We're launching Zoom training sessions!

We’re so excited to be launching a series of webinars via Zoom. Many of these are based on the common issues we discover appraising manuscripts, but the first is a professional development opportunity on sharing the joy of poetry in the classroom. This is a subject very dear to me!

My preparation for this has taken me back to the stack of books about writing poetry with school students and I thought I’d just post a mini review here of one of my favourites, Kenneth Koch’s Wishes, Lies and Dreams.

Not a lot has changed in schools since Ron Padgett, another U.S. poet wrote in his forward to the HarperPerennial edition of Koch’s book  20 years ago, ‘…poetry – reading or writing it – intimidated most teachers, whose training had not prepared them for this seemingly remote and specialized art.’ What is so terrific about Wishes, Lies, and Dreams is not only the practical exercises Koch discusses candidly, chronicling his successes and failures, but also his reflections on the exercises, the examples of other poems he shared with his student and, perhaps most of all, the poems written by the students under his teaching programme.