It is a happy coincidence that the first line of poetry in this book is an exclamation and the last poem begins with the idea of excitement, for throughout his life Kenneth Koch was highly energized by the mystery and pleasure of being alive and by writing poetry that became a part of that mystery and pleasure. The selection of poems in this volume tracks his excitement that began with rambunctious and inventive literary fireworks and deepened over the years into a moving lyricism that never lost its freshness, mirroring a life whose anxieties and doubts were transmuted into adventure and joy.
In retrospect, Koch's becoming a poet seems never to have been in doubt. Born in Cincinnati in 1925, Kenneth wrote, at the age of seven, his first poem—four rhymed lines he copied a few years later into a notebook that he called Scribble-ins of Kenneth Koch, a collection of his own writing and comic strips. His mother, proud of her precocious only child, sometimes had him stand on a chair and recite his poems—"my first fan," he later called her.
All things was wrong was what he done
He ne'er done nae thing neece
He tuke awee Durante's nose
And tuke an eskimo's eece1
Literary encouragement came to young Koch from several sources. When he was fifteen his uncle, Leo Loth, gave him a treasured copy of Shelley's poems and applauded his interest in poetry. Two years later, Louis Untermeyer's anthology Modern American and British Poetry introduced him to the work of E. E. Cummings, Kenneth Patchen, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Louis MacNeice, who became immediate influences. He was also impressed by the stream-of-consciousness passages in John Dos Passos's novel U.S.A. When his own poems took an aggressively experimental turn ("Fully agrandusating the milliamterical convolutions of each ackrested")2 or expressed "unacceptable" feelings (such as the pleasure of crushing a baby's head), his high school English teacher, Katherine Lappa, calmly continued to praise his writing. In his final semester at Walnut Hills High School, where he edited the school literary magazine, his poetic production speeded up, perhaps in anticipation of what was to come after graduation.
With America's entry into World War II it became clear that Koch would be drafted. During the spring semester of his senior year in high school (1943) he attended the University of Cincinnati in a course of study that he hoped would lead him into a relatively safe job (meteorology) in the military; but the young man "who had gone about for years as a child / Praying God don't let there ever be another war / Or if there is, don't let me be in it" ("To World War Two") eventually found himself in the 96th Division, Army Infantry, shipped off to fight in the Pacific. Private Koch maintained his subscription to View, the surrealist avant-garde art and literary magazine, but life itself became surreal. Gangling at six feet tall and 150 pounds, he fought from start to finish in the battle of Leyte, where, on one patrol in the jungle, he lost his glasses and at every sound of gunfire dropped to the ground and shot blindly into the air. At another point, standing in a foxhole at dawn, he learned that a nearby fellow soldier had had his throat slit during the night. But throughout the nightmare of war, Koch clung to a sense of his destiny, telling himself, "I can't be killed—because of my poetry. I have to live on in order to write it" ("To World War Two"), a grandiose vision he later found amusing. As luck would have it, he contracted hepatitis and was evacuated to a hospital on Guam just as his division entered one of the bloodiest engagements in U.S. military history—the battle of Okinawa, in which the 96th Division suffered very heavy casualties.
Two months after Koch's discharge in January 1946, he entered Harvard. Although the college did not normally accept transfer students, his College Board verbal score of a perfect 800, his high recommendations, and his good interview with an admissions officer showed him to be exceptional. An undergraduate majoring in English, he was thrilled to study with a real poet, the only one he had ever met: Delmore Schwartz. When, at Schwartz's urging, he embarked on a close study of Wallace Stevens and W. B. Yeats, his own work took on some of the latter's mythic aura. Later he was to shed Yeats's influence, but he continued to regard him as a great poet. Koch's admiration for Stevens never diminished.
The list of Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates at the time who later became nationally known poets is impressive: among them Robert Creeley, Donald Hall, Robert Bly, and Adrienne Rich. However, the most significant for Koch was John Ashbery. The two met in the fall of 1947 in the office of the Harvard Advocate, the literary magazine edited at that time by Koch, and became fast friends.
