Just had to trust imagination/my heart going boom boom boom

I met Kenneth Koch once.

"Rose, where did you get that red?"
I love this book so much. It is tattered like no other book I own. When I worked with elementary school kids through the arts council I used this book religiously. I also used it in classrooms and after school programs. It is a beautiful rare book. I am introducing it now because in April for National Poetry Month I am going to resurrect all my old lesson plans and share them with the web.
Koch used great poetry to teach children how to be poets...how to harness what already lived inside their endless imaginations. He taught kids to soar and through his books I was able to teach poetry to even the very young kindergartners. This book should be in every one's house because poetry is accessible to all of us. We all think and we all process and if we can learn the road from the mind to the pen, then we will soar. I can't wait to share the simple lessons with you in April. I have been reading Finnian poems for a long time and just now I am starting to create poems with him. I am teaching him that words are powerful and can help him express his feelings. I am giving him small gifts for the future. Gifts that might not unfold themselves for decades, but one day he will hear the lines from a poem, perhaps a Blake poem:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
in the forests of the night

and his mind will twist and stretch for a bit
and he will think back to the home he grew up in
and he will smile and remember that his mom said it was true
poetry makes you feel