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.
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