Kenneth KochRecensioni

This is a collection of poems for young children that features beautiful famous artwork. I thought that this book was very lovely and a great book to introduce younger children into different genres including poetry! I thought that the poems were unique and heartfelt, and I thought that the artwork that was included helped to illustrate the poems.

Education schools ought to make this required reading for anyone wishing to teach English in the primary grades.

I appreciated the novel approach of the author who distinguished poetry as a separate language in his discussion of the nature of poetry. His clear prose and use of examples from great poems helped make this a rich source for both those new to poetry and more experienced poetry lovers.

Everything I wanted to know about poetry at the time. It's one of those young-adult books thats useful and pleasurable for us elders too.

ages 3-8 yrs old

Poems from various time periods and many countries are organized by theme and illustrated with reproductions of art works from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

If you ever want young people to become fascinated with poetry and art, this is the book for them. The poems, mostly short, wander through the world, gathering specimens from China, Japan, India, Africa and Native American and other cultures, while also including western voices from Dante and Shakespeare to Frank O'Hara and Gary Snyder. Typical for 1985, only 8 women poets are represented (minus one-half star). The poems are evocatively and exquisitely paired with works from the Met's collection, including sculpture and ceramics as well as painting, drawing and collage. Kenneth Koch was a great poetry teacher: his enthusiastic sensibility is on display here. I love this book!½

This is a wonderful book and about as kind and wise a book as you could find about what it means to write poetry and why. While the book trends towards more classicism in its second half it is , as the writer was, an extraordinarily generous description of the art by one of its great practitioners. If you are of a short attention span read the first four chapters. It is also well written which is not, from experience, something one can be sure of even though the writing is about writing.

So, would a teacher accomplish the title goal of this book if guided by Koch's strategy? Hm. I guess it depends on exactly how the goal is defined. If it means helping children and teens see that grown-up poetry (as opposed to the kind of pap from Prelutsky that is most often shared in schools) is accessible and interesting, and if the teacher is passionate about the subject himself, sure. It is not a guide that can be used to work miracles, though. And in fact many time Koch himself focuses on less important aspects of the poem because they're the aspects most relevant to the students.

If the goal is to get children to think creatively, and to write expressively, well, again, an inspired and inspiring teacher will have some success. The goal was probably not to help a housewife of a certain age better appreciate certain poems, but that is what it succeeded at best, imo. If you're looking for similar help, this is a pretty good book. Lots of poems and suggested writing ideas - 10 full lessons with kids' works and an anthology of more poems with brief lesson ideas.

Meanwhile, here are some bookdart marked passages -

Inspired by Blake, a 6th-grade student, Jeannie Turner, wrote:

Oh Daffodil, I hope you never die but last forever.
Oh Daffodil, live until the sun turns read and the moon turns black."

Two of Federico Garcia Lorco's poems prompted Andrew Vecchione to write:

*The World Under Green Mist*

Under the moon's green mist lie dreams of beauty and wonder
There are beds of fur from a fox
The warmth of the fireplace glows sparks of wonder
With the peaceful dark of the night lie fire bugs flickering their lights
Oh under this world with green mist lie the dreams of every person
Hidden from them until they die.

and Sedley Alpaugh to write:

*As I Sailed*

The sea was amarillo
With waves of rojo
The sun azul
And the sky gris
This was all this
As I sailed
In my verde boat.

Btw, my edition is the one from 1974, and it has a slightly different cover."

Don't underestimate children. Good poetry isn't meant to be consumed in one go, nor art to be looked at just one time.

Maybe the first time you read this together with your seven-year old, pick out a few neat animal or nature pictures and read (out loud!) the poems that accompany them. Pick the one that is most fun to say, even if you don't understand it. Memorize it, or a few lines from it. Read it again a few months later. Read some of the other poems in that section.

Maybe memorize Little Fish" by D.H. Lawrence:

The tiny fish enjoy themselves
in the sea.
Quick little splinters of life,
their little lives are fun to them
in the sea.

Try to figure out the connections between the art and the poems - sometimes they're easy to spot, and sometimes you'll have to be a detective, or use your imagination to interpret a commonality. Maybe some will stump you and your child, until the child is a little older and has an 'ah-hah' moment.

Sometimes you and your child can have fun imagining yourselves in a scene, and sometimes you have to work your brains to make a guess why someone would paint or make something that seems boring, or scary, or weird. Try to figure out why the artist felt motivated to create each work. Who was the intended audience; what idea was she trying to share; what point was he trying to make?

Consider, from 1870, 'The Bathers' - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Winslow_Homer_-_Eagle_Head,_Manchester,_M... by Winslow Homer. Can you imagine wearing all those clothes in the water? Maybe not. But look at the women - do they make you think that the people in the 'olden days' were weird? I don't think so....

There are brief commentaries attached to many of the works to help with appreciation.

