."

RL: What's so interesting about those lines is that in our society daydreaming generally has a bad connotaton. Somehow it is thought of as a lack of attention, and yet it isn't. Daydreaming in its best sense is a very powerful stimulant to finding another perspective on something. It also seems to be a process by which the imagination truly works. This challenges what schooling is about. Schooling as it presently exists is about seeing things in pretty much a "right" or "wrong" manner, in a manner that tends to work against the poetic or the daydreaming aspect of ourselves.

LM...