Among School Children

Last September I had the chance to teach some children how to write poetry on Cleveland's East Side and to test out some of Kenneth Koch's theories about how it should be done. I first came across Koch a couple of years ago in his book, Wishes, Lies and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry, a collection of kids' poems prefaced by some lengthy remarks on teaching. I was intrigued with Koch's central idea: people's imaginations are more readily available to them when they are young; it's important to tap that flow before it is turned off. A teacher of writing and performance of poetry at Radcliffe, Ruth Whitman, once wrote--and Koch would agree--that children "are still close to the elemental sources, they are naturally honest, their mythmaking and imagemaking apparatus is close at hand." These seemed incontrovertible truths when I left with my brother-in-law from an idyllic farm west of Cleveland for the alternative school in the inner city where he teaches fourth, fifth, and sixth graders. But by the end of a single day in class I was certain that the title to Koch's book was actually meant to describe its preface and not the poems.

What caused my immediate skepticism, why did the whole thing turn out so differently from what Koch's book says or suggests about teaching children poetry? I think that Koch works under certain assumptions about poetry, education, and perhaps even children that ignore many of the problems one encounters every day in schools of all kinds--problems that keep his book from being very useful.

One of Koch's most convincing arguments is that he didn't teach in some exclusive private school, where most children go home every day to an environment of encouragement, where literate, college-educated parents could react to poems, and where children could benefit from "acquired tastes." Instead, Koch taught at P.S.61 on Manhattan's lower East Side, where more than half the kids are black or Puerto Rican. And his results--at least those that were published--are impressive. For example, Koch asked a fourth grader to translate one sense into another and she wrote:

Snow is as white as the sun shines.

The sky is as blue as a waterfall.

A rose is as red 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.

Of course the students didn't start out writing poems as evocative as this right away. Koch began with collaborative poems, all beginning with the idea, "I wish..." He de-emphasized spelling, grammar and punctuation because he saw them as barriers. He emphasized poem-ideas that were easy and natural for children to use, and that encouraged immediate responses. Often the children would make rules for the poem (i.e. it must include a color and a comic-strip character, or a city and a country, with "I wish" at the beginning). After the group poems his students went on to describing noises, dreams, colors, music, lies, then to even more sophisticated poems using comparisons and themes like "I used to be... But now I am," and even metaphors.

Koch found an interesting approach to the metaphor poems. He taught several different grades ranging from first through sixth. At first he inspired the kids by reading an adult poem--including D.H. Lawrence, Theodore Roethke, John Ashberry, and Dyland Thomas--but as his collection of kids' poems increased he would read in one class poems written in another. He noticed that P.S.61 was establishing its own literary tradition--an institutional salon of sorts. Thus a misspelled word triggered Koch's introduction to a metaphor. A child wrote "A swam of bees," instead of a "swarm." A first grader's poem: "I used to be a fish/But now I am a nurse," inspired a whole series of poems describing physical transformation like this one:

I used to be a nurse

But now I am a decade person.

I always was Mr. Coke.

But now I am Mrs. Seven Up.

Koch's theories of teaching seem sound enough. He believes in taking children seriously as poets, yet removing some of the aura of difficulty and remoteness surrounding poetry. He wants the atmosphere to be fun, would never assign 'homework.' From his experience at PS 61 he concluded that children enjoy writing poetry "because it provides welcome relief from required subjects." Because it is a group-activity it "belies self-consciousness or self-doubt." And he believes it to be "competitive in a mild and exhilarating way." Koch thinks that a teacher can overcome a child's fear of writing a bad poem or being criticized or ridiculed by reading poems aloud stressing their intrinsic value, and withholding the writer's name. Never change a line, says Koch, just ask the writer what he meant. He suggest going around the classroom "encouraging good lines and discouraging wayward ideas." In his second book on teaching children great poetry called Rose, where Did You Get That Red, he has this to say for the class atmosphere:

The children talked, laughed, looked at each other's poems, called me to their desks to read and to admire, or, if they were "stuck," to give them ideas. It was a happy, competitive, creative atmosphere, and I was there to praise them, encourage them, and to inspire them.

In the first place Koch assumes that children enjoy writing poetry because it gets them away from the regular courses, the dull routine of scheduled periods of reading, writing, arithmetic, spelling, etc. Essentially, he exploits that institutional tedium without ever questioning it. His creative geniuses would probably not have done so well if, in sitting at the same desk all day, every day, Miss Blunt would ask them to take out their pencils and paper and from 11:45 to 12:00 (right before lunch when they're all dying to go out and play) write a poem.