Although at Harvard Koch's work temporarily took a morose turn due to bouts of depression and anxiety, he never stopped writing poems and plays; and he continued the process, begun in the military, of learning how to get along with a wider variety of people than he had known in Cincinnati. His amorous experiences in the army had been fleeting ones with women he never saw again, whereas at Harvard he felt a genuine affection for some of his girlfriends. Nevertheless, he found it hard to trust fully the people he got close to, and he remained socially insecure, at times formal or aloof, partly because of his stammer, partly because he was a Jew in a school whose traditions had not been favorable to Semites.
Aided by credit for his studies at the University of Cincinnati and the Illinois Institute of Technology (the latter as part of his army training), Koch earned a B.A. degree in the spring of 1948. But what was next? His father had hoped that he would come into the furniture business, but that was out of the question. First the military and then college had allowed Kenneth to distance himself from Cincinnati, and he had no intention of returning to the flatness of bourgeois life there. One suspects that he also wanted to get away from his mother, whom he loved but who drove him to distraction. Where was a brilliant, ambitious young man to go but to New York City?
Koch spent the next several years there, doing graduate work at Columbia (1949-50) and keeping in touch with Ashbery, who wrote to Koch about the work of another Harvard undergraduate, Frank O'Hara: "I think we have a new contender." O'Hara subsequently became a lifelong friend. That at an early age Koch developed enduring literary friendships with Ashbery and O'Hara suggests either his prescience or resounding good taste or both.
During this period in New York, Koch met two young painters who would also become lasting friends, Jane Freilicher and Larry Rivers. Freilicher recalled that one day, just as the Third Avenue elevated subway train was going past the building where she and Koch had apartments, passengers were taken aback to see, in one window, a gorilla staring out at them—that is, Koch wearing a gorilla mask. His genius for the comic was starting to reemerge, but it hardly showed in his new work: formal and rather middling pieces (sonnets, canzones, and allegorical poems in rhymed couplets) that grew out of his admiration for W. H. Auden's technical expertise.
The summer of 1950 found Koch briefly in Cincinnati, trying to improve his French and being dazzled by the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire, just before leaving for a year in Paris and Aix-en-Provence as a Fulbright fellow. Apollinaire's lyricism, supple syntax, and long lines offered Koch exciting new ways to leap out of his own temporary stylistic muddle.
In Aix Koch fell for one of the great loves of his life—the French language—and for the modern poetry of Max Jacob (for its combination of humor and anxiety), Pierre Reverdy (for its spareness and quiet mysteriousness), Paul Eluard (for its serious, lyrical eroticism), and St.-John Perse (for its majestic expansiveness), as well as the work of André Breton, René Char, Francis Ponge, and Henri Michaux. But he loved classic French poetry as well. Paul Valéry's writings on poetry appealed to him; he would often quote Valéry's definition of poetry as something written by someone other than the author to someone other than the reader. That French was a language Koch sometimes misunderstood added to its allure: for him the surprises of misunderstanding generated a new excitement about the sensuous properties of language and its possibilities for associative leaps.
He returned to America eager to tell his New York friends about the wonders of Europe. After sharing a house with Rivers and Freilicher in East Hampton in the summer of 1953, Koch was off again, this time to Berkeley for graduate work at the University of California. There he fell in love with Mary Janice Elwood, an intelligent and beautiful young woman of Quaker background and a fellow student in English. He found himself also in love, for the first time, with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Whitman's expansive cataloguing of everyday American wonders was a vast permission: "After I read Whitman I felt I could write about anything... His lines seem to rise from the pages of a book like trumpet sounds from microscopic chips embedded there."3
The first poem in the current volume, "Sun Out," written in 1952, has a number ofthe hallmarks of Koch's poetry: the title alone radiates optimism, and the first line seems to be welcoming the variety of the world ("Bananas, piers, limericks"). When it continues "I am postures / Over there, I, are / The lakes of delectation" it resonates with Arthur Rimbaud's "I is another," but in the second stanza Koch is not only another, he is everything else too! The poem's broken syntax and displaced semantics convey a happy liberation—a year before, Koch had written that "unsyntactical / Beauty might leap up!" (in "On the Great Atlantic Rainway")—but he maintains a sense of form by having the lines be of roughly the same length and in two equal stanzas.
