Word: poemes
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...course the students didn't start out writing poems as evocative as this right away. Koch began with collaborative poems, all beginning with the idea, "I wish..." He de-emphasized spelling, grammar and punctuation because he saw them as barriers. He emphasized poem-ideas that were easy and natural for children to use, and that encouraged immediate responses. Often the children would make rules for the poem (i.e. it must include a color and a comic-strip character, or a city and a country, with "I wish" at the beginning). After the group poems his students went on to describing...
Koch found an interesting approach to the metaphor poems. He taught several different grades ranging from first through sixth. At first he inspired the kids by reading an adult poem--including D.H. Lawrence, Theodore Roethke, John Ashberry, and Dyland Thomas--but as his collection of kids' poems increased he would read in one class poems written in another. He noticed that P.S.61 was establishing its own literary tradition--an institutional salon of sorts. Thus a misspelled word triggered Koch's introduction to a metaphor. A child wrote "A swam of bees," instead of a "swarm." A first grader's poem...
...Ideology." On the other hand, Auden's development can be neatly split into only two periods. At first he felt uncomfortable in his world, and rejected its economic organization, social structure, and sexual practices; even nature, things like landscape and weather, seemed sick and threatening. Auden himself, in a poem in this book called "Thanksgivings," takes a stab at explaining why he abandoned this radical alienation...
...English, he tells us in one of his "Shorts," "can very easily turn nouns, if we wish, into verbs." He proceeds to do so with gusto, not only to nouns but almost every unit of syntax he can get his hands on. Some examples from a single new poem, "Archeology:" "vacancied long ago," "man...has always graved his dead," "what disastered a city," "though gluttoned on sex/And blanded by flattery," "not that all rites should be equally fonded...
Sometimes a poet seems to outlive his greatness. Christopher Isherwood once claimed that you could give Auden a subject and a verse form and he'd bring you back a "perfect" poem in twenty-four hours. In his later years, Auden was no longer able to pour out great poetry effortlessly like this, but he could still write some excellent things, like "Epistle To A Godson." A poet of Auden's quality can never be "washed out;" for what it's worth, Auden was the greatest living English poet even in his decline. But it's still unfortunate...