I love receiving my Gotham Writers Workshop Newsletter and this short article is worth sharing …

TIPS FROM THE MASTERS ON POETRY
Kenneth Koch
from my Gotham Writers Workshop Newsletter. http://www.writingclasses.com

Poetry is often thought to be one of the most elusive forms of writing. But the poet Kenneth Koch would disagree. His anthology Sleeping on the Wing has been known to work its way into the hearts of those least likely to embrace poetry. Koch includes the typical powerhouses like Whitman and Yeats, but also gives ample attention to more contemporary poets like Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara.

To celebrate National Poetry Month, we thought we’d share a few tidbits from this particular master.

Five Poetic Gems from Kenneth Koch:

It doesn’t make sense to read poetry the way you read a newspaper article.
It is good, in general, to read a poem with the kind of freedom, openness and sensitive attentiveness to your own thoughts and feelings that you have when you write a poem yourself or when you listen to a friend talking, or when you hear music.

You can like a poem before you understand it, and be moved by it, and in fact, that is a sign that you’re starting to understand it, that you’re reading the poem in a good way.

There is no one right way to talk about all poetry.
Talking about all poetry in the same way makes no more sense than talking, for instance, about all sports in the same way.

Poetry is different in different times.
What people experience is different and so, to some extent, is the language they use…Poets are inspired by what the world around them is like. Because that changes, poetry changes.

You really can be completely free in your first version of a poem—you can always revise it.
There is nothing in a poem that can’t be changed. A poem isn’t like a painting, where the change you make covers what was there before.

— from the Introduction to Sleeping on the Wing, published by Oxford University Press, 1973.

http://www.writingclasses.com