My son has one of these little players—a little blue box. You stick a card into it, and it plays a story or a song or a poem. These days, he pops in Runny Babbit by Shel Silverstein and, with elation, recites all the inverted nonsense words from “Runny and the skancin' dunk —.” He doesn’t even need the player, of course. He is “tubbin’ in my scrub” when he bathes, and he tells stories before bed of “verewolves and wampires.” This is the way we fall in love with words—by realizing we can make them our own, play with them in our mouths and in the air, distort and connect and covet them like charms in our empty hands.
In so many situations we want to turn around and go back in time. We want the thrills of rule-breaking and ignorance. Over the years, in writing, I have collected little statutes and decrees into my aesthetic over the years—tchotchkes from workshops, readings, or lectures. Craft is my work, and I love that work; but my approach has taken a professional slant, and with that comes restraint.
But not a ten-year-old.
A kid comes to the table flashing poetic license with wild abandon. Some of them spend an hour making end rhymes; some write exclusively in onomatopoeia; some loop through alliterative phrase after alliterative phrase; some think of the biggest words they know and wrap the poem around that word. I have been running a program called the Seawall Society of Young Poets; and last week in a workshop, kids from ages ten to thirteen wrote a collaborative poem about all of the phobias they could gather up. They wove together words like casadastraphobia and amathophobia and alektorophobia and spectrophobia. When I step back from their play with words, I can see the bigger idea is poetry: being afraid of falling into the sky or of our own reflection in the mirror is the stuff of intrigue and metaphor, and they find this through their own joy in verbiage. Children’s author Mac Barnett said in an interview that engagement and the willingness to do the work of reading are his ideals for a reader, and that “[t]his engagement, in the sense of play, is very rare among adults. It’s much more common in kids.” It’s the play that connects writers who are children to the world’s illumination. The investment that kids make in the work, and the playfulness they bring to the table, is something we can all benefit from in our craft. It turns out that loosening our boundaries can bring us closer to the enlightenment offered through text.
As a professor of writing, I see how writing creatively can help students to write better for other purposes. In one unit of my composition course, students write their own versions of Little Red Riding Hood after doing a deep dive into progressive iterations of this generational narrative. When we get to this more creative assignment, there is enthusiasm. There is fire. Imaginations alight. I want them to consider this aspect of the writing process—the one that’s filled with possibility—as they are learning to analyze and essay. I want them to stay connected to that place of playful language fostered during their youth. That feeling of being proud when you complete a poem—harder to conjure as we grow into the pressures of coursework,our own pressure on ourselves, and the pressures of publishing—is what feeds us as writers. Kids know nothing of these particular pressures. Rather, they exist in the ether of possibility. Filling up the space on a page can do so much to uplift us.
Over the last year, the Seawall Society of Young Poets’ workshops have been focused on nature writing. In this time of foreboding within the environment, in a place where the ground is uncertain in its solidity, it is especially important to give young people the space to celebrate their immediate worlds. This has the benefit of helping them to see why it is important to take great care of the things they love in their natural worlds. But the small action of noticing that a monarch butterfly is carried “in and out of lots of breeze” by “a buzz of light” or that a chicken may wish for flight or that the sun on the palm tree’s face “helps me live” connects them inextricably to the world through which they walk each day through personification, empathy, desire, and synesthesia.
Children are also rewarded through the delight of reading and writing. Bruno Bettelheim discusses transformation in The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, noting that “[a] small child can do little on his own, and this is disappointing to him – so much so that he may give up in despair,” but that reading fairy tales “encourages the child to trust that his small real achievements are important.” Reading and writing poems then sharing what they’ve written (through both performance and collaboration)offer spaces for the child to be proud of what s/he/they has created. In our workshops, we read Daniel Finds a Poem by Micha Archer, in which a little boy asks animals what poetry is and puts the responses together into a found poem. Young writers can easily see how he has made a poem, and they find themselves there in that book. When they complete the same action when writing their own poems, it’s no small achievement, and it sticks with them. Returning participants remind us of the poem that they wrote months ago about the manatee, the crab spider, or the voice of the sea. The memory is imprinted. The acts of despairing and giving up when we can’t get our words to sing just right to us from the page occur in adulthood, too, which might just be a good indication that we should focus on small achievements, on a moment of adoration for the world around us.
When we play, tiny miracles form: it feels like the tops of our heads have been taken off; we stop reading to savor the feeling of the flutter in the chest. This is what children know about craft, that knowledge some of us lost somewhere: we need to play, to be reckless, to find fun in playing with forms, and to abandon frustration. We should follow words that don’t exist all the way down the page to where we can make sense of them again. We need to return to the jungle gym of language.
Emily Schulten is the author of three books of poetry, including most recently, Easy Victims to the Charitable Deceptions of Nostalgia (White Pine Press, 2024). She is a professor of English and creative writing at The College of the Florida Keys and the director of CFK Poetics. In 2024, she was appointed the poet laureate of Key West. In that same year, she was named an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. As part of her project, she will immerse the city’s youth in poetry. She will offer children ages six through twelve a series of workshops, place the work of these young poets in public spaces, and create new spaces for continued access by installing interactive poetry-making equipment in public parks and creating a website that showcases the work of young writers.