Kenneth Koch

• Born: February 27, 1925
• Birthplace: Cincinnati, Ohio
• Died: July 6, 2002
• Place of death: New York, New York

Other literary forms

In addition to poetry, Kenneth Koch published one novel, The Red Robins (1975), and books of dramatic pieces, including Bertha, and Other Plays (1966) and A Change of Hearts: Plays, Films, and Other Dramatic Works, 1951-1971 (1973). Both Koch’s novel and his works for the stage are imaginative and improvisatory in their consistent portrayal of the comic drama of life.

The plays achieve their comic repercussions primarily through the juxtaposition of incongruous situations, and by means of rapid, often unpredictable changes of language, character, and scene. The plays echo and imitate older dramatic forms such as the Elizabethan chronicle and the court masque, frequently appropriating the earlier dramatic conventions for comic purposes. E. Kology (pb. 1973), for example, a five-act play in rhymed verse, is as much masque as play. In it, the main character, E. Kology, persuades various polluters of air and water to abandon their destructive habits. An additional masque element is provided by a troupe of young men and women who assist E. Kology, performing a series of celebratory dances as part of the play’s action. An even more masquelike play is The Moon Balloon, performed in New York’s Central Park on New Year’s Eve, 1969. The Moon Balloon is an entertainment in rhymed verse that makes use of spectacle, celebration, and metamorphosis.

History forms the basis for humor and metamorphosis in Koch’s two historical plays, Bertha (pr. 1959), a historical pageant, and George Washington Crossing the Delaware (pr. 1962), a chronicle play. Bertha is a Norwegian queen who saves her people from the barbarian menace. She performs this feat regularly, whenever she becomes bored with routine rule. The humor of the play resides in the use of formal Elizabethan language to describe Bertha’s idiosyncratic behavior, and in strangely concatenated literary allusions such as the linked references to William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (pr. 1606-1607) and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Bertha being related to both the tragic queen of Egypt and the mad queen of Wonderland.

George Washington Crossing the Delaware, perhaps Koch’s best play, is part myth, part chronicle, and part comedy. Its comic incongruities, its colloquial deflation of a more stately heroic language, and its juxtaposition of low comedy and high seriousness serve to make it a surprising and inventive theatrical entertainment.

Achievements

Kenneth Koch’s achievements are notable and varied. He received numerous fellowships, including several from the Fulbright Foundation (1950-1951, 1978, and 1982), the Guggenheim Foundation (1960-1961), and the Ingram Merrill Foundation (1969). His literary awards are impressive: the Ohioana Book Award for Poetry (1974), an Academy Award in Literature (1976) and an Award of Merit for Poetry from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1986), the Shelley Memorial Award (1994), the Bollingen Prize (1995), the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry (1996) for One Train, a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres, France (1999), and the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine (2000). He was twice nominated for a National Book Award, in 1963 for Thank You, and Other Poems and in 2000 for New Addresses. In 1995, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Biography

Kenneth Koch was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on February 27, 1925. Although he wrote his first poem when he was five, he did not begin writing seriously until he was seventeen, when he read the novels of John Dos Passos and was thereby stimulated to imitate their particular style of stream of consciousness. Koch served as a rifleman in the U.S. Army during World War II. After the war, he earned a B.A. degree from Harvard University in 1948 and a doctorate from Columbia in 1959. At Harvard, Koch was a friend of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, poets who held similar views about the nature of poetry. Later, when they had settled in New York, Ashbery, O’Hara, and Koch came to be thought of as principal poets of the New York School.

Koch spent three important years in Europe, mostly in Italy and France. During that time, he was influenced by the humorous, surrealistic verse of Jacques Prévert. In a brief autobiographical account that appeared in The New American Poetry, 1945-1960 (1960; Donald Allen, editor), Koch noted that French poetry “had a huge effect” on his own work. Moreover, he acknowledged that he tried to get into his own writing “the same incomprehensible excitement” that he found in French poetry.

During the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, Koch began teaching poetry writing at P.S. 61, a grammar school in New York City, and at a neighborhood museum in Brooklyn. A few years later, he taught similar classes at a New York nursing home. Out of these experiences came a series of books about the teaching of poetry to children and the aged. The first of these, Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Young Children to Write Poetry (1970), is perhaps the best known. A companion volume, Rose Where Did You Get That Red?, followed in 1973. Both are noteworthy for their inventive approach to teaching poetry, especially for the imaginative ways they keep reading and writing poetry together. An additional value of the books and of two later volumes (I Never Told Anybody: Teaching Poetry in a Nursing Home, 1977, and Sleeping on the Wing: An Anthology of Modern Poetry with Essays on Reading and Writing, 1981), is that all reveal something about Koch’s poetic temperament and inclinations. The qualities that Koch encourages in his students’ writing animate his own poems. Open forms, loose meter, memory and feeling, joy and humor, colloquial language, imaginative freedom—these reflect Koch’s view that “there is no insurmountable barrier between ordinary speech and poetry.”

