Throughout my early childhood, my father’s father kept a detailed record of what he deemed my most precocious and outrageous moments. In spiral-bound notebooks he compiled scraps of overheard monologues (me lecturing a stadium of stuffed animals, whispering to granite about the need to get serious), transcripts of my evening fireplace performances, and adult conversations for which I produced perfect punchlines on topics that seemed to occlude my toddler awareness.

When I was much later gifted a copy of these journals, I discovered among their pages a description of a three-year-old sobbing at her own reflection. After my grandparents found me crouching in the dark of their guest bedroom, I provided the unsolicited confession: “Don’t worry! I was just practicing for my career as an actor!”

An account of an outing to a Matisse exhibition detailed a few pages later has always incited the same feeling of embarrassment whenever I think of it.  

As is the case in many portraits, wherein the subject must be sacrificed to become worthy of a new mythic status, my grandfather’s picture of me overshadowed my own recollection of events and capacity for self-perception. This character had more chutzpah than I did—she bordered on shamelessness. And if witty, she seemed emotionally flattened, even pompous.

I grimaced at the image of her gesticulating with an arm extended, scanning the walls of the gallery with her four-year-old chest inflated—“yes, it was me, MATISSE, I did all of them.” I did not know if I liked her, but I knew I could not live up to her reputation.  

As an eleven-year-old I wouldn’t have called it this, but I became obsessed with this conflict over representation, and would pore over the documents for hours, inspecting my uncanny doppelganger with an unresolved mix of jealousy and apprehension.

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In the years since my grandfather’s death, it is no surprise that his journals have garnered new resonance. Re-encountering them, I find a record of his admiration, and a transcription of his gaze.

And I understand now how his style and sensibilities worked as a set of curatorial assumptions to sculpt my image, turning me into something else. I am not me in these pages, but a place that existed between us. The journals document a site of an ongoing collaboration. My grandfather’s wit, his cadence, his interests pair with a flash of my essence.

Maybe as an unwitting homage to him, or maybe because now I, like him, seek writing practices to help me preserve wonder inside adulthood, I found myself taking up his practice during my work with Writing the Community this season. Scribbling down small lines during and after visits to the classroom, I compiled lists of illuminating comments by students, hilarious interactions I witnessed, and enchanted lines from their poems.

I can only imagine that the moments and words which most stand out to me will not be where these students place emphasis should they ever look back on our brief explorations of poetry together.

And I am so glad that they were put in charge of selecting their own contributions to an anthology that they can continue to read for years to come. As for you, GO READ THEIR POEMS—they are wonderful.

But as a record of my own gaze on our time together, I present this brief re-mix of their brilliance: a collage assembled from my own biased records. Here are some of the most precocious and outrageous things I heard and witnessed in Erin Hines’ 1st-3rd grade classroom this season.

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Note: The lines beginning with quotation marks denote citations of students, while the lines beginning in brackets denote my commentary.

“Inspiration is like looking into a closet

that opens onto another world—you follow

the light

until you get to the unknown

“But I have something else that I must say about inspiration,

even though it is a little off-topic:

Inspiration is dangerous.

It will make you lose the ability to tell who your real friends are, if you go far enough into a fake world

You will have no real friends anymore.

 

“I can’t say anything about inspiration, I don’t want to make it go away, but I can show you what it means…

[The smallest student in the classroom walks around tapping her friends on the head:

“C, you’ve inspired me to write the word mountain.

“D, you’ve inspired me to write the word chair

“L, you’ve inspired me to write the word helmet.

“T, you’ve inspired me to write the word flower.

[After each oration, she adds a word to her one word / line poem.

//

“A day isn’t very good if I haven’t written a poem.

“The thing about poetry

is that I have to do it every day.

“Well, I

want to do it every hour.

“The thing I like about poetry is you can do it whenever…

//

[DEATH IS HILARIOUS

[Everybody laughs when anybody says the word “die” or “death” or “died”.

[So everybody says them A LOT

“SHE DIED AND DIED AND DIED

[every group poem ends with singular or collective death

“And then I died

“And then she died

“we all die

“sysphicsu dies a rock death

[For a while, every group poem ends with:

//

[Every kid in the circle dreamed that they turned into someone else in circle, so by the end

of the go-around everyone has been everyone else in their dreams.

[I told a friend about this,

and asked if they thought the kids were just copying each other

or if they are really all having the same dream, and she said that according to Jung

it doesn’t matter if you analyze the real dream or made-up material

To enter dream logic, you just have to talk about your dreams.

//

[Every single student ends the workshop wanting to be a poet

“When I grow up I want to be a poem writer.

“Well when I grow up I want to be a poem writer and a lawyer.

“Well when I grow up I want to be a poem writer and a teacher.  

“Well when I grow up I want to be a poem writer and a cat surgeon.

“Well when I grow up I want to be a poem writer and a dancer.

“Well when I grow up I want to be a poem writer and a professional MMA fighter and a magician.

 

[Student who wears cat ears to class writes the line:

“I think I heard a cat say my name

 

[M said she would be satisfied to find these lines in any book:

“I’m a spoon and she’s a bubble

We’re round and cool

We are both getting used…

Our names are Bubbles n’ Troom.

We are blue like a shoe that’s blue

We are teal like a heel that’s teal

 

[Astonished by these line breaks:

“higher still higher

the flowers,

 

many desks blooming

 

with browness

the stem elevators

up and down

water up for the                    light

the roots

the basement                        stretching down

 

Matisse Rosen is a descendant of bootlegger-turned-doctor Polish Jews. She lives in a body, is chronically ill, and is currently learning how to smear color with chalk pencils.