Kenneth Koch Wishes Lies and Dreams Spoken Arts Records Sa 1011
Wishes, Lies, and Dreams
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December 23, 1973
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Information technology's non strictly necessary to read both of Kenneth Koch's splendid and enormously of import books on children and poesy, though I strongly recommend it, if but for the pleasance both books give. Each stands on its ain, implying the whole argument. But they're better together, and to anyone for whom the subject is of import—parents, teachers; anyone who has the normal human please in true poesy, or anyone who wonders how his normal human pleasure was dwarfed and twisted—the pair of books will, I think, be a revelation.
"Wishes, Lies, and Dreams," originally published in 1970, is the record of Koch'due south highly successful experiment with teaching children to write poetry at P.S. 61 in Manhattan. In schools all over America, children are excited when the art teacher comes in; and a look at children's fine art in recent years shows that something actually happens in those art classes. Why then should the art of poetry be, for children, an annoyance and a bore? Koch, himself the author of such books of poetry as "The Pleasures of Peace," "Thanks" and "Ko, or A Season on Earth" and a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia, prepare out to prove — and has clearly proved—that writing poetry can be as exciting as anything in a child'south experience. When he entered a classroom, his pupils (grades I through six) shouted and clapped. When he left the classroom, he left children's poems that might make an developed poet envious. Poems like this:
Snow is every bit white as the sunday shines.
The heaven is as blue as a waterfall.
A rose is every bit red as a beating of drums.
The clouds are every bit white every bit the busting of a firecracker.
A tree is as green as a roaring lion.
"Wishes, Lies, and Dreams" tells how he did it and how, hopefully, anyone can do it. I can suggest here only the full general approach. He began with the firm confidence that the thing could be done. He writes: "I thing that encouraged me was how playful and inventive children's talk sometimes was. They said true things in fresh and surprising means. Some other was how much they enjoyed making works of art — drawings, paintings, and collages. I was aware of the quantum in teaching children art some forty years ago. I had seen how my daughter and other children profited from the new ways of helping them find and apply their natural talents. That hadn't happened yet in verse. Some children'due south poetry was marvelous, but most seemed uncomfortably imitative of developed poetry or else childishly beautiful. It seemed restricted somehow, and it manifestly lacked the happy, creative free energy of children's fine art."
To get what he was after, he knew he must slay 2 ancient schoolroom dragons. One was inhibition, the kid's fear of getting something wrong, proving tor the thousandth time that he's stupid, unacceptable. The other was, in effect, the child's innocence of cultural tradition. However gratis and open a child may feel, he nevertheless has the question, "What shall I write almost?"—really the difficult question, "What is a verse form?"
Koch slew the first dragon by establishing a comfortable, adequately noisy classroom much like that typical, of fine art classes; by encouraging students to write whatever they pleased, joke poems (even ornery jokes on Mr. Koch), mean poems, poems involving sex, and so on; by placing no importance on spelling, grammar, or neatness (all matters which could exist attended to afterward); and by discouraging the utilize of rhyme, since rhyme tends to limit imagination and honest feeling. Equally for the child'south question, "What shall I write?," Koch worked out a set of "Ideas for Poems"—unproblematic, essentially formal ideas that should get things moving in any classroom. One is, Begin every line with "I wish." Another is, Utilise u comparison in every line. (He offers many more.) The poem I quoted earlier, "Snow is as white as the sun shines," is a consequence of the comparison idea. Here is some other:
Thunder is similar bowling
Clouds are like a feather
The dominicus is similar a yellow airship in the sky
A tiger is similar the beating of drums.
I quote this 2d poem partly to relay one of Koch'due south most of import 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, it's a proof of alive poetic tradition in P.Southward. 61. Again and once again, Koch's students borrowed each other'due south ideas, attempting to improve on them. (That'south one of the things art is all about.) Koch forced this valuable process along past getting children to write in collaboration. He says, "Composing a poem together is inspiring: the timid are given backbone by braver colleagues; and ideas likewise good to belong to whatever i child are transformed, elaborated on, and topped." A typical result of collaborative
I wish I was an apple
I wish I was a steel apple
I wish I was a steel apple so when people scrap me their teeth would autumn out ...
