BY ROBERT HIRSCHFIELD
Richard Lewis, 88, teacher and poet, has stayed young by traveling far into the places where children go with their imagination and where he meets them with his. This long journey is the extension of his early poetry, which often dealt with childhood and the beginnings of things.
“All education is put on hold,” Lewis writes in his book, Taking Flight Standing Still, “when a child looks up, trying to read the words the sky is saying.”
His own method, before getting children to write poetry, is to take the sky, for example, as a subject, and have them rub some of its blueness, some of its vastness, onto themselves, into their hands, onto their feet.
He emphasizes in his writing, and in conversation, that the pressure put on children in schools to “factualize the world” staunches “a poetic way of perceiving experience.” A child’s natural way of perceiving experience.
I first met Lewis in 2019 at his old office in Astoria, Queens, in a building that housed three funeral parlors and a museum, as well as his Touchstone Center for Children, now 54 years old and still connecting with children, via poetry and life dialogues in New York City schools, parks, and playgrounds.
I was struck by the immediate stirring of almost childlike energy whenever he spoke of children. His eyes would shine and his hands move as if to a piece of music both irresistible and inescapable. Four years later, visiting him at his upper East Side Manhattan apartment, I found him pretty much as I recalled him. Short and solid, with a faintly Asian cast to his face. The energy was a bit less, perhaps, but the music, once begun, still animated his life.
As a young poet, Lewis traipsed around the world to compile Miracles (Simon & Schuster), his classic anthology of children’s poetry. He remembers the mud floor of a Calcutta school and the children spread across it, desperately poor, totally attentive.
“I opened my mouth, and they all leaned forward. Something was about to happen…”
What Lewis calls in Taking Flight, “The cell-life of enchantment.”
In the poetry he writes, the native New Yorker’s voice echoes the Chinese masters:
This too
is a story,
how a boat
crossed the
sky
and in its
wake
a slow
unending
trickle
of
leaves
flowed
out,
covering
the
dying
salamander
Lewis is not unlike that boat, built with a firm sense of purpose, whose oars point interchangeably to sea, sky, heart, and the silence that binds one to the other. A man made boat, the manufacture of cosmic inspiration.
I asked him what he had to learn to work effectively with children.
“I had to learn to listen. That was the key. That stayed with me since the beginning.” The beginning was an antique shop in Englewood, New Jersey. He found himself facing a handful of kids, ages 8-11. He began by reciting poetry and saw their eyes glaze over, as if they were back in school again. Suddenly, he changed course, insightfully asking them, “How did you get here today?”
That brought the students to life. The teacher wanted to hear what they had to say. They had a lot to say.
“I began to realize then that I wanted to engage in a conversation with children.”
I never had such a teacher. My own school career was a mix of tedium and shame. Report cards with lots of red circles like Christmas decorations. No teacher to ask me anything of meaning to rouse me from my funk.
I ask Lewis about the effects of the pandemic on children. There is a sigh, a downward look, sadness. A man trying to make sense of a catastrophic storm.
“It’s definitely made children more frightened, frightened of the very circumstances of life itself. For the first time in their lives, its aliveness was taken from them. They couldn’t go out and play. They couldn’t talk to one another. They had to Zoom with teachers sometimes hundreds of miles away. It was very isolating. They had to deal with restrictions that made them fearful of their own childhood.”
How to offset that?
Lewis took a rubber band from the table and began stretching it.
“The rubber band is the sky. Let’s stretch the sky as far as we can stretch it.”
Or, put another way, let’s rebuild what is limitless—let’s rebuild our imagination.
During COVID, like everyone else, he found himself trying to outstep “the enigmatic bacteria that was pursuing us.” It caught up with him after the long season of dying was ending. “I had mild COVID.”
In the midst of New York’s lockdown, he’d go for long walks in nearby Central Park.
“The park was still the same park. It brought me, like always, deep into the process of nature’s unfolding. Biologically, our aliveness depends on everything around us. We are very fragile.”
We come inevitably to the subject of his mortality, which brings up, as he puts it, “complicated feelings.”
“The realization of how quickly this life goes by. It’s a little scary. But at the same time, it evokes the wonder of still having time, being able to gather insights. Contemplating death, I don’t feel fear. Sadness perhaps. A sadness at what we leave behind: books, poems, loved ones. I do sense one moves into another nature of being, or being of nature.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know what it means.” He laughs. “Let it be a surprise.”
With his life tied to those at the beginning of theirs, his basic equanimity is fed by proximity.
“The wonderfulness of being with children is that their newness is organic.”
And his work mysterious. Lewis realizes how far back it goes, teaching children, and being taught by them. So many lives coming together and separating, listening and being listened to, vanishing and resurfacing down through the ages.
“The oldness of what is still beginning!”
Robert Hirschfield is a New York-based writer and poet. He has spent much of the last five years writing and assembling poems about his mother’s Alzheimer’s. In 2019, Presa Press published a volume of his poems titled, The Road to Canaan. His work has appeared in Parabola, Tricycle, Spirituality & Health, Sojourners, The Moth (Ireland), Tears in The Fence (UK) and other publications.