Sleeping on the Wing : An Anthology of Modern Poetry with Essays on Reading and Writing

Rating:
Summary: You Won't Get Sleepy Reading Sleeping on the Wing
Review: A wonderful anthology with short, lively pieces chosen especially for young people in high school, but the selection of poems may well delight readers of all ages -- not only beginners! Among the poets represented are not only predictable classics -- Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot -- but also such contemporaries as the post-moderns John Ashbery and Amiri Baraka. The selection of 23 poets -- American, British, European -- has a somewhat urban, playful quality reminiscent of the sixties: Koch is definitely New York School. New York City style or not, though, my colleagues and students upstate have found much here to intrigue them. The editorial comments and creative writing suggestions are especially valuable to teachers who want to make poetry come alive in the classroom. It's also worth noting that the book is well-designed: the poems look good on the page -- they invite the kind of reading and creative response they embody. From the very first poem we read together -- "Disillusionment at Ten O'clock" by Wallace Stevens (beginning "The houses are haunted / By white night-gowns" and ending with "an old sailor" who "Drunk and asleep in his boots / Catches tigers / In red weather") the class was wide awake.

Rating:
Summary: It Works!
Review: Having taught creative writing at the high-school level for almost ten years, I have been acquainted with a multitude of writing textbooks. SLEEPING ON THE WING is the only one which has worked as a whole. In my new course for 2001 entitled simply POETRY, I have used each and every poem collected and exercise designed here by Koch. They work. They're intelligent, focused, and student friendly. This selection of poetry from the modern canon is both challenging and accessible.

Best of all, this anthology is downright fun. Koch's glosses are straightforward and informative, and his exercises doubtlessly grow out of his own lifetime of experience with writing poetry. Since I write along with my classes, I, too, have been wildly pleased with my own poetry production using Koch's exercises.

This is a fine text for the autodidact who wishes to teach her- or himself how to write a poem. However, the energy and zest which flows from a larger group of young poets working together is invaluable as inspiration.

Mr. Koch, you are not simply a stuffy tweed from Columbialand. Thank you for your thoughtfulness and grace.