ABSTRACT
Before that interlude, I tried to show how children learn about themselves—their bodies, their feelings, their lives, their relationships—by what we might call the training of the imagination: the education of what Coleridge (1907) sees as the fusing of ‘synthetic and magical power’. My interlude was an attempt at frying some garlic: what it said must affect everything I write, much as garlic affects everything in a dish. In the poems children compose, we need to detect a taste of the awareness of what cliché is and a strenuous avoidance of it, and the presence of the kind of contemplation that goes into the making of drafts. Children need to keep in their minds all the time they are writing the need to find the phrase that hasn’t been found before. They must develop the will to work on their early notes as if they mattered (because they do): to draft.
