The children talked, laughed, looked at each other's poems, called me to their desks to read and to admire, or, if they were "stuck," to give them ideas. It was a happy, competitive, creative atmosphere, and I was there to praise them, encourage them, and to inspire them.

In the first place Koch assumes that children enjoy writing poetry because it gets them away from the regular courses, the dull routine of scheduled periods of reading, writing, arithmetic, spelling, etc. Essentially, he exploits that institutional tedium without ever questioning it. His creative geniuses would probably not have done so well if, in sitting at the same desk all day, every day, Miss Blunt would ask them to take out their pencils and paper and from 11:45 to 12:00 (right before lunch when they're all dying to go out and play) write a poem.

At the school I visited, the kids--mostly blacks--were encouraged to use the library, read to each other, and explore their own interests: they were hardly ever required to sit quietly in their seats and listen. "Group participation" wasn't apparent in the collaborative poems, certainly not so much as the sense of coercion. Encouragement for an individual line, even if I never mentioned the name of its author, still caused discouragement. A kid was bright enough to know that if didn't like them. Some, when asked to write a poem refused out right, and others expressed their rebellion in the wish-poems:

I wish I didn't have to wrote a wish.

I wish there was no school.

I wish school wasn't invented.

I tried to open up the kids' imaginations, to encourage and inspire them. Koch said, "Perhaps the most important thing to do, I found, is to be positive about everything." I said to these kids, "Write anything you want." But in public schools the words "everything" and "anything" are already surrounded by an implicit censorship. Many of these children picked up on the work "anything" and wrote away with a fierce sense of vindication:

I wish I was out of this school

Because this is turning into

a Public Poop-school.

I wish Greg will shut his mouth.

Koch never printed lines quite like these. Traditional schools usually don't allow that kind of honesty.

The atmosphere was happy and somewhat creative, but it wasn't always happy, and not constantly productive. There was a lot of tension--not terrible but still recognizable--that Koch never even suggests as possible. But two poems in particular were outstanding: they showed sensitivity and a certain playfulness with words. Both were written by Laura, a sixth grader:

I wish I had 20 dogs in all

Kinds of breeds. I wish I had a