It is hard to pin down Koch's method of composition in "Sun Up," but it might have resembled that of earlier poems, in which he sometimes revised by replacing certain words solely by phonic association. For example, as he later demonstrated (in "Days and Nights"):
Sweet are the uses of adversity
Became Sweetheart cabooses of diversity
And Sweet art cow papooses at the university
And sea bar Calpurnia flower havens' re-noosed knees
Koch was not simply trying to keep the language fresh, he was also assuming that there is always another kind of truth—a poetic truth that can be experienced even when it cannot be understood—behind every statement, a truth that sometimes can be discovered by an associative procedure such as this. As With a good abstract painting, what you see is what you get: an interesting or mysterious or beautiful surface. In his work there is no need for the reader to puzzle over symbols or decipher a cryptic poetic code. Koch had no use for the allusive obscurity that was rampant in American poetry in the 1940s and 50s. At various times he preferred the sensuousness of Keats, the dark lyricism of Lorca, the energy of Mayakovsky, the daring of Stein, the exalted depth of Rilke.
A year at Berkeley, far from New York and his friends there, was all that Koch could bear, so he transferred back to Columbia. To be nearer to him, Janice Elwood transferred to Harvard, then moved to New York, where the two shared an apartment on Perry Street in Greenwich Village. It was there, in the spring of 1953, that Koch wrote When the Sun Tries to Go On, a relentlessly energetic and fizzy abstract poem of 2,400 lines partly inspired by his reading War and Peace, a book that made him want to include everything imaginable,4 but perhaps also by Whitman's long breath and urge toward vastness ("I contain multitudes") and by the sprung rhythm and piling up of words in the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins ("Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here"). Koch's poem begins with the supreme word of accumulation:
And, with a shout, collecting coat hangers
Dour rebus, conch, hip,
Ham, the autumn day, oh how genuine!
Literary frog, catch-all boxer, O
Real! The magistrate, say "group," bower, undies
Disk, poop, Timon of Athens...
Often during the three-month composition of this work Koch would talk on the phone with O'Hara, who was also writing a long poem (Second Avenue), and the two would read their day's work aloud to each other, in what proved to be a useful and friendly competition. Koch often commented on how helpful it was to be inspired by and envious of the work of one's brilliant friends. In this respect he relied mostly on O'Hara, Ashbery, and later James Schuyler, as well as the painters Freilicher, Rivers, Fairfield Porter, and Alex Katz, though he was also energized by other artists he knew, such as Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, and in subsequent decades by collaborating with Jim Dine, Red Grooms, Joe Brainard, Rory McEwen, Bertrand Dorny, and his daughter Katherine. Koch, O'Hara, Ashbery, and Schuyler even wrote collaborative works together. It was these four who would come to be called, for better or worse, the New York School of Poets.
It was also in 1953 that Koch completed his M.A. work with a thesis, The Physician in English Drama. This study was an outgrowth of his lifelong love of theater, but one suspects that it also derived from his fear of contagious diseases—one of his earliest memories was of painful shots necessitated by a typhoid epidemic—and from his psychoanalysis. In fact his thesis ends with a call for a new poetic drama in which the analyst will assume the traditional doctor's function of resurrector.
Sometime in the early 1950s Koch underwent intensive Freudian psychoanalysis (with Rudolf Loewinstein) to deal with his anxieties, his stammer, and what he felt to be the less attractive parts of his character—a therapy that proved beneficial. The wildly imaginative Koch must have taken quickly to the therapeutic technique of free-association.
By the end of his first stint of teaching at Rutgers (1953-54), the syntax in his poetry had reassembled itself, as in "I am crazier than shirttails / In the wind, when you're near" ("To You"), and he was writing the poems that would figure in his first major collection.
In 1954 Kenneth and Janice were married, and using an inheritance from his Uncle Leo, they went to Europe. A year later, after their daughter Katherine was born in Rome, the family returned to New York and Koch took up teaching again at Rutgers. In 1957 Janice's Fulbright took them to Florence. There Koch wrote not his doctoral thesis, as he was supposed to, but his first epic narrative poem, Ko, or a Season on Earth, which features, among others, a Japanese pitcher whose fastball has so much velocity it can knock down a grandstand. Written in ottava rima and iambic pentameter—a rhythm Koch had practiced by using it for his notes in a course at Harvard and later by learning to speak in it—this comic extravaganza was inspired by Byron's witty and digressive Don Juan and Ariosto's dashing and digressive Orlando Furioso.
