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RACHEL CONRAD
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020 (209 pp.)
It was at the time I was reading the closing pages of Rachel Conrad’s book
The book’s premise is that poetry written by children is not typically regarded as literature in its own right: the poems are viewed as homework practice rather than art, or the outputs of adult teaching rather than childhood creativity. Conrad argues that cultural biases mean young people are considered intellectually and artistically immature and that the works of young poets are too often ignored or dismissed as juvenilia. She contests this idea throughout, engaging in close readings of youth-written poems from adult-facilitated projects to demonstrate their literary value.
Conrad navigates the terrain of previous research in areas like the sociology of childhood, critical developmental psychology, and young people’s poetic writing, consistently referring to one of the key concerns in childhood studies: the agency of young people. Conrad presents three methodological approaches that frame the book. The first one emphasizes the intention of reading youth-written poetry with the same in-depth engagement used for poetry written by adult poets. The second approach involves reading youth-written poetry from projects initiated by adults to consider the decisions that adult mentors, teachers, editors, and publishers make in presenting works by young poets. Finally, Conrad pays special attention to how young poets represent time and temporality as key contributors to their sense of agency.
Conrad presents four different projects dealing with youth- written poetry in the United States during the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, and the inspirations driving them. Across the various chapters, she examines the young poets’ temporal structure of action, use of common temporal markers, charting of temporal metaphors and trajectories, shifting or playing with verb tense, and reference to age or life phases. I have to admit, I could not have imagined that focusing on time and temporality would be such an interesting approach to these young poets’ writings. Yet, through substantial analyses of the poems, Conrad convincingly argues for their intrigue and significance when it comes to young people’s lived experiences in and over time.
One chapter focuses on Gwendolyn Brooks and her engagement with and promotion of young poets through both her authorship and her sponsorship of contests and workshops. In her analysis of the poems that ensued, Conrad discusses how the young poets deal with questions of entrapment by time, age, and racial injustice. The poems are both dramatically straightforward, as in Aurelia Davidson’s poem “Trapped” (“I am trapped / Because I am Black,” 51), and quietly contemplative, as in Ebony Tillman’s untitled poem: “’Cause the world I wanted / is dead in my hands” (55).
Issues connected to racial injustice and oppression become one of the prominent themes among the young poets presented in this book. In the chapter on
Another chapter focuses on the literary magazine
There are times when Conrad’s core arguments are overly recapped, meaning the book occasionally strays into feeling repetitive. Conrad also dedicates a significant amount of space to describing the adult facilitators who work with these young poets. While this is understandable and valuable in terms of context and approach, it nevertheless tends to shift the focus away from the young poets and their work.
Ultimately, though, reading Conrad’s book has been a stimulating experience. It is well-written, inspirational, and theoretically as well as methodologically sound. One of its absolute strengths is the large amount of youth-written poetry, combined with Conrad’s knowledgeable gaze and unrelenting close attention usually only reserved for poems written by adults.
Conrad makes the literary case for poetry written by young people loud and clear. After all, they might go viral one day, too.