Ordinary mortals and poet scholars alike will find something to love in Koch's down-to-earth approach to making sense of that most head scratching of literary genres. Asserting that "poetry ... is a separate language," he steers clear of the stodgy, hidden-meaning school of deciphering poems (wherein the reader digs through the poem "for some elusive and momentous significance") and takes us instead on a tour through the tonal, rhythmical, and metrical aspects of poetry. Yes, it's about the music: "The sound of words is raised to an importance equal to that of their meaning, and also to the importance of grammar and syntax." But rather than asking us to simply take his word for it, Koch provides lively and insightful examples (including many rarely anthologized poems). For instance, why does "two and two are rather green" have little or no meaning, while "two and two / Are rather blue" smacks of the truth? Why does "I don't know whether or not to commit suicide" plop from the mouth like so much cold oatmeal, while "To be or not to be, that is the question" is so pleasing to the ears? Resonance, says Koch. "Poetry lasts because it gives the ambiguous and ever-changing pleasure of being both a statement and a song."

Moving from poetry's music to its methods (comparisons, personifications, and apostrophe, to name a few), Koch continues to offer up an amusing and edifying array of excerpts and analogies to clarify his point that with poetry, "as with baseball ... one has to understand a little in order to enjoy it...." Insightful, yet never patronizing, Making Your Own Days is for anyone who's ever read a poem and wished it were more "like a newspaper article." Though Koch can't tell us why Wallace Stevens wrote "I placed a jar in Tennessee," or why "So much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow" (William Carlos Williams), he helps us listen to--and savor--that sometimes bewildering conglomeration of words otherwise known as poetry. --Martha Silano


From Library Journal
Koch, a preeminent American poet and author of two best-selling books on teaching poetry to children, has at last produced a guide for adults. This book is divided into two parts: a series of essays on subjects such as meter, rhyme, and personification and an anthology of favorite poems. Most remarkably, non-English poems often appear with several translations, underscoring the flexibility of poetic language. Making Your Own Days will be most useful to writers already familiar with the basics. However, while some of the playfulness that marked Wishes, Lies and Dreams (HarperCollins, 1980) and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? (Vintage, 1990) creeps in, the overall tone is that of a lecturer, and Koch covers the same ground as Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux's The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (LJ 10/15/97), though in a less engaging manner.?David Kirby, Florida State Univ., TallahasseeCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Review
Ned Rorem Koch is that rare phenomenon, the poet who can write prose -- prose that is necessary and lucid. In his book, he offers a new and healthy dimension to the life of virtually everyone.


Book Description
In Making Your Own Days, celebrated poet Kenneth Koch writes about poetry as no one has written about it before -- and as if no one had written about it before. Full of fresh and exciting insights and experiences, this book makes the somewhat mysterious subject of poetry clear for those who read it and for those who write it -- and for those who would like to read and write it better. Treating poetry not as a special use of language but, in fact, as a separate language -- unlike the one used in prose and conversation -- Koch is able to clarify the nature of poetic inspiration, how poems are written and revised, and what happens in a reader's mind and feelings while reading a poem. Koch also provides a rich anthology of more than ninety works: lyric poems, excerpts from long poems and poetic plays, poems in English, and poems in translation -- by poets past and present from Homer and Sappho to Lorca, Snyder, and Ashbery. Each selection is accompanied by an illuminating explanatory note designed to complement and clarify the text. In this book, Kenneth Koch's genius for making poetry clear and for bringing out its real pleasures is everywhere apparent.


About the Author
Kenneth Koch is the author of many books of poetry, most recently Straits, and won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1994. He has also published fiction and plays, as well as books on the teaching of poetry: Wishes, Lies and Dreams; Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?; and I Never Told Anybody. He lives in New York City, where he is professor of English at Columbia University.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This book makes the somewhat mysterious subject of poetry clear for those who read it and for those who write it and for those who would like to read it and write it better. Koch accomplishes this revelation of poetry by presenting the idea that poetry is a separate language, a language in which music and sound are as important as syntax or meaning. Thus he is able to clarify the many aspects of poetry: the nature of poetic inspiration, what happens when a poet is writing a poem, revision, and what actually goes on while one is reading a poem - how confusion or only partial understanding eventually leads to truly experiencing a poem. Among the poets whose work is included are Homer, Ovid, Sappho, Shakespeare, Byron, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Li Bei, Stevens, Williams, Lorea, Ashbery, and Snyder.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

Koch, a preeminent American poet and author of two best-selling books on teaching poetry to children, has at last produced a guide for adults. This book is divided into two parts: a series of essays on subjects such as meter, rhyme, and personification and an anthology of favorite poems. Most remarkably, non-English poems often appear with several translations, underscoring the flexibility of poetic language. Making Your Own Days will be most useful to writers already familiar with the basics. However, while some of the playfulness that marked Wishes, Lies and Dreams (HarperCollins, 1980) and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? (Vintage, 1990) creeps in, the overall tone is that of a lecturer, and Koch covers the same ground as Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux's The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (LJ 10/15/97), though in a less engaging manner.--David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee

Booknews

A handbook for readers and writers of poetry, with an anthology of famous works thrown into the bargain. The author, award- winning poet Kenneth Koch, looks at the mechanics of poetry such as rhythm, rhyme, line division, meter, and poetic forms. He also explores the unique language of poetry, inspiration, revision, and how confusion or partial understanding can lead to a true experience of a poem. The anthologized poems are each accompanied by an explanatory note, and include work by Homer, Shakespeare, Li Bai, Mayakowsky, and e.e. cummings. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

David Lehman

"[Koch] revolutionized the teching of poetry to children and then did the same with elderly nursing home residents. His teaching is continuous with his own poetry, and indeed springs directly from it. A poet of the highest originality...he has stretched our ideas of what it is possible to do in poetry." -- American Poetry Review

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

"I would recommend Koch's way of teaching poetry above all others. His book is informative, witty, and surprising. It's also authoriative. I hope it has the great success it deserves; it is a precious defense of poetry." — Frank Kermode