Everyday life, though, became scary when Janice miscarried and nearly died. The Kochs hastened back to America, where Kenneth resumed teaching, at Rutgers and at Brooklyn College, while completing his Ph.D. work at Columbia, a dissertation entitled The Reception and Influence of American Poetry in France, 1918-1950. In 1959 he joined the English and Comparative Literature department at Columbia, and, in his 43 subsequent years there, proved to be an inspiring teacher known for his spontaneous wit, good taste, high standards, and infectious love of great literature and art, for which he received the Harbison Award for Distinguished Teaching (1970). A surprising number of his students went on to become writers.
He also directed the influential poetry workshop program at the New School (1958-66), creating a hotbed of the so-called Second Generation of the New York School of Poets.
In 1962 Grove Press brought out Koch's first big collection, Thank You and Other Poems, part of which had been written as early as 1951. Compared with When the Sun Tries to Go On, its syntax is conventional, but the energy, imagination, and lyricism are as lively as ever, ranging from love poems:
I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut
That will solve a murder case unsolved for years
Because the murderer left it in the snow beside a window
Through which he saw her head, connecting with
Her shoulders by a neck, and laid a red
Roof in her heart....
("To You")
to faux naïveté and parody (of William Carlos Williams's "This Is Just to Say"):
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.
("Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams")
to a diatribe against the stuffy poetry of the 1950s:
"Oh to be seventeen years old
Once again," sang the red-haired man, "and not know that poetry
Is ruled with the sceptre of the dumb, the deaf, and the creepy!"
("Fresh Air")
to the flatness of conventional narrative:
As I was walking home just now, from seeing
Margaret and Norris off...
("The Departure from Hydra")
to a formal poem consisting mainly of rhymed sonnets ("The Railway Stationery"), a Disneyesque fantasia ("The Circus"), a comic list poem ("Taking a Walk with You"), and an ode to lunch ("Lunch"). The wide range of work in Thank You suggests that Koch, always open to new possibilities, would not be confined to a single style, unless it be a very capacious one. Five of the poems in this debut collection—"To You," "Fresh Air," "Permanently," "Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams," and "You Were Wearing"—continue to be widely anthologized.
Koch's buoyancy became more grounded in the spring of 1968, during protests at Columbia by students angry about the Vietnam War and by some of the university's policies. In one incident he and other faculty linked arms to defend students from the oncoming police, and he was appalled when, in the ensuing fracas, an officer inflicted a cut on the head of F. W. Dupee, the distinguished older professor who had become Koch's academic mentor and father figure. Though Koch was never a political activist, he had always been quick to support an immediate good cause or to help a needy friend. Galvanized by the student protests and the awfulness of the war (and no doubt by his own wartime experiences and by Janice's Quaker pacifism), he wrote his first overtly political poem, but instead of writing against the war, which he said others could do better, he wrote "The Pleasures of Peace," which ends in a lyrical upsurge of optimism:
And the big boats come sailing into the harbor for peace
And the little apes are running around the jungle for peace
And the day (that is, the star of day, the sun) is shining for peace
Somewhere a moustachioed student is puzzling over the works of Raymond Roussel for peace
And the Mediterranean peach trees are fast asleep for peace
With their pink arms akimbo and the blue plums of Switzerland for peace
[ . . . ]
And the Alps, Mount Vesuvius, all the really big important mountains
Are rising for peace, and they're filled with rocks—"surely it won't be long;
And Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper is moving across the monastery wall
A few micrometers for peace, and Paolo Uccello's red horses
Are turning a little redder for peace, and the Anglo-Saxon dining hall
Begins glowing like crazy, and Beowulf, Robert E. Lee, Sir Barbarossa, and Baron Jeep
Are sleeping on the railways for peace and darting around the harbor
And leaping into the sailboats and the sailboats will go on
[ .. . ]
It will all be going on in connection with you, peace, and my poem, like a Cadillac of wampum
Unredeemed and flying madly, will go exploding through
New cities sweet inflated, planispheres, ingenious hair, a camera smashing
Badinage, cerebral stands of atmospheres, unequaled, dreamed of
Empeacements, candled piers, fumisteries, emphatic moods, terrestrialism's
Crackle, love's flat, sun's sweets, oh Peace, to you.