There is an index of titles and authors, and another of first lines. There are also short essays at the beginning and end that give some gentle guidance. Unfortunately, there is no way to search for works of art or artists - for example if you wanted to quickly find which page the painting by Winslow Homer is on, or whether he has any other works included.

This is a beautiful book, and I wish I could find a good home for it.

"

Talking to the Sun is supposedly an anthology for "young people," and is shelved in the juvenile nonfiction section of my local public library,. But at 112 pages with about 177 poems, I feel it's not appropriate for its supposed age group of ages 3-8.  At those ages, I'd also want to read more kid-friendly poems to my children.  I'd target this anthology at ages 10 (grade 5) and up.

The poems selected are representative of many cultures (including ancient and native peoples), but that also contributes to its appropriateness for an older age group.  Some well-known poets are represented, but others are overlooked in favor of lesser-known poets of the same "New York School" as selector Kenneth Koch - at least 15 of the poems fall in this category.

The poems are grouped into ten sections that, according to co-selector Kate Farrell in an introduction, "suggested by the history of poetry; the book starts with ancient and primitive poetry, and ends with modern poetry."  Poems in each section generally address a common topic or are of a certain type, such as nature, spring, children, love, nonsense, animals, the universe, ordinary things, and dreams.  While the introduction and appendix (also by Farrell, on helping young people like poetry) and section introductions are good, and some of the commentary on individual poems is helpful (such as definitions of words no longer in common use), other commentary is superfluous.

Poems in the book are paired up with works from New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art (which co-published the book). Sometimes the connections are obvious, sometimes they are not, but they should spark good discussions.  I loved the idea of doing this. The cover photo is detail from the image of one of those works, The Repast of the Lion by Henri Rousseau, with the book title strategically covering the lion eating his prey.

© Amanda Pape - 2015

[This book was borrowed from and returned to the Hood County Library in Texas. This review also appears on Bookin' It.]

Kenneth Koch was like a 20th century Walt Whitman with a goofy sense of humor. The poems in this volume -- only eight of them! -- have rambling, expansive poems with titles like "The Art of Poetry" and "The Art of Love," and seem to contain every thought that flitted through Koch's head over the course of a long night of conviviality. His advice is comical but sincerely felt, as when he says "To learn of cunnilingus at age fifty speaks to a life ill-spent." He's uninhibited and wild to entertain you, though when he advises you to tie up your girlfriend and fold her into an airplane, perhaps you might think this a bit much (as I do). Small compaint, though, when it comes to a poet so inviting and so much fun to read.

Rose, Where Do You Get that Red? by Kenneth Koch is written for educators, and yet it is accessible to others. Reading it as a mother shows me that reading classic poetry to my young child can be inspiring in not just their own understandings of poetry but also in their own writing. There is no need to limit children to “age-appropriate” poetry, which often is cliché and boring; children can handle the “real” stuff, like Shakespeare, Donne, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens.

More detailed review on my blog

Santa Claus, leader of a group of pilots called the Red Robins, battles the Easter Bunny in a quest to find Tin Fan, a lost Asian city, in this avant-garde play. Highlights: Jill, one of the Red Robins, falls in love with Santa Claus and takes him home to meet the parents; the President of the United States tries unsuccessfully to win the heart of Lyn, another of the Red Robins; a rock, a man-eating tiger, and an "as-yet undiscovered possibility" all deliver monologues. For the original staging of the play, several New York artists contributed to the set design, including Roy Lichtenstein.½

The title gets it right. The others are, in the main, that.

Kenneth Koch, poet, explains how he teaches children to write poetry. Includes samples of the children's (great) poems.
Kenneth Koch is both sensible and inventive in his approach to teaching children how to write poetry. He understands the importance of physical detail, repetition, and knows how and when to pinch kids in order to get them to think big (but not get lost in boneless generalities). Great for anybody who has a group of children on hand for a few hours and needs to give them something to do. His instructions and models can actually be followed, or tweaked, without that much difficulty.

Village Voice
The Collected Fiction of Kenneth Koch
Edited by Jordan Davis, Karen Koch, and Ron Padgett
Coffee House Press, 387 pp., $18

Koch's fiction strings together impeccable sentences in ways that beat the boundaries of logic and genre. A seven-page Hardy Boys epic nestles next to a Proustian riff off a postcard; novels have a hard time deciding whether they're made up of chapters or stories. Koch wrote about one long work: "All the sentences were like the last sentences of novels or the first sentences of short stories." There's an innocence to all his orderings, and a great relief in not knowing whether we're reading grown-up literature for children ("He really loved the polenta, and so did his friend") or children's literature for grown-ups ("We have had such a good lunch that it makes me sad"). What's certain is a light and loving hand that wasn't afraid to do a little wavering.

808.8

808.81

Gift from Glenda Geu