Book Review: Wishes Lies and Dreams

Book Review: Wishes, Lies, & Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry

Author: Kenneth Koch

Date: 1970, 1980

Publisher: Chelsea House (1970), Harper & Row (1980)

ISBN: 0-06-080530-7 (1980)

Length: 309 pages

Illustrations: some black-and-white photos

Quote: “I had told Mrs. Wiener to ask the children not to use rhyme...There are formal devices which are more natural to children, more inspiring, easier to use. The one I suggested most frequently was some kind of repetition.”

There are children who are turned off by being asked to do something that somebody thinks will be “easier” for them. I was that sort of child. I, like many children, liked rhymes and had no trouble free-associating nonsense to go along with rhymes.

Then again, I may be less bigoted than Kenneth Koch was. He wrote, “When I read ‘red as a rose,’ I don’t see either red or a rose...when I read ‘orange as a rose’ or even ‘yellow as a rose’—I see the flower and the color and some­thing beyond.” Indeed. Well, when I read “red as a rose,” I have no trouble picturing red roses; if I take the time to think about it, I find myself mentally seeing many different roses, and wanting to ask which one: tight bud, half-opened, wide open, or losing petals? a plain five-petal rugosa or a highly bred multicolored mutant? on a vine, a bush, a little tree, a young stalk, or a cut stem? The answers to such questions would determine the shade of red I would visualize. I think Koch’s imagination may have been as impoverished as his stereotyped beliefs about the abilities of children.

There are children who do school assignments in such a way as to express their dissatisfaction with teachers who assume that they won’t be able to do something they are, in fact, already doing. I suspect it was such a child who wrote “What It Feels Like to Be a Mr. Koch. If I were a Mr. Koch would feel tall and lumpy. I would get the flu...you know why he would be lumpy because he’d get small pox!” My adult mind has shrunk too far to allow me to imagine how it would feel to have smallpox and flu, but I can imagine being a child who wishes a patronizing, belittling teacher had both.

Some of the poems in this collection are more helpful to adults who want to understand, or remember, other moods children have: “I wish all my teachers would disappear. And I wish we didn’t have to go to school. And I wish my little sister would find her nightgown. And I wish even if she didn’t she wouldn’t wear mine.”

Most of them are, however, so extravagantly free-associated that all they communicate is some doubt about whether the children have any idea at all what they’re trying to say. “My hair is redsilver / My eyes are greensilver / My teeth are bluesilver / My body is orangesilver / My skin is graysilver.” Something of interest to adults is going on in this fourth-grader’s brain, but whether she has serious eye problems, or is in some confusion about the meaning of the word “silver” (but in grade four?), or simply thinks that writing rhymeless “poems” that mention a color in every line is a stupid assignment, is less clear.

Kenneth Koch claimed that his students created delightful sound patterns. I find remarkably few of them in this book. I’ve heard children say things that had delightful sound patterns. I’ve heard a child use dactyls more effectively than Longfellow: “Nightmares of horrible slippers with eyes, and a mouth, and it talks, and it whispers horrible things...” I’ve heard many children discover rhyme, or alliteration, or puns, or even spoonerisms, all by themselves, and use them to good effect. I’ve heard children use simple repetition in ways that had a poetic, even hypnotic effect. In this book the inspiration seems to be missing. Nonsense lines like “I used to be a brush; now I am a flower,” don’t fall into a context with either a sound pattern (“I used to be a fish; now I am a banner”) or a pattern of meaning (“I used to be a pencil; now I am a poem”). They just plop, and go on plopping, until the child runs out of time or paper or both.

For about twenty years this book was recommended to all teachers as a wonderful book about how to get children to write. I can’t remember ever feeling impressed by it, or having shared anything in it with an elementary school student who did. Many other people, however, obviously did, so if you missed your chance to read or use or share this book, here’s a chance to buy my copy.

In a sequel to this book, Rose Where Did You Get That Red, Koch asked children to write sestinas in which each line ended with the name of a color. I had to try knitting those colors, with the result discussed below: 

https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2019/05/knitting-sestina-afghan.html