This climactic incantation is a good example of the masterful variations on the list technique that Koch used in many of his best poems, topped off here with the stunning description of the poem itself as a flying "Cadillac of wampum." One wonders if he might have had Allen Ginsberg in mind, if obliquely, when he created in this poem a rival peace poet named Giorgio Finogle. Both Ginsberg and Koch were literary descendants of Whitman and Williams, and as different as Allen and Kenneth were, their work has remarkable similarities: spontaneity, high energy, expansiveness, a yearning for joy, the feeling that poetry can change the world. These qualities enabled them to invent hilarious collaborative poems before a live audience at the Poetry Project in 1979, documented in their book Making It Up.
In 1968 Koch started teaching poetry writing to children in a public elementary school on New York's Lower East Side. In doing so he started a quiet and happy revolution in how teachers think of their students and how students think of themselves, simply by honoring the energy of the imagination liberated by language. When he walked into the classroom, the children would cheer. Soon poets all over the country, inspired by Koch, were introducing schoolchildren to the joyous liberation of imaginative writing and thinking. Koch's trailblazing work is documented in his best-selling books Wishes, Lies, and Dreams (1970) and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? (1973). For a while his national renown as a teacher overshadowed that of his own poetry, much to his dismay. Later he taught poetry writing to children in France, Italy, Haiti, Malaysia, and China, as well as to residents in a nursing home.
To depict Kenneth Koch solely as a sparklingly imaginative poet of optimism is to ignore the undercurrent of anxiety that caused him to undergo psychoanalysis for most of the 1960s. He wrote explicitly about this undercurrent in poems such as "Alive for an Instant":
[. . .] I think I have three souls
One for love one for poetry and one for acting out my insane self
Not insane but boring but perpendicular but untrue but true
The three rarely sing together [. . .]
I eat the bacon I went down the slide I have a thunderstorm in my inside I will never hate you
But how can this maelstrom be appealing? do you like menageries? my god
Most people want a man!
The poem ends with a scary image, rare in Koch: "I have a wild rat in my secrets from you."
Having a secure position as a professor—a job he grew to love and perhaps the only one suitable for him—helped stabilize his life and influenced his writing. During the early 1970s Koch's poetry took an instructional turn: "The Art of Love" is a take-off on Ovid in the form of a comic handbook written by a logical but deranged man (whose sexism some readers found offensive); "Some General Instructions" is a curious mixture of ironic and straightforward advice; and "The Art of Poetry" is a completely serious general guide and, perhaps not incidentally, a manual for understanding Koch's own poetry.
From this point onward Koch would write other poems about writing poetry, clarifying how writing and life have a synergistic effect that helps each to be more pleasurable, honest, mysterious, beautiful, and deeply experienced.
In the early 1970s Koch's poetry began to engage his demons more explicitly. After his separation (amicable) from Janice in 1971, he wrote one of his most moving autobiographical poems, "The Circus" (sometimes referred to as "The Circus" [II] to distinguish it from his earlier
poem of the same name). As if written late at night, the new "Circus" is imbued with regret for the lost past, the memory of old friendships, and the oddness of looking back at one's previous selves. Recollecting also makes him realize
... I was interested in my career
And still am but now it is like a town I don't want to leave
Not a tower I am climbing opposed by ferocious enemies
The enemies he refers to were perhaps some who recognized themselves as among those he had thumbed his nose at in "Fresh Air," and who now declined to review his work, belittled it, or gave it grudging praise. In the dominant atmosphere of the somewhat depressed and solemn academic poetry of the 1950s and 60s Koch had been, after all, a disarming rarity: a highly sophisticated and serious comic poet. But it was also his stylistic difference that led some to underestimate his work, for in many quarters the dominant aesthetic still called for a poetry that was tightly compressed ("jewel-like") or that displayed a measured, controlled artifice (the "well-wrought" poem), whereas Koch's work was constantly opening out and flexing its spirit. He once told me that although the conventional idea of revision—tightening, condensing, honing—has its obvious uses, it alone is too narrow; sometimes a draft could be improved by expanding the poem to twice its length.
