Kenneth Koch is an American poet, playwright, and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and his book is about an experiment he conducted from 1968 to 1969, in teaching boys and girls to write poetry at a lower class New York primary school.

Wishes, lies and dreams is in two parts. The first is a long introductory essay, and the second is a selection of the children's verse, grouped under the headings of certain poetry themes, with a short explanatory commentary to round off each group.

The author soon discovered that teaching young children to write poetry was like permitting them to find what they already had, because they had a natural talent. Treating