Intent and Practice in Kenneth Koch's Wishes, Lies and Dreams and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?

Phillip Lopate's argument in "The Balkanization of Children's Writing"¹ against a number of competing "schools" of children's poetry is remarkably moral and Romantic. It is moral in its disdain for adult manipulation of innocent sensibilities by teachers who seek merely to reproduce in their pupils little icons of their own aesthetic prejudices: "the Child as Christian moralist, the Child as Nature-worshipper, the Child as avant-garde poet, the Child as muckraker and social realist, the Child as right-on revolutionary."² It is moral, too, in an especially pedagogic fashion since Lopate feels children should be aware, generally, of what they are doing when they are writing poetry:

There is something ugly about the prospect of a generation of school-children learning to parrot the mannerisms of contemporary writing and to produce works that look, to us, intriguingly advanced, without their really consciously understanding what they are doing. We would like to know if these effects were intentional . . . or . . . merely a case of jumping through hoops set up by the teacher.³

The Romanticism comes in when Lopate defines his own slant on teaching children to write poetry:

I wondered if there was a way to lead children slowly into a writing that had no compulsory ending. To connect them with processes and flows that were ongoing, infinite . . . to take the voyage into openness and to discover the poem in the act of writing it.⁴

There is, of course, some small irony in all this. Lopate's indignation over teachers who set up hoops of their own making for children to jump through is slightly compromised by his confession that he wants children to write "good modern poetry, or the sort I liked, Open Poetry."⁵ And once these young poets begin to send back notes from their "voyage into openness," these hieroglyphs from the infinite, he would like them to be consciously aware of the effect they were making in their poetry; in essence, be Romantic voyager and exegete at the same time.

But if this sort of sniping on my part seems mean, it is really only a reaction to Lopate's brisk review of various approaches to teaching children to write poetry. Manuals from 1872 which stress fake British gentility and tell-it-like-it-is books like The Me Nobody Knows get pretty short shrift because Lopate feels they are all examples of adults slanting, perverting the natural voice of children—even though he readily admits that there is no "jungle habitat" expression of childhood.⁶ Children are always imitative. As Coleridge (whose writings on childhood education deserve more attention than they have received in this century)⁷ somewhere in his marginalia points out: we do not love the child for itself alone, but like the yearling which butts before its horns appear, childhood is sanctified because of its promise of maturity. There is no child's voice apart from an adult one because there is no child who is not reaching inexorably into adulthood. To seek for some ur-poetry of childhood is to mistake the nature of childhood—and of poetry itself, for that matter, since poetry, again as Coleridge points out, is the most precise and manipulated form of intellectual language. It only and always imitates: either sense impressions or cognition, emotion or (in modern poetry) language itself. A naive primitivism in pedagogic matters is, therefore, fundamentally immoral; it perverts the very natural process of achieving maturity: children really don't want to be just children; they usually look forward in some inchoate fashion to an adult state which they imagine is free from the arbitrary terrors of the dependent status they must temporarily endure.

Therefore, if we agree with Lopate that there is no inherently natural childhood voice, then I suppose we must look around for the best kind of manual for nurturing and distilling the burgeoning linguistic and intellectual faculties of children, at least as far as teaching them to write imaginatively is concerned. In pursuit of...