Koch's turn toward autobiography continued in The Burning Mystery of Anna in 1951 (1979), which contains direct and open poems such as "The Problem of Anxiety" and an account of an intense love affair, "To Marina." This volume also includes one of his most admired poems, "The Boiling Water," whose first line—"A serious moment for the water is when it boils"—signals that this poem may have a muted comic undertone but that Koch is aiming for something else by focusing soberly on a single moment and exploring its ramifications.
Finally, in 1980, he and Janice divorced (again, amicably), and when she fell ill and died the following year, it was a terrible loss for him, for the love and admiration he felt for her was real. He would continue to write about her for the rest of his life, even though he would be involved with other intelligent and attractive women. Koch could not live without women, recurring muses at the erotic heart of his inspiration, like the beautiful young art student in his poem "Fresh Air." Over the years Koch had provided virtual guides to his own work, from "Fresh Air" to "The Art of Poetry," but in Days and Nights (1982) the title piece is about not only his own poetry but also its relation to his life:
Wondering how much life and how much writing there should be—
For me, have the two become mostly the same?
Mostly! Thank God for the mostly! Last night with you
I felt by that shaken and uplifted
In a way that no writing could ever do.
The body after all is a mountain and the words are a mist—
I love the mist. Heaven help me, I also love you.
But Koch needed poetry: "It helps me to be writing it helps me to breathe" and his youthful belief that "poetry was everything" had a way of not disappearing. The year after Janice's death Koch went on a reading and lecture tour of Africa, sponsored by the United States Information Agency. In an unpublished travel journal, he describes his daily activities, the sights and sounds, but he also lays his heart bare:
And I wonder who on earth I am writing for anyway? [. . .] I am already "a poet." How much interest do I have really, as I head for non-being, in finding out—or in communicating—some truth? Since I feel sure the truth won't save me from extinction.5
But later in the journal, when his spirits have brightened, his comment on a line of poetry he had read shows that he is as fascinated as ever by language itself:
As for the appeal of the line "O la danseuse Zannie Amaya de Bangui!" it's that the words, the physical words, are so much stronger than the "meaning," so that the line escapes from its parents' intentions for itself and becomes a free entity—for a while, at least, it really lives.
Although Koch never stopped loving words that had sparkling surfaces, his poetry was becoming less effervescent and more introspective: "What's here if I'm not that same sensual Kenneth / Of years ago, nuts for exhilaration" and "Did you too ever feel it, like a promise / That there could be a perfect lifetime, Janice?" His answer: "1 don't know" and "Nothing has come of this except my wonder / What it's about, before I'm shoveled under" ("Seasons on Earth"). He was sixty.
When Karen Culler, a pianist and education consultant Koch had met in 1977, moved in with him in 1989, a sort of relaxation came over him. They married five years later, and until he died (July 6, 2002) Karen was to remain his wife, friend, astute fan, and energetic traveling companion on trips to Europe, Africa, Asia, South America, and Antarctica.
Koch's next collection, One Train (1994), begins with the poem "One Train May Hide Another," inspired by a railroad crossing sign he had seen in Africa. This poem is a synthesis of many of his gifts: a lyrical marriage of humor and seriousness in the form of an instructional list focused on one motif deftly varied. Also in this volume is "A Time Zone," in which Koch takes off from Apollinaire's poem "Zone," whose conversational tone and limber, sometimes enjambed lines are given shape by being subtly rhymed couplets. Koch travels back through time zones to his early years in New York City, and now, when he talks about his old friends, it is with the certainty that most readers will recognize their names, for his friends have become part of America's literary and artistic history, as he has. But Koch is not name-dropping, and what he says in "Currency," a poem about his early experiences in France, rings true here as well:
I don't care about fame
I have never cared about it
I just want to be delighted and I'm envious
I want to be part of that enormous cake over there
At this point in his career he can call upon any side of his poetic genius, moving from direct statements about his character to narrative to an imaginative lyricism that is unsurpassed in twentieth-century American poetry, even in such a simple line as "The pink and yellow lines come marching down the boulevard Montparnasse."
