Kenneth Koch (1925-2002) was a legendary teacher of poetry,
whose presence is still felt among the many young poets who
passed through his classroom. He liked to teach elementary-
school children as well as the usual graduate students; today’s
poem, which appeared in his final collection, A Possible World,
came out of a trip he took to Haiti in 1975, invited by the
American ambassador to teach poetry in a Port-au-Prince lycée.
As Koch later wrote about his poetry experiments in other
countries, with their distinct literary traditions and contexts
for poetry, “I did the foreign teaching, I think, mostly out of
curiosity: to see if the teaching would work, and to see what
kinds of poems the children would write. I didn’t think that the
ease, excitement, and spontaneity, the quick and poetic
responsiveness of my students at P.S. 61 in New York were
exclusively American phenomena.” As it turned out, despite the
pupils’ lack of familiarity with his teaching method and the
atmosphere described below, Koch did break