Poetry with Kenneth Koch

Inspired by Kenneth Koch's book, Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? the older students spent 6 weeks studying the poems of Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Ways to Look at a Blackbird; John Ashbery’s Into the Dusk-Charged Air: Arthur Rimbaud’s  Voyelles; William Blake’s Tyger Tyger, Rivers, Kenneth Koch's prompts for children are both motivating and creative and a joy to teach.  

By Agnes:

As I lay upon the beach

Dusk has kissed the horizons

Reach, the salty sea spray

Touches my neck as I dive off

Of the deck, the ocean wraps

It waves around me as if

To never set me free.

By Max

RIVER AND THE FIVE SENSES

A fast river looks like sand dunes

With blue sand.

A fast river smells like the ocean

And seaweed

And sweet sand.

A fast river tastes salty

But if you use your imagination

You can make it sweet.

A fast river feels like a snake’s skin

Slithering, slithering

Pouncing.

A fast river sounds like pancakes on the stove

The sweet smell of dough.

By Ace

Vowels

A: in the night some light flows a red cascade of sound past the ears of thousands

O: a bird that has taken flight with wings of wind it soars through the blue and white of the heaven above.

U: a ghost that haunts the world of man and screeches to all the living.

E: the light of the sun as it shines on all the happy children in the world as they dance.

I: the terror of night the darkness of the light a dark face that watches the happy to torment there lives.

Y:an unsure warrior at his last life.

The vowels