| March 4, 2004 I ran my first workshop this month. My daughter, who follows my writing faithfully, decided the time was right for her to begin poetry writing. Now, she has frequently borrowed my hand-held voice recorder to dictate her own "poems", but this was serious business: pen (with INK!), paper, the two of us writing side by side. After acquiring appropriate materials (not always easy for a kindergartener – pen color is a MAJOR decision), we attacked our first hurdle: what to write about. "Why don't we", I suggested, "write about something pretty?". Always a safe and bountiful area for poets of all ages, I thought. Sure enough, we soon had a long enough list of ideas to make a meaningful choice. "Rainbows. Let's write about rainbows". Pause. "How do we write about rainbows?" Ah, the opportunities you have when you are a geek with a precocious child. "Well, what are the colors of the rainbow?" No hesitation: "Red. Orange. Yellow. Blue. Indigo. Violet." "OK. So let's write one sentence about each color and we'll have a rainbow poem, right?" So she wrote: Red is the first color of the rainbow. I threw her a curve: "But how about if we trade out the color? Take out the word "red" and put a something red in its place?" Pause. "Like a rose?" "You got it!" And she did. I didn’t prompt her again. She would speak her next line aloud before writing it and assess my reaction. Then, well, she ignored me. The line I suggested she might want to write differently is on the page as she originally spoke it. The line I thought was perfect is slightly tweaked in the final work. (On the other hand, a suggestion from a critic in the gallery – the poet’s mother – was adopted in full.) I won’t tell you which lines these are because my opinion is not germane. It’s not my poem. So here are the two poems we wrote, side by side, one line at a time, one color at a time, one sleepy Sunday in February, in the months approaching her 6th birthday. When we'd run out of colors, she decided on a last line, then suggested it should be my last line, too. OK.
She read our poems - hers aloud, mine to herself. "I like them both!" Another pause. "Next time, can my poem be a story, too, like yours?" No reason why not. No reason at all. I think you’ll agree: While they may not exactly listen to me, my students turn out quality work. David Vincenti Advisor, Center for the Performing Arts at DeBaun Auditorium www.debaun.org; www.davidvincenti.com
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