Ah, Poets

I wonder wonder who who that that man man is

The one with the white teeth and

big smile.

He's very tall and funny,

He writes poetry wonderfully,

And he always gets nervous.

He's a scatterbrain like me

And he wears great big round glasses.

He's got curly hair and a big

face

(No, he isn't Santa Clans)

He is about 40, he looks about 35

And he acts about 18.

Oh now I remember--it's Mr. Koch.

--Eliza Bailey, Age 12

When the funny man with the big round glasses comes bouncing into the classroom at Manhattan's P.S. 61, the sixth-graders burst into applause. "Hi there, poets," says Kenneth Koch. "How about a Christmas poem today?" He suggests all sorts of ideas: "Like what would the ocean do if it really cared about Christmas? Or the eagles, sparrows and robins--what would they do? The apes in in Africa, would they swing from the trees? Or Abraham Lincoln, would he shave his beard? The rain? The sun? And the people in Puerto Rico, or China . . ."

Without hesitation, their faces screwed up in concentration, the pre-teen poets attack their papers. Soon anxious hands wave in the air --"Mr. Koch! Mr. Koch!"--as the children bid to have their work approved. Koch bounces to each raised hand, never failing to be delighted with what he discovers.

" 'On Christmas day cars will laugh with their jelly mufflers,'" he reads aloud. "I love 'jelly mufflers,' " he laughs.

" 'Santa Claus is going on a diet.' Oh, I like that." He laughs again, moving among what is now a forest of raised hands. One child, standing on tiptoe, drapes Koch's head with tinsel as if he were a Christmas tree. School--or, for that matter, writing poetry--was never like this.

Secret Feelings. Koch arrived at P.S. 61 two years ago. A noted poet and professor of English at Columbia, he brought with him a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the suspicion that children are full of verse, and a determination to make them aware of it. His success is convincingly demonstrated in Wishes, Lies, and Dreams (Chelsea House; $7.95), a collection of his pupils' work. In a long introduction to the delightful primer, Koch tells how he did it and how other teachers can do it too.

Ignoring such "barriers" as rhyme and meter, Koch emphasized repetition, which is more natural to children. More important, he got the children to express their "secret feelings, their fantasies--turning them on to their imaginations." As he puts it: "There are lots of kids who have never been praised for saying the sky is purple." His first success came when he asked the class to begin each line with the words "I wish . . ." When Koch read their wish poems aloud, the children began waving, blushing, laughing and jumping up and down. Koch recalls: "It was the first time they realized that others had secret feelings too."

To the basic "I wish" formula, Koch had the children add colors, noises, even comic-book characters:

I wish I were with Charlie Brown in

a blue shirt in France.

I wish I was green with Superman

in Negev Desert.

From wishes, they progressed to comparisons ("A witch's coat is like a mussel's shell"), then to dreams and lies ("I was born nowhere/And I live in a tree."). The next step led to lines beginning "I used to . . ." alternated with "But now I . . ." This especially charmed the kids, perhaps because it reminded them of their own constant physical change. First-Grader Andrea Dockery offered a typical thought:

I used to be a fish

But now I am a nurse . . .

Huge Creatures. Koch insists that any child can be attuned to poetry by any good teacher. He is now spreading that message by way of lectures and television (The David Frost and Today shows). NET will soon air a half-hour documentary filmed at P.S. 61. Though he has given up a regular schedule at the school (the program continues under Poet Ron Padgett), Koch likes to return every couple of weeks just for the fun of it. On each visit, he is startled to see how small the children really are: "From their poetry, I think of them as these huge creatures. And now I can't walk by an eight-year-old on the street without thinking, 'Ah, a poet.' "

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.