Rose, where did you get that red?

Back in 1991, while I was in Canada, I bought a book called “Rose, where did you get that red?” It’s by Kenneth Koch and is about how he taught poetry (‘great poetry’) to primary school aged children. It’s a fabulous book, with poems written by the kids in response to his introducing famous poems to them by means of what he calls poetry ideas. So, for William Blake’s The Tyger (“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright/In the forests of the night”), the poetry idea is “write a poem in which you are talking to a beautiful and mysterious creature and you can ask it anything you want – anything. You have the power to do this because you can speak its secret language.” One of the children, Desiree Lynne Collier asked the question that became the book’s title. This came to mind this week as I worked in the garden in Auburn surrounded by the glorious roses that are blooming there at the moment. Where do they get that red? And those pinks and yellows and oranges for that matter? There are other fantastic poems and ideas throughout the book – for Wallace Stevens’ poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, the idea, not surprisingly is to “write a poem in which you talk about the same thing in a number of different ways”. One of the kids (appropriately called Rosa Rosario) has written a poem in response to this called Ten Ways of Looking at Roses – “The rose opened like a road to colourful dreams” is the opening line – and its closing line is “The rose is nature’s way of looking at things”. Good eh? It’s so easy to just glance at everyday beauty, not really seeing the wonder of everyday stuff – nature, the world around us. I love these poems for adding another dimension to the looking – for seeing some of the magic. I mean, look at those petals, those swirls of colour – they do look like dreams. They look like they’re looking right back.