Unshackled Imagination
MALPEDE, KAREN
Unshackled Imagination Wishes, Lies and'Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry By Kenneth Koch Chelsea House. 309 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Karen Malpede Kenneth Koch's Wishes, Lies and Dreams...
...Third-grader Eliza Bailey wrote: "I have a sailboat of sinking water/ I was given a piece of paper made of roses...
...And I wish we didn't have to go to school...
...Sometimes I wish I owned a puppy...
...There was no competition, no fear of being "unoriginal," no pronouncements of instant success or failure...
...Wishes make a very good early writing assignment...
...Fourth-grader Tara Houseman explained her mystifying middle line to Koch: "Oh, you know, when the plane is on the ground and starts going faster and faster over those white lines on the runway it looks like my cat...
...And I wish we would live in the country...
...Lucille Perez ignored the suggested line openings, but responded to the idea simply and beautifully: My little world is an empty one...
...The act of writing itself produces a barrier that effectively blocks all but the most imitative thoughts--those designed especially to please the teacher/audience...
...The 200 pages of examples he has collected here show he was able to stimulate that process in the students at P.S...
...A poet, playwright and short story writer, Koch wanted to make his students feel that poetry was a natural way to express themselves...
...He never corrected a child's poem or selected the "best" poem from each assignment...
...Perhaps more important, though, Koch not only proves what can be done, but provides instructive methods for other teachers to use...
...Without the clutter of the adult art world, some very happy and inspired poetry was written...
...A child's world is bounded by his home, school and television set...
...But the dream 1 had 1 cannot forget...
...Yet each now poetry idea--lies, dreams, colors, noises--moved the writers to find a new way of ordering their experience...
...And then he understood that "something like a literary tradition" was being created at the school...
...And I wish all my sisters would disappear...
...Sometimes I wish for a room of my own...
...At least during its poetry classes, taught first by Koch and continued by Ron Padgett, P.S...
...Once they understood the challenge was in how to say it, what got said was often amazing: "The sky is as blue as thunder, but/ The cat is as striped as an airplane take-off/ The globe is as round as the wind...
...And I wish even if she didn't she wouldn't wear mine...
...Children have plenty to say, as we all know, but usually are incapable of putting it down on paper...
...But a dream like that 1 cannot forget...
...Even mature authors tend to imitate the style of famous works rather than risk finding a structure that would best transmit their own ideas or experiences...
...And I wish my little sister would find her nightgown...
...Asking them to do so gives them a whole new subject matter they usually don't think about in school...
...61 was a community of artists...
...Children are great makers of wishes, and they love to write about them...
...Beckett and Pinter, for example, have been followed by a host of playwrights purporting to be meaningful merely because their plays are full of abstractions, repetitive-ness and general pessimism...
...And sometimes I can hear a sound of an animal walking toward me...
...Her surprising results attest to the success of Koch's method: Sometimes I wish I had my own kitten...
...The problem is not limited to children alone...
...To help them with form I suggested that they begin every line with T wish.'" After Erin Harold, a fourth-grade student, was given this form, she was able to play variations on it...
...Instead, he urged them to do things like include a comparison in every line...
...Thus sisters, brothers, pets, and prime-time fantasies are the recurrent subjects of the poems...
...The noise poems brought a rich lyricism to the emerging body of literature at P.S...
...He was not promoting permissiveness, but rather attempting to offer a structure that made sense to his students...
...A swan of bees" was originally a spelling error for "a swarm," but it became a method of describing that was easier for the children than metaphors...
...He asked his classes, which ranged from the first through the sixth grades, to write poems about wishes...
...Reviewed by Karen Malpede Kenneth Koch's Wishes, Lies and Dreams ranks with the best literature on education...
...61 on New York's lower East Side...
...At first Koch was amazed by the poetic output of the children at P.S...
...Koch asked the children to use Spanish words or even to write whole poems in Spanish if they could...
...His long essay on teaching children to write poetry reveals a deep understanding of the creative process...
...I seem to be/ But really I am" allowed the older children to express their self-consciousness...
...it was the right way to treat them because it corresponded to the truth...
...Although rhyme is usually the only characteristic of poetry children can readily name, Koch felt it would stop the "free flow of their feelings and associations" so he asked his students to avoid rhyming...
...Later he began to analyze his success as a teacher: "Treating them like poets was not a case of humorous but effective diplomacy, as I had first thought...
...Sometimes I wish we had a color TV...
...The next morning I thought it was for real but I realize it was a dream...
...Koch freed his students' imaginations by isolating for them one way of looking at the world and then giving them a practical method for transferring their inspirations to paper...
...When he started reading poems from one class to children in another, he found that they were a definite inspiration...
...he read their work to stress the advantage of a second language in poetry...
...Even difficult poems like Wallace Stevens" "Bantams Among Pine Woods" seemed immediate to the children when their themes coincided with the day's poetry idea...
Vol. 54 • January 1971 • No. 2
