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A review by emmkayt
Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry by Ron Padgett, Kenneth Koch
4.0
I was excited to find my library system still has an old copy of this book. My mother had one in our house when I was growing up, and I was obsessed with it. Reading it now, probably close to 40 years later, I found some of the lines and photos were still familiar. Serendipitously, I also read as part of the same batch of library books Ninth Street Women, a tome about the art world in New York in the 40s and 50s, in which I unexpectedly found author Kenneth Koch hanging around with the beat poets and Jackson Pollock.
The first part of the book is a short essay about Koch teaching poetry in the New York public school system in the 60s, what worked and what didn’t. The rest of the book consists of his students’ poems, with a bit of explanation of the themes and his methods. Not necessarily ground-breaking methods with modern eyes, but joyful, non-judgemental, and respectful. I got a kick out of some of the recurring themes or more startling images, as well as some of the references that were more of a time capsule. So nice to rediscover this.
The first part of the book is a short essay about Koch teaching poetry in the New York public school system in the 60s, what worked and what didn’t. The rest of the book consists of his students’ poems, with a bit of explanation of the themes and his methods. Not necessarily ground-breaking methods with modern eyes, but joyful, non-judgemental, and respectful. I got a kick out of some of the recurring themes or more startling images, as well as some of the references that were more of a time capsule. So nice to rediscover this.