233 Roland Legiardi-Laura: The Underground History of Amercian Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

233 Roland Legiardi-Laura: The Underground History of Amercian Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Roland Legiardi-Laura  

   In 1966 1 taught the novel Moby-Dick film theory, and versification to a thirteen-year-  old kid named Roland Legiardi-Laura, at JHS 44 in Manhattan. Roland was memorable  in many ways, but two I remember best were him reeking of garlic at nine in the morning,  every morning, and his determination never to work at a "job" but to be a poet. Before he  had even graduated from college,

both his parents died, leaving him nearly penniless.  Forced to become completely self-supporting, he still remained focused on poetry, and a  little over a decade later, while living on a shoestring, organized a mobile band of poet-  terrorists who raced around the state in a candy-striped truck, delivering poetry  spontaneously in bars and on street corners. Shortly afterwards, while living in a  building without secure stairs or an intact roof, he flew to Nicaragua where poetry is the  national sport and convinced the government to allow him to make a poetry  documentary. When I advanced him $50 out of the 300 grand he would need, I told him  he was nuts. But somehow he raised the money, made the film, and won nine  international film awards. Meanwhile he had learned to support himself doing carpentry  and odd jobs, the oddest of which was to help to rehabilitate a shambles of a building  near Hell 's Angels headquarters on Manhattan 's Lower East Side and convert it into a  poetry nightclub, where he would later become the director and an impresario. Who  would go to a poetry nightclub? It turns out a lot of people, and as the Nuyorican Poets  Cafe expanded to include Roland's unique creation — a live reading of original film  scripts using top professional actors — I saw the unfolding of a life that's touched the lives  of thousands of people, helping foster their talent, not a corporate agenda. Rooted in his  local community, full of distinction, thoroughly "scholarly, "Roland's career as a poet  and critically acclaimed filmmaker simply would not have been possible or even  foreseeable to a School-to-Work program.