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