Authority, Agency, and Artistry: Exploring Youth-Authored Poetry

Rachel Conrad's Time for Childhoods: Young Poets and Questions of Agency is a timely addition to a growing corpus of literature that foregrounds the cultural contributions of young writers and centres young people as "active interpreters, makers, and participants" (3) in their own right. In this concise and engaging monograph, Conrad makes a case for the serious consideration of poetry written by young people—that is, poets under the age of eighteen—who have been historically excluded from the literary canon. Time for Childhoods begins with an anecdote: Conrad, perusing the bookshop at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, is startled by a copy of Salting the Ocean: 100 Poems by Young Poets, edited by Naomi Shihab Nye. Conrad asks herself, "Why weren't poems by 'young poets' ever talked about in literature classes, in literary magazines, in scholarly criticism?" Conrad continues, "Why weren't poems written by young people more visible and more a part of literary culture?" (ix). So begins her pursuit of, and argument for, poetry by young writers.

The resulting study grapples with two key concerns: bias against young poets as authors of texts worthy of critical attention within the literary sphere, and the difficulties inherent to theorizing youth agency. Conrad draws a correlation between these issues and cultural constructions of childhood that fail to recognize children's lives in the present tense: the lives children are living right now as opposed to how they will be as future adults. Poetry by young writers has traditionally been relegated to the realm of juvenilia, if it is studied at all, or read as an indicator of potential future literary successes. In Time for Childhoods, Conrad calls on readers, publishers, scholars, and critics to value young poets as a poets, full stop.

Time for Childhoods is structured in five chapters. In the introduction, "'The Busy Clock': Poetry and the Times of Youth," Conrad presents time as a concept central to her theorization of agency. She is interested in how young people represent and (re)imagine time within poetry as a means to assert themselves and to contend with age-based identities and expectations. Examining how young poets write time prompts readers to consider temporality as it is created by and for children. From movements like The March for Our Lives and Black Lives Matter and the case of Juliana v. United States, it is easy to see the cultural and political prominence of young people's voices today. Writing, too, is a means of asserting one's voice. Poetry's flexible nature can be a way of asserting agency through the construction of time. In the following chapters, Conrad presents four case studies of youth-authored poetry projects, from poetry contests to writing workshops and edited collections. Each section begins with a brief overview before offering close readings of several poems by young poets from each project, paying heed to constructions of what Conrad terms "temporal agency" (1). The exemplars selected, including two spearheaded by Gwendolyn Brooks in Chapter 2 and June Jordan in Chapter 5 as preeminent Black poets, highlight a plurality of diverse and often racialized childhoods in the United States. The young poets featured range from preschool to high-school age. Where previous studies have focused on historic children's writing (e.g., Victoria Ford Smith's work on child/adult collaborations), Conrad's focus is contemporary, drawing on examples from the mid-twentieth to the twenty-first centuries.

Research on young writers frequently occurs at the intersection between the fields of literary and childhood studies: a crossroads at which Time for Childhoods is firmly situated. Conrad is a childhood studies scholar with a background in developmental and child clinical psychology. She is also a poet. Conrad's multitudes are at the heart of the book's success; she interweaves literary analysis with critical social studies of childhood in what she terms a "transdisciplinary fusion of literary, critical...