Koch taught at Brooklyn College (now of the City University of New York), Rutgers University, and the New School for Social Research. In 1971, he began his long tenure at Columbia University as a professor of English and comparative literature. Exhibitions of Koch’s collaborative work have been held at the Ipswich Museum, England, in 1993; at the Tibor De Nagy Gallery, New York City, in 1994; and at Guild Hall, East Hampton, New York, in 2000. He lived in New York City until his death on July 6, 2002.

Analysis

At his best, Kenneth Koch was a good comic poet and a fine parodist. A poet of limited tonal range yet of a wide and resourceful imagination, Koch used random structures, open forms, and loose meters to give his poetry freedom and surprise that occasionally astonish and often delight. Just as often, however, the formlessness of Koch’s poems results in slackness and self-indulgence. The tension that one expects in good poetry, deriving largely from exigencies of form, is missing in Koch’s poems.

In The King of the Cats (1965), F. W. Dupee compared Koch to Marianne Moore. Dupee notes that while both Koch and Moore make poetry out of “poetry-resistant stuff,” Koch lacks Moore’s patient scrutiny and careful, sustained observation. Preferring to participate imaginatively rather than to observe carefully, Koch often seems more interested in where he can go with an observation, with what his imagination can make of it, than in what it is in itself. At his best, Koch’s imaginative facility translates into poetic felicity; at his worst, Koch’s freedom of imagination obscures the clarity and lucidity of the poems, frequently testing the reader’s patience.

Perhaps the most trenchant and perceptive criticism of Koch’s work has been that of Richard Howard in his book on contemporary poetry, Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950 (1969). Howard suggests that the central poetic problem for Koch is to sustain the interest of the instant, to hold onto the momentary imaginative phrase or the surprising conjunction of dichotomous ideas, experiences, and details. Koch frequently hurries beyond moments of imaginative vitality and verbal splendor; rather than sustaining or developing them, he abandons them. At his best, however, such abandonments lead to other moments that are equally splendid, culminating in convincingly coherent poems.

Some of Koch’s most distinctive and successful poems are parodies. His parody of Robert Frost, “Mending Sump,” in which he alludes to and satirizes the style and situation of both “Mending Wall” and “The Death of the Hired Man,” is one of his most famous. A modestly successful parody, “Mending Sump” does not compare with Koch’s brilliant and witty parody of William Carlos Williams’s brief conversational poem “This Is Just to Say.” Koch entitles his parody “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams.” In four brief stanzas, Koch parodies the occasion, structure, rhythm, and tone of a poet whose work has powerfully influenced his own.

Although in his nonparodistic poetry Koch did not often attempt to imitate Williams, he did try to accomplish what Williams achieved in his best work: the astonishment of the moment; the astonishment of something seen, heard, felt, or understood; the magic and the beauty of the commonplace. Koch, too, could astonish—but not by acts of attention like those of Williams nor by his power of feeling. Koch astonished by his outrageous dislocations of sense and logic, his exuberant and risk-taking amalgamation of utterly disparate experiences. His achievement, finally, consists of small surprises, delights of image and allusion, phrase and idea; his poems rarely possess the power to move or instruct, but they do entertain.

Among Kenneth Koch’s long poems are Ko: Or, A Season on Earth, a mock-heroic epic in ottava rima about a Japanese baseball player, a poem with a variety of story lines; The Duplications, a comic epic about sex that employs trappings of Greek mythology and that in its second part becomes a self-reflexive poem concerned with the poetic vocation; and When the Sun Tries to Go On, a poem that goes on for one hundred twenty-four-line stanzas, in large part because Koch wanted to see how long he could go on with what was originally a seventy-two-line poem. All three poems are characterized by Koch’s infectious humor, his far-fetched analogies, and his digressive impulse.

More interesting and more consistently successful are Koch’s shorter poems, ranging in length from a dozen lines to a dozen pages. In the poems included in Koch’s best collections, The Art of Love and The Pleasures of Peace, and Other Poems, one encounters Koch at his most graceful and disarming. In the best poems from these volumes (and there are many engaging ones), Koch exhibits his characteristic playfulness, deliberate formlessness, and almost surrealistic allusiveness. The poems are humorous yet serious in both their invitations and their admonitions.

