Kenneth Koch Revisited

Abstract

Kenneth Koch Revisited Robert DiYanni (bio) With Wishes, Lies and Dreams and its companion volume, Rose Where Did You Get That Red? Kenneth Koch demonstrated how to make reading and writing poetry come alive for children. Aside from the optimism and the inventiveness of these books, perhaps their most important achievement was the integration of reading and writing in teaching poetry to children. Moreover, their influence has ranged beyond the elementary school classroom to include high school and college students, who have benefited from introductory poetry texts such as John Frederick Nims's Western Wind and Robert Wallace's Writing Poems. Though Nims' book emphasizes reading poetry and Wallace's text stresses writing it, both implicitly endorse Koch's approach to integrating the two skills. Recently Koch has continued his poetical pedagogy with the help of Kate Farrell, in Sleeping on the Wing: an Anthology of Modern Poetry with Essays on Reading and Writing. The authors describe their new book this way: This is an anthology of modern poetry. It includes a number of pages of poetry by each poet who is in it, and has essays about the poets and their poems and suggestions to you for writing poems of your own . . . . You will find that reading poetry is a great help in writing it, and that writing it is very good for your understanding of what you read. A logical place to start reading poetry is with modern poetry—since that is the poetry of our own time. The premises of Sleeping on the Wing are those of the earlier books. While the focus on modern poems directs the book more at high school students than at the younger children for whom Koch first developed his teaching strategies, Koch and Farrell's pedagogical approach easily adaptable to any audience of any age. Koch and Farrell themselves have ably demonstrated that with their book about teaching in a nursing home, I Never Told Anybody. Two other virtues of Sleeping on the Wing deserve note: its essays on the twenty-three poets, and the writing suggestions that follow these essays. In their introductions to the work of each poet, Koch and Farrell subordinate literary-historical and biographical information to highlight the distinctive features and animating impulses of the poet's work. Their writing suggestions form a set of guided assignments, most of them invitations to compose poems. Specific, lucid, and imaginative, these assignments encourage students and challenge them, without rigidly prescribing how to proceed or what to say. Moreover, they direct students back to a rereading of the poems, with the necessity for writing themselves prompting students to reread more closely than they might have otherwise. The essays and writing suggestions follow the poems rather than precede theme, thus suggesting that students ought to encounter the poems directly before having them mediated by the authors' comments. To give a clearer sense of Koch and Farrell's procedure, here is a bit of what they say in their introductory note to Wallace Stevens: He thought the world, if you saw it as it really was, was beautiful and dazzling, that you could be constantly discovering its amazing beauty if you gave what you were looking at all your attention, using your imagination, seeing it as if for the first time, seeing everything always in a new way. He thought this was the most exhilirating, most joyful, best, and truest way to see anything, to think of it, to write of it. Stevens's idea was that even simple, plain things, like a blackbird or a plowed field, are exotic and amazing. Think, for example, of the rain. You look out the window and it is raining. You think, "I need my umbrella today." You're used to the rain. You look at it; but in a way you don't really see it. But what if it were the first rain you ever saw? If you didn't know what it was? If you could forget, for a minute, everything except the rain? How would it look and smell and feel and sound? What would you think or write about it? . . . These comments are noteworthy for their clarity and their concreteness...