i'm curious about Kenneth Koch's how to write/teach poetry manuals - I think
there are 4 of them -
(I was browsing through Rose, where did you get that red? in the library)
Has anyone used them as manuals? Or read them just for enjoyment?
I'm particularly curious about "I never told anybody: teaching poetry
writing in a nursing home".
Can this kind of book be a catalyst?
My own interest isn't so much practical (I'm not involved with poetry
workshops) but I am interested in the history of entertaining instruction
manuals, from statecraft to etiquette. I believe the earliest known books
are manuals, like the Arthasastra of Kautilya, c. 300 B.C. (That one
contains info on "how to create a village", "how to use spies properly" etc)
My impression is that Koch's manuals are rather different to, say, a more
didactic approach, and it intermixes with the poetry - such as the
mock-serious instruction manual poems The Art of Love and The Art of Poetry,
or the lists of things to do in Bed etc.
The instruction-manual poem seems to be predominantly, now, the
instructions-for-a-conceptual-art exhibit poem.
Edmund
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