Volume 23, Number 21 & 22 · January 20, 1977
I Never Told Anybody Teaching Poetry Writing in a Nursing Home
By Kenneth Koch
Last spring and summer, I taught poetry writing at the American Nursing Home in New York City. The American Nursing Home is on the Lower East Side, at Avenue B and Fifth Street. I had about twenty-five students, and we met sixteen times, usually on Wednesday mornings for about an hour. The students were all incapacitated in some way, by illness or old age. Most were in their nineties, eighties, and seventies. Most were from the working class and had a limited education. They had worked as dry cleaners, messengers, short order cooks, domestic servants. A few had worked in offices, and one had been an actress. The nursing home gave them safety and care, and a few activities, and sometimes a trip to a show or to a museum. They did little or no reading or writing. None had ever written poetry.
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