- Wishes, Lies, and Dreams
Kenneth Koch was an American poet, playwright, and professor at Columbia University, and a leading figure of the New York School alongside Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery. When he began working with the Teachers and Writers Collaborative agency, which sent poets to teach children and adolescents poetry writing in the New York City Public Schools, he developed a brilliant insight into the underlying nature of poetry into a collection of writing prompts, the first of which he published in 1999, Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry.
The three fundamental prompts indicated by Koch’s title work not only in classrooms, but also in solitude, for both poets and writers.
Briefly, they are:
Wishes: Compose a list of your wishes; the more personal, the better. Use them for a poem or a memoir.
Lies: Make up lies about everything. Write your autobiography but make it all lies.
Dreams: Consider your dreams not only to be imaginative nocturnal adventures but realities, actual happenings. Use them in a serious poem and memoir composition.
2. Mistranslation
Select a poem in a language you do not understand and, using only your imagination, translate it.