Kenneth Koch (1925-2002) is often linked to the founding of the New York School poets in the 1950s, a group that includes John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Barbara Guest. The seemingly spontaneous, cosmopolitan and exuberant poetry he wrote helped define not only characteristics of the New York School, but Koch’s work in New York City public schools.

“I was onto this new way of writing that I could tell people about, and help them to write, give them feelings of power, confidence, excitement,” Koch told Teachers & Writers Collaborative in an interview. Often, getting students to feel this excitement involved opening them up to poetry in the first place, which initially proved difficult.  "A lot of the best writers in that school already hated poetry,” Koch said, when talking about his work at P.S. 61, where he started teaching in 1968. He blamed some of this hatred on what he called “essay-poems,” poetry that was overly academic and that contained obligatory allusions to figures like Helen of Troy or Cuchulain. Koch wanted to make language fresh and concrete for his students.

“When I had kids write directly –I mean directly in the sense of, when they write about what they think about the President or what they think about their block, they always wrote dull,” he said. “I obviously wanted very quickly to make people do something else when they seem to me to be stuck in other people's language, other people's ideas.” Koch urged students to write about their own wishes and dreams, to make things up if they wanted. “You can put in a lot of colors, wishes, lies, dreams, bananas, grapefruit, songs,” he told a class.

His success in the classroom led him to write several books about teaching poetry to children, including Wishes, Lies and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry (1970) and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? (1973).  He credits his work through the Teachers & Writers Collaborative as the seed behind these texts. “One thing I liked, that was wonderful about Teachers & Writers, was I had to keep a journal. Without that, I don't think there would have been a book.”

Koch produced many books in his lifetime, in many genres: over 30 volumes of poetry, plays, fiction, nonfiction, and even several librettos. Still, he saw his teaching as among his most valuable work. “I discovered a way really to help a lot of people,” he said.

Still, the accomplishments of Koch’s poetry shouldn’t be overlooked. In Poetry magazine, Paul Carroll wrote that’s Koch’s works “embody the poetic imagination as it rejoices in the ebullience of its health and freedom, its fecundity, its capacity for endless invention, its dear, outlandish ability to transform everyday, pragmatic reality into an Oz or a tea-party at the March Hare's house, its potency in, possibly, achieving a bit of immortality as a result of having brought forth some children of the soul." Not only did Koch help bring poetry to children, but his poetry is credited with drawing out the inner child of adults.

-Lee Conell

Lee Conell lives in New York. Her writing has appeared in the Chronogram, on Women’s Studio Workshop Blog, and in The New York Times.