Kenneth Koch Wishes Lies and Dreams Spoken Arts Records
Wishes, Lies, and Dreams
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December 23, 1973
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It'due south not strictly necessary to read both of Kenneth Koch's fantabulous and enormously important books on children and poetry, though I strongly recommend it, if simply for the pleasure both books give. Each stands on its own, implying the whole argument. Just they're better together, and to anyone for whom the subject is of import—parents, teachers; anyone who has the normal human delight in truthful poetry, or anyone who wonders how his normal human being pleasure was dwarfed and twisted—the pair of books will, I call up, be a revelation.
"Wishes, Lies, and Dreams," originally published in 1970, is the tape of Koch's highly successful experiment with didactics children to write poetry at P.Southward. 61 in Manhattan. In schools all over America, children are excited when the fine art teacher comes in; and a expect at children'south fine art in contempo years shows that something actually happens in those art classes. Why so should the art of verse be, for children, an annoyance and a bore? Koch, himself the author of such books of poetry as "The Pleasures of Peace," "Give thanks Y'all" and "Ko, or A Season on World" and a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia, set out to prove — and has clearly proved—that writing poetry can exist as exciting equally anything in a kid's experience. When he entered a classroom, his pupils (grades I through 6) shouted and clapped. When he left the classroom, he left children'due south poems that might make an developed poet envious. Poems like this:
Snow is every bit white as the sunday shines.
The sky is as bluish equally a waterfall.
A rose is as cherry as a beating of drums.
The clouds are as white as the busting of a firecracker.
A tree is as green as a roaring lion.
"Wishes, Lies, and Dreams" tells how he did information technology and how, hopefully, anyone can practise information technology. I tin can suggest hither only the general approach. He began with the business firm conviction that the matter could be done. He writes: "Ane thing that encouraged me was how playful and inventive children'south talk sometimes was. They said truthful things in fresh and surprising means. Some other was how much they enjoyed making works of fine art — drawings, paintings, and collages. I was aware of the breakthrough in educational activity children fine art some forty years ago. I had seen how my daughter and other children profited from the new ways of helping them find and use their natural talents. That hadn't happened all the same in poetry. Some children's poesy was marvelous, but most seemed uncomfortably imitative of developed poetry or else childishly beautiful. It seemed restricted somehow, and it obviously lacked the happy, creative free energy of children'southward art."
To get what he was after, he knew he must slay 2 ancient schoolroom dragons. I was inhibition, the child's fear of getting something wrong, proving tor the thousandth fourth dimension that he's stupid, unacceptable. The other was, in outcome, the kid'south innocence of cultural tradition. However free and open up a kid may feel, he nevertheless has the question, "What shall I write almost?"—really the difficult question, "What is a poem?"
Koch slew the first dragon by establishing a comfy, fairly noisy classroom much similar that typical, of art classes; by encouraging students to write whatever they pleased, joke poems (even ornery jokes on Mr. Koch), hateful poems, poems involving sex, and and so on; by placing no importance on spelling, grammar, or neatness (all matters which could be attended to later); and by discouraging the use of rhyme, since rhyme tends to limit imagination and honest feeling. As for the child's question, "What shall I write?," Koch worked out a set up of "Ideas for Poems"—simple, essentially formal ideas that should get things moving in any classroom. One is, Begin every line with "I wish." Another is, Apply u comparison in every line. (He offers many more.) The poem I quoted earlier, "Snow is equally white as the sun shines," is a result of the comparison thought. Here is another:
Thunder is like bowling
Clouds are similar a feather
The dominicus is like a yellow airship in the heaven
A tiger is like the beating of drums.
I quote this second verse form partly to relay one of Koch'due south most important points. Both poems I've quoted, you'll have noticed, contained the phrase "beating of drums." A bad instructor would call that plagiarism. In fact, information technology's a proof of alive poetic tradition in P.S. 61. Over again and again, Koch's students borrowed each other's ideas, attempting to improve on them. (That'southward one of the things fine art is all nigh.) Koch forced this valuable procedure along by getting children to write in collaboration. He says, "Composing a poem together is inspiring: the timid are given courage past braver colleagues; and ideas likewise good to vest to any one kid are transformed, elaborated on, and topped." A typical result of collaborative
I wish I was an apple tree
I wish I was a steel apple tree
I wish I was a steel apple so when people flake me their teeth would fall out ...
