Politics, Poetry, and Teaching Children: A Personal Journey

Abstract

Politics, Poetry, and Teaching Children:A Personal Journey Arnold Adoff (bio) I am very glad to be here in New York City this morning. I was born and raised in the East Bronx section of New York; went to various schools here; lived and taught and wrote for twelve years until 1969, when I was kidnapped and forced to move to some idea of America called Ohio. I have published twenty-five books for children, young adults, and their older allies: about half that number are anthologies, mainly concentrating on work by Afro-American poets and young writers of all backgrounds. In the past ten years I have made a concentrated effort to create a body of work: a family of young voices, through collections of my own poetry, that speak to, and through, the times of youth. My young people play sports and eat flying oatmeal cookies and search for inter-racial identities, and care about a solid hug. I have become adept with a chainsaw, out in Ohio, and I can grow equal numbers of Better Boy and Better Girl tomatoes in that good Ohio dirt. Beyond geography and agriculture, I have been on a long journey from my own childhood here in New York City. Sometimes I used to think I was some alien "superboy," living as a spy in this city whose parents arrived some time earlier on steerage rockets from a dying planet. (Chocolate was my own personal Kryptonite.) This was the New World, as well as a new world. And while we always waited for the next pogrom to turn the corner of 172nd Street and Boston Road, and head down our block, we scratched through the structures and institutions, attitudes and sociology, to find home, place, and purpose. Certainly the overriding influences on my vision of the world, and some sense of purpose in this new world of America, began, really, before I was born. With the Stalin Purges, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the beginnings of the palpable insanity of the Holocaust, the world war, we were forever marked: as survivors, as Jews, as Americans. The home planet had been destroyed, along with most of its population, our history and kin. And that magnificent potential of Economic Socialism, that idea of social justice and self-determination within a Democratic framework —hat alternative had also been destroyed for our time, certainly for mine. Even with the creation of the State of [End Page 9] Israel, we were still Americans —studying, writing, teaching —forever enmeshed in the social, political and economic tangle of a contradictory, fascinating, and exciting place. And if the rockets could never return to Europe, for my grandparents, and my parents, for me there was no desire to leave. If America has ever meant anything beyond an artificially high standard of living for a large middle class, it has meant possibility, and potential for change. When I studied at City College and Columbia University, with the Faculty of Political Science, I became quite aware of the restrictive and narrow view of an America held by most of my professors, contained in my texts. I was drawn to Harry Hopkins, the New Deal, those insanely wonderful "100 Days of Change" that happened directly after Franklin Roosevelt assumed the office of President in 1933, in the midst of real danger to the democratic structure of this country. Of course I was a young poet and history student in an America of Joe McCarthy, the House Un-American Activities Committee, red-baiting witch-hunts, and the seeming inability of the "power structure" or the press to challenge and defend. But beyond "Beat," beyond "Hip," beyond "Jazz," was the developing Civil Rights Movement, and the beginnings of the struggles for equality and social justice that were the high points of that time. And if destruction of the alternative of Socialism, and the destruction of millions of humans by other humans, shaped my early years, then the ultimate failure of the disparate efforts of the sixties to create real change in the structure of this society was the third great influence on my own development and view. I have worked to create collections of Black American poetry...