The poems past 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 instructor'south suggestions, but the children themselves felt a need for something more. Koch's response was to shift the experiment to "didactics dandy poetry to children," thus broadening the tradition available to them. And the record of this experiment and its startling results is "Rose, Where Did You Get That Ruddy?"
In his new book Koch explains in detail how he introduced—how whatever good teacher might introduce—poems ranging from Blake'due south "The Tyger" to Rimbaud's "Voyelles." Briefly, the method went similar this: Koch would pass out and read the poem, he and the children would talk nearly information technology, non worrying virtually every unmarried detail merely getting the feeling, the core thought. With "The Tyger," for example, the core idea is "A person talking to an animal." As soon as the teacher senses that the children have got it—that is, they experience the awe at the heart of the poem, 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 instructor sets the children to work on poems of their own.
Look at iii results. Offset, a poem‐fragment which shows imagistic influence from Blake:
Giraffe! Giraffe!
What kicky, viscid legs yous've got.
What a long neck you've got. It looks like a stick of fire ...
Second, a fragment from a brilliant joke poem that shows that its young writer actually did imagine conversation with an animal:
Glub blub, trivial squid. Glub blub, why blub do you lot glub have blub Glubbblub blub such glub inky blub stuff blubbb? I employ it for a protective shield confronting my enemies blubbb ...
Third, a poem I quote simply because it'southward terrific:
Giraffes, how did they brand Carmen? Well, yous run into, Carmen ate the prettiest rose in the world and then just then the great change of heaven occured and she became the prettiest girl in the world and considering I dear her.
Lions, why does your mane flame similar fire of the devil? Considering I have the speed of the air current and the strength of the earth at my command.
Oh Kiwi, why have you no wings? Considering I take been born with the despair to walk the earth without the power of flight and ant damned to do and then.
Oh bird of flight, why accept you been granted the power to fly? Because was meant to sit upon the branch and to exist with the wind.
Oh crocodile, why were you granted the power to slaughter your boyfriend animal? I exercise not answer.
Non everyone can teach children poesy as well equally Kenneth Koch, a man who, as a superb poet himself, perhaps knows more than nigh poetry than he realizes. Telling how he worked in the classroom, he says: "Sometimes a pupil would be stuck, unable to first his verse form. 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 yous write most those?' or 'What do y'all hear when you're on a gunkhole?' Sometimes students would go stuck in the middle of a poem, and would practice the same sort of thing. Sometimes I would be called over to approve what had been written so far, to see if information technology was OK. I often fabricated such comments as 'That's good, merely write some more than,' or 'Yes, the offset three lines in particular are terrific—what about some more like that?' or ... 'I think maybe it's finished. What virtually another poem on the other side?"
I talked with a higher professor in California, a wellknown literary critic, who tried education young children by Koch's method. The problem, he told me bluntly, was that he was never admittedly sure what to praise, what to call finished, and so on. If it was difficult for my friend, it may be harder all the same for, say Miss Watson at E Pembroke Primal.
Nevertheless, the principle is correct, and not just for poets. What we have now fails almost invariably; Koch's method will piece of work for everybody at to the lowest degree some of the time. His two books could—should—be the beginning of a dandy revolution. I urge you to buy them, pass them around, exert influence on schools. Aid stamp out the kind of poetry children are normally forced to read and write—for example this horrible textbook slice (from "September," in "The World of Language," Book 5, 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 event, a fifth‐grader's verse form on spring:
Spring is sailing a boat
Spring is a flower waking upwardly in the morning
Spring is like a plate falling out of a closet for joy
Spring is like 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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