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Michael Rutherford is a graduate of SUNY Albany with a BA in English
and a Masters in Library Science. He is the founder and director of
Alternative Literary Programs (ALPS) and was the co-founder of Cultural
Conspiracy, Inc. which published Artists with Class, a quarterly
addressing the concerns of teaching artists. When he was younger (as
opposed to his ongoing childhood) he translated Catullus and published
numerous poems. Now that he has grown older and more garrulous, he has
moved into prose, writing literary sword and sorcery tales. His
novella, THE TALE AND ITS MASTER, Spring Harbor Press, 1986 was
nominated as one of the year's best fantasy novellas and then
anthologized in THE YEAR'S BEST FANTASY STORIES, DAW Press in 1987. His
collection of fantasy novellas, THE INFINITE KINGDOMS, followed in
1990. Currently he has a fantasy novel, MORTAL BEAUTY, making the
perilous rounds of publishing houses.
When did I start my crooked career
as a teaching artist? It’s a little frightening to
realize that I started thirty years ago with the now
defunct Poets in the Schools.
Though actually it was even earlier
than that. I started teaching street kids film-making
for the Upper Hudson Library Federation. In retrospect,
my naivety was prodigious. I thought of these tough,
troubled and often abused kids as angels with dirty
faces. The only reason I use this cliché is that my
attitude at this point was so banal and flawed.
My students tried to disabuse me of
this as quickly and pointedly as possible. We shot a
movie in my apartment with about 7 kids acting and in
production; the few objects I had of value vanished and
the only reason I kept working this particular crew was
that it was impossible to figure out who the thieves
were. In those heady, ignorant days of poisonous
romanticism, the library also gave kids cheap super 8mm
cameras to shoot whatever they found meaningful. Kids,
of course, were natural artists and would create works
of Rousseau-like innocence and power. What we did get
were works of perverse integrity: kids beating the crap
out of each other, stealing bicycles. Then there was the
day one schizophrenic father began beating his son on
the steps of the library. Being somewhat strong, I
pulled the father off his son and then got attacked by
the kid AND the father.
But the worst was the reaction of
the Library Federation. They had told me that I’d get
paid more if I got an MLS (Master of Library Science
Degree), an oxymoronic definition of library expertise.
My position was that I wanted to work with kids (no
matter what their thievish, thuggish, ungrateful
natures).
So I got my library Masters and was
immediately assigned to being a reference librarian,
since I was overqualified to work with poor kids. Being
a reference librarian involved writing suburban kids’
term papers for them. So I quit the library and started
working for Poets in the Schools.
All I can say about the (mostly
African American) kids I worked with through the library
system is that I’m still in touch with some after
thirty years, know the jail records of others and have
attended funerals.
There was another equally
outrageous factor, though I find the Library world one
of superbly impractical majesty. I was flying. At 25, I
was trying to figure out whether I should be a
professional hot air balloonist or a teaching poet.
I’d lied on a car loan and bought a hot air balloon.
Much to my surprise, I’d displayed a real talent for
flying gas bags. I suppose the real measure of my
practicality was that I was trying to figure out whether
to earn a living as a poet or the Wizard of Oz.
Hot air ballooning has a lot to
recommend it to the young artist. It’s inherently
dangerous. It affords an incredible view of the world in
its drifting isolation. It’s like walking in the air.
And above all, it’s not really quiet. In order to keep
the balloon above the ground, you have to blast a flame
that erupts like a lion’s roar into the crown of the
balloon. There’s also a wonderful satisfaction in
knowing that if you mishandle the propane tanks or
forget to seal the valves of the fuel lines, you’ll
blow up.
I managed to get a few grants to do
poetry readings and throw poems from balloons. But
ballooning is inherently expensive; extremely expensive
as I discovered, when the lawyers and doctors whom I was
teaching systematically ran into dead trees and ripped
holes in the balloon. As a practical matter, because of
wind and weather conditions, I could only fly or put the
balloon up in store parking lots to advertise special
events one day in three. Daily income was great, but it
was totally unpredictable.
It became clear to me that it would
take a full-time effort to make a living at being either
a poet in the schools or a commercial hot air balloon
pilot. I liked kids more than the people I taught flying
to and the schools were never closed because of high
winds or hot air. There was enough work in Poets in the
Schools to scrape by. It was obvious. Being a poet in
America offered more stability.
Michael Rutherford
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