November 21, 1970

A Teacher Who Makes Writing Poetry as Exciting as Stickball

By LISA HAMMEL

he fifth grade class stood up and cheered so wildly when the tall man with a mop of wavy hair came into the room, he might have been a baseball player. Or maybe an astronaut.

But he wasn't. The man in the fisherman's knit sweater and blue corduroy pants who seemed to invade rather than come into the room was their poetry teacher.

"That's my friend," said a little boy happily, from the back of the room as Kenneth Koch planted himself before them.

How did poetry get to be as exciting as stickball or giggling over secrets at P.S. 61, a school on East 12th Street, whose population is partly lower-income, partly middle-class?

Mr. Koch has chronicled part of how it happened- and what other teachers and parents can do to make it happen- in a new book, "Wishes, Lies and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry." The book also contains an anthology of the P.S. 61 children's poetry.

Mr. Koch, a poet who has taught writing to adults at the New School and who is now also a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, began his experiment at the school in the spring of 1968, under the sponsorship of the Academy of American Poets.

His Observations

He had been noticing, he said, that when you gave children a piece of paper and a crayon, they got excited. When you gave children a piece of paper and a pencil to write with nothing happened.

"You have to think too much first," one child told him.

But Mr. Koch had observed when he had read adult poetry to youngsters in junior and senior high schools that "the children were amazingly responsive. They don't make the mistake adults do of thinking you have to understand it to enjoy it."

He wanted to harness this response- "the same energy and excitement they paint and draw with."

He learned first that it was not enough simply to present the children with an idea. "I have to find a form that helps them organize the poem [his idea the other afternoon was, 'I remember such and such/ But I forget some other part of it'] and then I have to get them excited about it through examples."

He also had to find a way to involve those children who, according to one of their regular teachers "are afraid to express themselves and enjoy themselves."

'Can't Wait to Write'

"You have them talk their poems until they get so excited about what they're saying, they can't wait to write it," he explained. "And I always tell them to be crazy and silly because they have such a tendency to be conventional in school."

"Can the poem be fake?" one boy asked the other afternoon. "Of course it can be fake," Mr. Koch answered. He told the class, "You can put in a lot of colors, wishes, lies, dreams, bananas, grapefruit, songs" But how does it all come out so quickly in a class that seems constantly to be in motion- talking, running in and out of the room?

"It always looks like nothing will happen," he said, "but then they write these beautiful things on pieces of paper."

"I remember knowing how a magician made me," one fifth-grade girl wrote, "but I forgot how it used to be in the dustland"

"I remember seeing a bird," wrote another girl, "but I don't remember if it had wings"

"I remembered the earth but I forgot the moon/ I remembered the stripes on the flag, but I forgot the stars"

"I remember going to sleep three nights ago/ But I forgot if I woke up"

Why do the children seem to enjoy it so much?

"They get to talk about their secret feelings," Mr. Koch said, "and somebody is taking their feelings seriously. It's nice to find out that these feelings you have really mean something.

"As one little girl said, 'When you write, you feel as if it's really happening.' And you're using your whole self to make something," he continued.

"One feels so separated from the world. But all the separation we're forced to feel in order to survive disappears when you're writing a poem. You can be a mouse, or talk to trees, or speak to the ocean."

The children had treated his idea the other afternoon as a paradox, until he began to explain. "How can you forget something if you remember it?" they shouted.

"I remember I wore socks yesterday, but I don't remember what color they were," he answered. "If you get stuck, just think of something you remember and there will always be a part of everything you forget."

"And there's a part of everything," said a serious-faced little girl in the back of the room, "that you never know."

Return to the Books Home Page