Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?: Teaching Great Poetry to Children

361 Pages·1990·1.85 MB·English

by  Kenneth Koch

BOOKS BY KENNETH KOCH
Poems
Permanently
Ko, or A Season on Earth
Thank You and Other Poems
Bertha and Other Plays
When the Sun Tries to Go On
The Pleasures of Peace
Wishes, Lies, and Dreams:
Teaching Children to Write Poetry
A Change of Hearts:
Plays, Films, and Other Dramatic Works
Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?
Teaching Great Poetry to Children

VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JULY 1990
Copyright © 1973, 1990 by Kenneth Koch
All rights reserved under International
and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States
by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,
and simultaneously in Canada
by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Originally published by Random House, Inc., in 1973.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Koch, Kenneth, 1925– comp.
Rose, where did you get that red?
1. Children’s writings, American.
2. Poetry—Study and teaching. I. Title
PS508.C5K58 1974 811′.5′408 73-17480
eISBN: 978-0-307-76510-9
v3.1
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the
following poems:
“Oath of Friendship” from Translations from the Chinese translated by
Arthur Waley. Copyright 1919, 1941 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,
renewed 1947 by Arthur Waley. Reprinted by permission of Alfred
A. Knopf, Inc., and Constable and Company, Inc./“Thirteen Ways of
Looking at a Blackbird” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.
Copyright 1923, renewed 1951 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted by
permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and Faber and Faber, Ltd./ “The
Wood-Weasel” from The Collected Poems of Marianne Moore.
Copyright 1944 and renewed 1972 by Marianne Moore. Reprinted
by permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., and Faber and
Faber Ltd./“Into the Dusk-Charged Air” from Rivers and Mountains
by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1962, 1963, 1964, 1966 by John
Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
Inc./“The Painter” by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1956 by John
Ashbery. Reprinted by permission./ “Sailing to Byzantium” from
Collected Poems by William Butler Yeats. Copyright 1906 by The
Macmillan Company, renewed 1934 by William Butler Yeats. “Who
Goes with Fergus?” from Collected Poems by William Butler Yeats.
Copyright 1928 by The Macmillan Company, renewed 1956 by
Georgie Yeats. Reprinted by permission of The Macmillan Company,
Mr. M.B. Yeats, Macmillan Co. of London & Basingstoke, and
Macmillan Co. of Canada./“The White Horse,” “Trees in the
Garden,” and “Humming-bird” from The Complete Poems of D.H.
Lawrence edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts.
Copyright © 1964, 1971 by Angelo Ravagli and C.M. Weekley,
Executors of the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli. Reprinted by
permission of The Viking Press, Laurence Pollinger Ltd. and the
Estate of the late Mrs. Frieda Lawrence./“The Boy” and “From a
Childhood” from Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke by
M.D. Herter Norton. Copyright 1938 by W.W. Norton & Company,
Inc. Copyright renewed 1966 by M.D. Herter Norton. Reprinted by
permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., and The Hogarth
Press, Ltd./“Cirque d’Hiver” from The Complete Poems by Elizabeth
Bishop. Copyright 1940, © 1969 by Elizabeth Bishop. Reprinted
with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc./“Somnambule
Ballad” and “Tree, Tree” translated by William Logan, from Selected
Poems by Federico Garcia Lorca. Copyright 1955 by New Directions
Publishing Corp./“This Is Just To Say,” “The Locust Tree in Flower,”
and “Between Walls” from Collected Early Poetry by William Carlos
Williams. Copyright 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp./“No
One Spoke” by Ryota and “Wild Goose” by Issa, haiku from One
Hundred Poems from the Japanese translated by Kenneth Rexroth. All
rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of New Directions
Publishing Corp.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to The Pierpont Morgan Library
for permission to reprint the following holographs: John Keats,
Sonnet XII Morgan Catalogue: MA 658 (V-10-C); Walt Whitman,
Ode to Washington Morgan Catalogue: MA 627 V-2 11B; and
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan Morgan Catalogue: MA 56-57
(V-8-A 0.5)
To
Arlene
Ladden
Acknowledgments
Much of what is best in this book is due to Arlene Ladden, who gave a
great deal of her time to helping me write and organize it. My other
most important collaborators were the students at PS 61 in New York
and the other children whose work is included here. At PS 61 the
continuing good will of the principal, Jacob Silverman, was a great help
to me, as were the interest and co-operation of the teachers I worked
with there—Les Bowman, Diane Fay, and Jean Pitts. Sarah Spongberg
used some of my ideas to teach children to read and write poetry at the
Isidore Newman School in New Orleans and at Friends’ Academy in
North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, as did Mary Bowler at St. Mary’s
Secondary School in Swaziland. I am grateful to them for the poems they
helped inspire their students to write and for the evidence they gave me
that this way of teaching could work for other teachers and in other
kinds of schools. Pierette Fleutiaux made it possible for me to work with
her high-school students at the Lycée Français in New York. For other
help and encouragement I am grateful to Pat Dreyfus, Cheri Fein, Emily
Dennis Harvey, Ellen Hodge, Debby Mayer, Marilynn Meeker, Ron
Padgett, James Schuyler, McKay Sundwall, Julie Whitaker, Galen
Williams, and Michael Wood.
Kenneth Koch
New York City
February, 1973