Ever alert to new ways of writing or to new ways of seeing older forms of writing, Koch revitalized the apostrophe, or, as he once wittily defined it, "a poem in which you talk to someone or something that can't talk back."6 At the age of fifteen Koch had been exhilarated by Shelley's talking to the West wind, and he himself had used apostrophes in poems; he had even had schoolchildren write apostrophes inspired by Blake's "Tyger." But he himself had never written a whole poem as an apostrophe. His New Addresses (2000), composed entirely of such poems, turned out to be perhaps his most accessible and popular collection. Imagine writing a poem in which you talk, as he did, to the word yes, or to World War II, or to orgasms. As he commented in Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry, talking to something mysterious or huge makes us feel less at a loss, as perhaps it did for John Donne when he wrote "Death, be not proud." Feeling more powerful and in control seems to have allowed Koch to write about an even wider range of his experience, and to do so with honesty, wit, perception, and freshness. In "To Jewishness" he finally speaks at length of his ethnicity, and with good humor, as in "How / Like a Bible with shoulders / Rabbi Seligmann is!" In a journal kept during a trip to China in 1991, Kenneth had written:
I . . . decided . . . that I wasn't going to think about death, cancer, old age, failing powers anymore (as little as possible) but just keep thinking about things that open up.7
Koch had survived two different kinds of cancer, and, despite the expected bad patches, his underlying attitude throughout had been surprisingly buoyant, especially for one who flinched at a sneeze. Vitality radiated from this man who, well into his seventies, would write every morning for three or four hours and then go bounding about the tennis court with high energy. As for old age, he admitted to fearing it, but, after all, he had to accept it: he ends his poem "To Old Age" simply with "Old age, here we are!" But notice that it concludes with an exclamation mark.
For decades Koch had been idolized by young poets, especially in New York, but in his later years critical esteem for his work finally came to the fore, with public praise from writers such as Frank Kermode, John Gardner, Thomas M. Disch, James Salter, David Lehman, Reed Whittemore, Stephen Spender, Aram Saroyan, Robert Coles, John Hollander, Gary Lenhart, Ken Tucker, John Ashbery, Jonathan Lethem, and Charles Simic. Volumes of his poetry appeared in French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Swedish, and Danish translation. Koch was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and won the Bollingen Prize, the Bobbitt Library of Congress Prize, the Shelley Award for Poetry, and the Phi Beta Kappa Award for Poetry. He was also a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The French government made him a Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters. Koch liked getting prizes and awards but he never confused them with greatness. A competitive man with high standards, he continued to vie happily with his literary heroes past and present.
Koch's final collection, some of which was written with the knowledge that he would probably not survive his third cancer, shows that his poetry continued to unfold. A Possible World, published a few months after his death, has much of his witty charm, but it also charts new directions in his work. One such direction is toward what I think deserves to be called profundity. Koch had always warned against solemnity, a trait often mistaken for seriousness, but at this point in his life his spirit seemed to move beyond seriousness, even. At least that is what I sense in "Paradiso," a poem whose title probably refers to Dante's heaven and whose final lines ask a question that most of us are unable to answer:
..... Why do you keep believing in this
Reality so dependent on the time allowed it
That it has less to do with your exile from the age you are
Than from everything else life promised that you could do?
Kenneth Koch kept believing in this reality. Near the end of June 2002, his illness demanded a return to the hospital, but he held off to attend one last performance of his short plays. Helped onstage as the cast were taking their bows, he shuffled over to the director, smiled, and, with a courtly bow, offered her a rose.
Ron Padgett 2006
1New York Public Library, Berg collection, series I, box 1, folder 1.
2Unpublished "Fat Woman and Nun on a Bus in June," Koch archive, Berg Collection, series I, box 1, folder 5.
3The Art of Poetry, University of Michigan Press, pp. 188-89.
4See the endnotes in Sun Out, p. 142.
5Koch archive, Berg Collection, notebook in series XIll, box 244.
6An impromptu remark at his New Addresses reading at the St.
Mark's Poetry Project, if memory serves.
7Koch archive, Berg Collection, series XTII, box 245.
About the Author
Ron Padgett, editor, is the author of many volumes of poetry including You Never Know, The Big Something, and Great Balls of Fire.
Library of America
Introduction copyright © 2007 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
