All of these poems may not actually be poems, but the mechanics help children become aware of all the different styles available to them. At the same time they can use their imaginations, as Koch says. But Koch often attributes too much consciousness of the process to the children. Many never go beyond sheer mechanical repetition. In a series of "I used to be/But now I am" poems this become apparent to me:

I used to be 8 years old but now I am 9 years old

I used to be young But now I am older

I used to be little But now I am big.

I used to be little But now I'm tall.

All of these indicate a kind of formulaic plugging in--there's nothing very imaginative about them.

Koch gives so much credit to the children's awareness of writing that at one point in Rose, where Did You Get That Red? he claims a sixth grader's poem written in response to William Carlos Williams "shows not only William's attention to the beauty of small and supposedly unbeautiful things, but also his way of making the poem, as it goes along, a physical experience of discovery for the reader." It's hard to imagine a sixth grader intentionally attempting to evoke such a sophisticated response. It's like equating a crayon drawing of a cow with wings floating under a purple sun with a Chagall. In fact it's difficult to accept the premise that kids understand poetry much better than a definition shouted out at the beginning of my class: "words written down." Of course adults don't understand poetry very well either, and that's even more true nowadays, when education. has to be relevant and useful. I think Koch ignores the whole issue of usefulness too. Young kids need to learn how to write, but they should be learning how to write to communicate too. They don't need somebody to come in and publish their poems.

In a note about this poem, "Among School Children," Yeats wrote "Topic for poem--School children and the thought that life will waste them perhaps that no possible life can fulfill out dreams or even their teacher's hope." The school children I met and taught and came to admire showed me that they will never fulfill Koch's dreams or hopes. Their imaginations should and can be active all the time in school--not just in one liberated period of time.