At the school I visited, the kids--mostly blacks--were encouraged to use the library, read to each other, and explore their own interests: they were hardly ever required to sit quietly in their seats and listen. "Group participation" wasn't apparent in the collaborative poems, certainly not so much as the sense of coercion. Encouragement for an individual line, even if I never mentioned the name of its author, still caused discouragement. A kid was bright enough to know that if didn't like them. Some, when asked to write a poem refused out right, and others expressed their rebellion in the wish-poems:

I wish I didn't have to wrote a wish.

I wish there was no school.

I wish school wasn't invented.

I tried to open up the kids' imaginations, to encourage and inspire them. Koch said, "Perhaps the most important thing to do, I found, is to be positive about everything." I said to these kids, "Write anything you want." But in public schools the words "everything" and "anything" are already surrounded by an implicit censorship. Many of these children picked up on the work "anything" and wrote away with a fierce sense of vindication:

I wish I was out of this school

Because this is turning into

a Public Poop-school.

I wish Greg will shut his mouth.

Koch never printed lines quite like these. Traditional schools usually don't allow that kind of honesty.

The atmosphere was happy and somewhat creative, but it wasn't always happy, and not constantly productive. There was a lot of tension--not terrible but still recognizable--that Koch never even suggests as possible. But two poems in particular were outstanding: they showed sensitivity and a certain playfulness with words. Both were written by Laura, a sixth grader:

I wish I had 20 dogs in all

Kinds of breeds. I wish I had a

sister not so mean. I wish I

had a ten speed bike like I wish

people would be all alike...

I wish my mother wouldn't

have said be a good friend

to Rita or I would have hit

her back and made her

turn black and blue and

made her think she was pink.

Rita was the subject of several abusive wish-poems because, in the true spirit of writing "anything," she expressed her desire for all of the boys in the class to jump in the lake. I didn't let anybody know about Rita, but ripples of rumor turned into waves of discontent: "I wish Rita with/her fat self shut her/garbage mouth and/turn into a fat white rat." Now I attempted to curb this bickering with a wish poem containing a color and a T.V. show. Most of these kids spend a lot of time watching television; some of them are allowed to stay up late because their parents just don't care. Here is the collaboration:

I wish I was Randy Jackson's wife.

I wish I was a young movie star with long black hair.

I wish I was Red Fix's daughter

I wish that Olive Oyle would stretch down the Grand Canyon.

I wish Bugs Bunny was a purple monkey.

All of these poems may not actually be poems, but the mechanics help children become aware of all the different styles available to them. At the same time they can use their imaginations, as Koch says. But Koch often attributes too much consciousness of the process to the children. Many never go beyond sheer mechanical repetition. In a series of "I used to be/But now I am" poems this become apparent to me:

I used to be 8 years old but now I am 9 years old

I used to be young But now I am older

I used to be little But now I am big.

I used to be little But now I'm tall.

All of these indicate a kind of formulaic plugging in--there's nothing very imaginative about them.

Koch gives so much credit to the children's awareness of writing that at one point in Rose, where Did You Get That Red? he claims a sixth grader's poem written in response to William Carlos Williams "shows not only William's attention to the beauty of small and supposedly unbeautiful things, but also his way of making the poem, as it goes along, a physical experience of discovery for the reader." It's hard to imagine a sixth grader intentionally attempting to evoke such a sophisticated response. It's like equating a crayon drawing of a cow with wings floating under a purple sun with a Chagall. In fact it's difficult to accept the premise that kids understand poetry much better than a definition shouted out at the beginning of my class: "words written down." Of course adults don't understand poetry very well either, and that's even more true nowadays, when education. has to be relevant and useful. I think Koch ignores the whole issue of usefulness too. Young kids need to learn how to write, but they should be learning how to write to communicate too. They don't need somebody to come in and publish their poems.

In a note about this poem, "Among School Children," Yeats wrote "Topic for poem--School children and the thought that life will waste them perhaps that no possible life can fulfill out dreams or even their teacher's hope." The school children I met and taught and came to admire showed me that they will never fulfill Koch's dreams or hopes. Their imaginations should and can be active all the time in school--not just in one liberated period of time.