received a manuscript from a 13 year girl in Missouri. when was I in Missouri? the girl is anxious to get going, publishing wise. her poems don't proclaim the next poem making genius, nor should they. writing, perhaps especially poetry, takes a while to learn. to get to a focus on what you should be doing or what all. what I liked about her writing was it seemed genuine. Kenneth Koch's books on teaching children point out ways to end around the received wisdom that exerts on us all, and certainly heavily on children. it's a slow process finding a means appropriate to you, and a vocabulary. it is scary to think how people's ambitions and insecurity lead them to produce the patent dilutions that get, finally, published and crowd the shelves. Pound's writing circa early last century (ABCs of Reading) about the same issues. inventors, masters, diluters, writers sans salient qualities. it is ever thus, and we all fail in our icy gaze, at self and others, to recognize the which for the other which. watch out for the teachers and those who congratulate, Anna from Missouri. when she's 20, people will stop congratulating on the score of her youth, and big league rules will apply. Robert Grenier at Franconia was remarkably open to student writing. for someone so identified with a certain aesthetic, he seemed quite helpful to those well outside it. my own aesthetic was pretty inchoate, I was much baffled by what I didn't udnerstand (Stein, Zukofsky, Pound), but receptive at least.