The Pleasures of Peace, and Other Poems

Koch’s major poetic preoccupations find abundant exemplifications in his volume The Pleasures of Peace, and Other Poems. The title poem is divided loosely into fourteen sections, each section describing different kinds of pleasures: of writing, of peace, of pain, of pleasure itself, of fantasy, of reality, of memory, of autonomy, of poetry, and of living. The poem is both a catalog and a celebration of the rich pleasures of simply being alive. Its self-reflexiveness coexists with its Whitmanesque embrace of the range, diversity, and variability of life’s pleasures. Another stylistic hallmark evident in this poem is a playful use of literary allusion. In addition to evoking Walt Whitman, Koch alludes directly to William Butler Yeats (“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”), Andrew Marvell (“To His Coy Mistress”), Robert Herrick, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth. The allusions are surprising: Koch’s lines modify and alter the words of the earlier poets as they situate them in the context of a radically different poem.

These observations about “The Pleasures of Peace” fail to account for what is perhaps its most distinctive identifying quality: a wild, surrealistic concatenation of details (pink mint chewing gum with “the whole rude gallery of war”; Dutch-speaking cowboys; the pleasures of agoraphobia with the pleasures of blasphemy; the pleasures of breasts, bread, and poodles; the pleasures of stars and of plaster). Moreover, amid the litany of the poem’s pleasures occur several notes of desperation—for the horrors of war and suffering. Koch seems to find it necessary to remind his readers of the peaceful pleasures of life largely because the horrors of war and the futility of modern life allow them to be forgotten.

Although Sigmund Freud is an obvious influence on Koch’s “The Interpretation of Dreams,” a zany poem that imitates the syntax of dream in its associative structure, in its dislocations and disruptions of continuity, and in its oddly mismatched characters, Whitman is the dominant voice and force behind most of the other poems in the volume. Whitman’s influence is discernible in “Hearing,” a rambling play on sounds in which Koch makes music out of the disparate noises of waterfalls and trumpets, throbbing hearts and falling leaves, rain and thunder, bluebirds singing and dresses ripping. The poem, concluding with the words “the song is finished,” owes something also to the other American poets it invokes: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens.

It is Whitman, however, who stands behind Koch’s “Poem of the Forty-eight States,” especially the Whitman of “On Journeys Through the States”; and it is Whitman who hovers over the incantatory litany of Koch’s “Sleeping with Women,” especially the Whitman of “The Sleepers” and “Beautiful Women.” Perhaps the most successful of Koch’s Whitmanesque poems is “Faces,” which, while less uniform in tone than “Sleeping with Women,” with its hypnotic, anaphoric incantation, and not as close to Whitman’s own tone, nevertheless carries something of Whitman’s power of suggestion in its implication that the variety of faces called up in the poem (Popeye and Agamemnon, Herbert Hoover and the poor of the Depression) reflect the life of the speaker of the poem. By implication, Koch seems to suggest that each reader could create a similar yet highly individual and personal collage of faces that, taken together, reflect the range and variety of his or her experience and that, in a concentrated yet variegated image, sum up his or her life.

The Art of Love

Koch’s other important volume, The Art of Love, while retaining something of the humorous tone of The Pleasures of Peace, and Other Poems as well as something of its imaginative wit, reaches more deeply in feeling and ranges more widely in thought. Many of the poems are cast in an admonitory mode; others are ironic, while still others include both irony and admonition. “ The Art of Poetry” alternates between ironic posture and serious gesture in its descriptions of poetic attitudes, ideals, and practices. The speaker advises poets to stay young even while growing and developing, something that Koch has consistently tried to do. He suggests that a poet should imitate other poets, try on other styles, and try out other voices in an effort to form, paradoxically, his or her own style. After addressing the problems of beginning a poem, sustaining and ending it (and also revising it), the speaker reminds the poet to be absorbed totally in poetry, for only such a total immersion will enable the poet to see poetry as “the mediation of life.” Such is Koch’s poetic credo.

This poetic creed notwithstanding, perhaps the most unusual and the most useful advice in “The Art of Poetry” is given in a set of questions and answers that further reveal the direction and impulse of Koch’s own poetry: Is the poem astonishing? Is it wise? Is it original? Does it employ cheap effects, tricks, or gimmicks? Does it engage heart and mind? Would the poet envy another’s having written it? If the answer is “yes” to all but the fourth question, the poem qualifies, if not for greatness, at least for honesty and integrity, qualities and standards certainly deserving of respect and admiration. In his “The Art of Poetry,” Koch seems to have achieved them.