The poems by children published in "Wishes, Lies, and Dreams" show how vital poetic tradition was at P.S. 61. Naturally, it was a somewhat limited tradition: children learned from each other and from their teacher's suggestions, only the children themselves felt a need for something more than. Koch'south response was to shift the experiment to "teaching nifty poetry to children," thus broadening the tradition bachelor to them. And the record of this experiment and its startling results is "Rose, Where Did You Become That Red?"
In his new volume Koch explains in detail how he introduced—how any good teacher might innovate—poems ranging from Blake'southward "The Tyger" to Rimbaud's "Voyelles." Briefly, the method went like this: Koch would pass out and read the poem, he and the children would talk nearly it, not worrying about every single item just getting the feeling, the core thought. With "The Tyger," for instance, the core idea is "A person talking to an brute." As presently equally the instructor senses that the children take got it—that is, they experience the awe at the centre of the verse form, the shocking quality of the nightmare lines ("burning bright / In the forests of the night," or the idea of God hammering out the tiger on an anvil)—the teacher sets the children to work on poems of their own.
Wait at three results. Showtime, a poem‐fragment which shows imagistic influence from Blake:
Giraffe! Giraffe!
What kicky, sticky legs y'all've got.
What a long neck yous've got. It looks like a stick of fire ...
Second, a fragment from a vivid joke poem that shows that its young writer actually did imagine conversation with an fauna:
Glub blub, petty squid. Glub blub, why blub practice you glub have blub Glubbblub blub such glub inky blub stuff blubbb? I use it for a protective shield against my enemies blubbb ...
Third, a verse form I quote simply because information technology'due south terrific:
Giraffes, how did they make Carmen? Well, you meet, Carmen ate the prettiest rose in the world then just and so the smashing change of heaven occured and she became the prettiest daughter in the earth and because I love her.
Lions, why does your mane flame like burn of the devil? Because I have the speed of the wind and the strength of the earth at my command.
Oh Kiwi, why have you no wings? Because I have been born with the despair to walk the earth without the ability of flight and emmet damned to do so.
Oh bird of flight, why take y'all been granted the power to fly? Because was meant to sit down upon the branch and to be with the air current.
Oh crocodile, why were you granted the ability to slaughter your swain animal? I do non answer.
Not everyone can teach children poetry too as Kenneth Koch, a homo who, as a superb poet himself, perhaps knows more about poetry than he realizes. Telling how he worked in the classroom, he says: "Sometimes a pupil would be stuck, unable to showtime his poem. I'would give him a few ideas, while trying not to give him actual lines or words—'Well, how do musical instruments sound? Why don't you write about those?' or 'What do y'all hear when you're on a boat?' Sometimes students would become stuck in the middle of a poem, and would exercise the same sort of thing. Sometimes I would exist called over to corroborate what had been written so far, to run across if it was OK. I often made such comments every bit 'That'southward adept, but write some more than,' or 'Yes, the first three lines in item are terrific—what about some more than like that?' or ... 'I think maybe it's finished. What well-nigh another poem on the other side?"
I talked with a college professor in California, a wellknown literary critic, who tried teaching young children by Koch'due south method. The problem, he told me frankly, was that he was never admittedly sure what to praise, what to call finished, and so on. If it was hard for my friend, it may be harder yet for, say Miss Watson at Due east Pembroke Key.
Nevertheless, the principle is right, and not merely for poets. What we have now fails almost invariably; Koch's method will work for everybody at to the lowest degree some of the time. His two books could—should—be the beginning of a great revolution. I urge you lot to purchase them, pass them around, exert influence on schools. Aid stamp out the kind of poetry children are usually forced to read and write—for case this horrible textbook piece (from "September," in "The World of Language," Book v, Follett Educational Corporation) which Kenneth Koch quotes:
... Asters deep purple,
A grasshopper's telephone call,
Today it is summer,
Tomorrow is fall.
Koch compares, with devastating consequence, a fifth‐grader'due south poem on spring:
Spring is sailing a gunkhole
Bound is a flower waking upwards in the morning
Bound is like a plate falling out of a closet for joy
Spring is similar a spatter of grease .... ■
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1973/12/23/archives/wishes-lies-and-dreams-teaching-children-to-write-poetry-by-kenneth.html
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