Minority Youth Poetics from Page to Stage in circa-1970 America

• In Event: Child Pedagogues of Dissent: Reading the Lessons of Young People in Literature and Performance

Abstract

This paper reveals an aesthetic of child-adult collaboration in the popular 1969 child-authored poetry anthology The Me Nobody Knows and its 1970 adaptation into an Obie Award-winning Broadway musical. I locate these works within a late-1960s surge in American adults’ attention to literature authored by poor children of color. Although children’s writings had long attracted adult attention, I argue, the circa-1970 moment was distinguished by wide-ranging adults’ belief that minority youth were uniquely able to speak truth about American racism and inequality. While adults looked to “children’s voices from the ghetto” to teach the nation, young writers in turn depended on the adults who supported, edited and circulated youth writings. Understanding children and adults as unequally positioned yet mutually influential collaborators enables a view of texts often dismissed as irredeemably mediated by adults. The young poets of The Me Nobody Knows teach their adult interlocutors how children of color should be read and heard, even within the musical’s flattening of youth voice to fit a performance of authenticity and intimacy. I read circa-1970 youth of color as the co-shapers of discourse around racism, educational crisis and social change, from the page to the stage. Moreover, considering young writers’ participation in multi-generic, cross-age collaborative processes reframes literary critical debates over authenticity and authorship in minority texts.

Author

• Amy Fish, Harvard University