Highly Gifted/ Highly At-Risk

CECILIA WOLOCH has published six collections of poems and a novel, Sur la Route. Recent honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Indiana Review Prize for Poetry. She collaborates regularly with artists in other disciplines and conducts workshops for writers around the world.

HIGHLY GIFTED/HIGHLY AT-RISK. That’s how the kids—seventh and eighth graders at El Sereno, a school on the east side of Los Angeles where I’d been hired to lead poetry workshops for the next ten weeks—were described to me. In other words: really smart gangbangers. These kids were bright enough to have tested into the Gifted and Talented Education Program, or to have been recruited into it, but they weren’t in my workshop because they were model students. They had also been designated as “at-risk,” and I knew what that meant. Of all the useless euphemisms concocted by education bureaucrats, this may be one of the few that’s apt: in danger, in peril, under threat, vulnerable, exposed to harm.

It was 1992. Gang violence in L.A. was at an all-time high—drive-by shootings, turf wars, drug-fueled terror in the streets—and El Sereno was at the heart of it. Along with Boyle Heights and Lincoln Heights, El Sereno was part of the LAPD’s notorious Hollenbeck Division, and friends who knew the city even better than I did told me I was going into a war zone.

MY FIRST DAY at El Sereno, the students filed in noisily and filled the rows of desks while I spread out my books and papers on the table in the front of the room. When I looked up, I saw thirty-five twelve- and thirteen-year-olds at various stages of puberty, most of them still baby-faced. Of course, even a preteen girl can look “hard,” given enough black eyeliner and attitude, and some of the boys slouched in their chairs in an attempt, I thought, to look menacing or bored. But it was all bravado and posing—wasn’t it?

The regular teacher was sitting at a student desk in the back of the room. She was a woman about my age, I guessed, but soft-looking, quiet, conservatively dressed—the kind of woman who seems to be trying to make herself invisible. I thought she might stand up and introduce me, but she was hunching over her notebook, so I wrote my name on the board and asked the class if they’d ever met a poet before. Silence. I asked them