The poet Kenneth Koch (1925-2002) seemed like a nice guy. His poetry was playful and luminous, highly imaginative and celebrated the simpler things in life and language. In the photos that can be found on the Internet, he always appears smiling (even in a photo where he appears to have been arrested by a police officer). His students at Columbia University regarded him as a stimulating, witty and passionate professor of literature. And he made no small effort to bring poetry closer to that group so often forgotten and maligned: children. “Once language exists, it exists…
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The poet Kenneth Koch (1925-2002) seemed like a nice guy. His poetry was playful and luminous, highly imaginative and celebrated the simpler things in life and language. In the photos that can be found on the Internet, he always appears smiling (even in a photo where he appears to have been arrested by a police officer). His students at Columbia University regarded him as a stimulating, witty and passionate professor of literature. And he made no small effort to bring poetry closer to that group so often forgotten and maligned: children. “Once the language exists, there is also the impulse to play with it,” he wrote.
The best thing about his way of teaching poetry to the little ones was respect. He did not underestimate them: he offered them pieces by some of the most important poets of his time or of the poetic tradition (William Carlos Williams, John Ashbery, William Blake, Wallace Stevens, Rainer Maria Rilke or his beloved Federico García Lorca). “He found it a problem to give children bland, cheap, infantilizing poems,” says the editor Aníbal Cristobo, “his idea was to present the texts of these poets on an axis that could make the little ones question “. I didn’t understand the line between children’s poetry and what we call adult poetry.
Thus he encourages his little pupils to write (in what he called ‘tasks’) inspired by the great poets, but with motives from their world, their dreams or their desires. For example, based on the famous poem Just to tell, in which Williams confesses that he ate some prunes that someone kept in the refrigerator for breakfast (Forgive me / they were delicious / so sweet / so cold), Koch suggests writing about things who like to do, even if they are badly done. About not being too sorry.
“Koch spreads the idea that poetry is not so much a literary genre to be adapted to different audiences, but a way of looking at and interacting with the world,” says poet Claudia González Caparrós. What mattered less was formality, or talent, being a good or bad poet, nor learning names, dates, rhymes, and measures (as so many attempts have been made to teach poetry, without much success), but imagination and discover the desire and have fun. “I once dreamed that my friend was a carrot and I was a cucumber,” wrote Ilona Barbuka, one of her students, inspired by a dream.
‘Just to tell you’, by the boy Andrew Vecchione inspired by William Carlos Williams
Thanks for the ants you left in my bed.
This is just to thank you for giving me the sunset
purple on my birthday
poetry in public school
Koch began teaching poetry workshops to elementary school students at a New York public school (Public School 61, in Manhattan) in the late 1960s, but later expanded his scope to teach workshops in several countries. His extensive experience spawned two successful books that spread his methods to many schools: Wishes, Lies and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry (Wishes, Lies and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry), published by Harper Collins in 1970 , where literary “homework” predominates, and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?: Teaching Great Poetry to Children, published by Vintage Books in 1973, which discusses the work of established poets and their ways of inspiring children.
His teaching activity reached the pages of The Wall Street Journal, Life, Newsweek or The New York Review of Books, and the public readings of his crazy short disciples reached the same spaces where the established poets recited. From the mix of the two works mentioned above, which greatly contributed to the dissemination of a different way of teaching poetry, the recent Spanish synthesis was formed: An ant is the beginning of a new universe (Kriller71), edited by González Caparrós and Cristobo , where the two books have been merged, keeping in mind that some of the exercises didn’t make sense when translated into Spanish.
Poem by the girl Marion Mackles, based on “lies”
I am as green as the grass.
I am standing on the leaf of a tree.
I’m sitting on a flying cranberry in New York.
The mud is beautiful.
The rain is ugly.
I’m on a vine.
I am snow.
I am snow in Spain.
I am rain in Spain.
I am the sun in Spain
I am a cloud in Spain.
I am in Spain.
I am Spain.
Koch suggests writing collaborative poems (as was done in ancient Greece, in medieval Japan, or as the Surrealists did), poems based on wishes (starting with the formula “I would like to …”) or on what he calls “lies”. , that is, when counting things that do not exist. He suggests writing about “something that shouldn’t be pretty, but you secretly think is.” At the end of his collections he gives advice for poetry teachers. Most important: reading poetry. “One thing that encouraged me was how playful and imaginative the children’s speech was at times,” Koch writes, “they said true things in surprising new ways.”
The pedagogical adventures of Koch and the poems of his students lead the reader to the anthology of his own poetry, collected in Spain in Perros ladrando en la nieve (Kriller71), edited by Jordi Doce. Thus it is discovered that Koch’s poems do not differ that much, except for distances, from the poems he inspired in his workshops. “Maybe that’s one of the keys: Koch didn’t have to replace the chip, what he brought the kids to the workshops was the same thing he and his colleagues produced, often with similar procedures,” says Cristobo.
The New York School
His “colleagues” were the poets of the so-called New York School; in fact, it was more than a school, it was a group of friends that sprang up in that town in the 1940s and 1950s. Among them, as the most visible chief, the huge (and strange) John Ashbery; also, lesser known, Frank O’Hara (who died young, at age 40, hit by a beach buggy). Also Barbara Guest or James Schuyler (see the anthology The New York School of Poetry, edited by Alba). “These people brought a lot of oxygen to poetry, taking it away from academicism and clever stuff,” says Cristobo (although reading some authors, like Ashbery, is anything but easy). They loved the French surrealism of Roussel and Apollinaire, they rejected the academicism of New Criticism, they had connections to the abstract expressionism of Pollock and De Koonig, which at that time made New York the artistic center of the planet (taking over from Paris ), and with the neo-Dadaism of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.
‘Four ways to look at a wolf’, poem by Joseph Scifo inspired by Wallace Stevens
A wolf in a book looks like a growling wild dog.
A werewolf and Frankenstein together are a wolf.
A wolf is like Godzilla when his belly hurts.
A wolf is like a long-haired hippie.
The times helped Koch’s activity: “By the late 1960s it was clear that good modern poetry did not deal with a lofty theme presented in lofty diction framed by rhyme and meter, which are the chief stumbling blocks for poets.” poetry,” writes the poet Ron Padgett in one of the forewords. Not only that: Koch started teaching in 1968, a frenetic moment in the world when hierarchies were questioned, new worlds were sought, new ways of doing things, a certain horizontality, and creativity and imagination were valued wanted to “bring to power”). as read on the graffiti of the Paris riots).
Perhaps the most curious thing about Koch’s activity is verifying that the texts that can be dark and mysterious to adults, and that make us reject poetry, need not resemble children: Koch believed it was a mistake to to present them as a riddle to be deciphered, and that we should enjoy them more freely, even if we do not fully comprehend their meaning: let them flow in language, and approach them not so much from the intellect as from the emotion. And the little ones know how to do it: “It’s nice to see how the dictatorship of meaning has not yet reached the children,” concludes Caparrós.
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