Although not overtly about the art of poetry, “ Some General Instructions” can be taken as describing Koch’s poems even as it gives more explicit advice about living. One statement in particular suggests the connection between poetry and life: “Things have a way of working out/ Which is nonsensical, and one should try to see/ How the process works.” This implies that nonsense ultimately makes sense, that beneath the apparent confusion lies order, purpose, and meaning. The statement provides a helpful gloss on the best of Koch’s poems, which often go by way of nonsense to make a final and useful kind of sense.

“Some General Instructions” alternates between aphorism and meditative commentary. Like any set of aphorisms, it bristles with contradictions. Even so, it shines with joy and radiates humor. Koch seems to enjoy juxtaposing serious moral and ethical advice with comic yet practical admonition. He advises, for example, that his readers be glad; that they savor life, love, pleasure, and virtue; and that they not eat too many bananas.

Although a similar tone mixing playful humor with thoughtful advice permeates Koch’s lovely and beautiful “On Beauty,” a rather different note is struck by two other poems in the volume. In “The Circus,” a nostalgic reminiscence about the time he wrote an earlier poem with the same title, Koch wonders about the value of the earlier poem, and then, by extension, about the value of any of his poems and the value of his poetic vocation. Moving out of a concern with poetry, “The Circus” becomes more somber, turning into a meditation on time, death, and loss, especially the loss of friends. In “The Art of Love,” a how-to manual of eroticism, the speaker describes a set of outrageous sadomasochistic procedures. The practical nature of the advice ranges from how to meet and greet a girl, to how to get her to do the things described in the poem. “The Art of Love” ends with a catalog of questions about love, some serious, some humorous. Ludicrous answers are provided to each question. Full of high spirits, erotic fantasies, hyperbole, and insult, the poem needs to be taken ironically if it is not to be considered an offense against decency. Even then, its specificity of reference and particularity of detail make it seem less an ironic poem about the art of love than a degrading if witty description of perverse fantasies.

On the Edge

Koch’s 1986 volume, On the Edge, consists of two long poems, the title poem and “Impressions of Africa.” The former is a strongly autobiographical work; the latter, as its title suggests, presents images and impressions gathered while the poet was in Africa. Although both present difficulties, with their fragmentations and free associations that attempt to represent experience and memory in Koch’s unique way, the structure is not entirely haphazard. “Impressions of Africa,” more than the usual Koch work, gives the reader a sense of how a place objectively appears, in lines that sometimes remind one of diary entries transformed into verse. “On the Edge” is harder to grasp. In the poem, events involving Koch and his friends circle an apparently fictional character named Dan. Moments of clarity are scattered among thoughts that interrupt themselves, such as “Our modern—fragmentary—Dan stands up—it’s about time—reason.” Koch’s charm and sense of humor appear throughout, but the landscape of the work frequently exists so deep within the poet’s consciousness that it seems indecipherable.

Koch’s talent is perhaps best manifested in The Pleasures of Peace, and Other Poems and The Art of Love. Although the poems do not range widely in style, theme, and technique, they do offer a distinctive set of pleasures for the accepting and patient reader, the pleasures of engaging an unusual and unpredictable poetic imagination as it reveals itself in a colloquially inflected idiom that is, by turns, earnest and ironic. The deliberate dislocations of logical organization, the profusion of incongruities in image and idea, the exaggeration and far-fetched analogies are all part of Koch’s effort to avoid the predictable, the stodgy, and the dull. They are all part of his effort to create a poetry full of fun and surprise that even though it only infrequently ends in wisdom, nevertheless very often sustains the delight with which it begins.

Straits

In Straits, persons searching and journeying appear in the volume’s title poem, a dazzling array of sentences of failure, success, discovery, and change, with everything happening at once. The “straits” of this collection represent a possibility, and they grant access to ecstasy, unity, freedom, and completeness. Running through Straits is Koch’s preoccupation with time and making time run, not after him but in circles. Thus the seventeen quatrains of “Ballade,” each titled for a year of the poet’s life, undo chronology, beginning with the seventy-first and ending with the thirtieth year, and ranging in age from five to seventy-three, in no particular order. Themes of aging, seasonal change, and “the loss of the sacred in everyday life” are amply evident (on being seventy-three, Koch comments, “I have lots of years and decades in me/ And they divide me like Sunday ads./ It’s the Big Sale of the Week, when I can speak in song”).

The volume spans a wide range of form and content, of experiences culled from Koch’s life (“Currency”) and those that are formed merely in an exuberant imagination. The sequence “ The Seasons,” dedicated to the eighteenth century poet James Thomson, maker of The Seasons (1730, 1744), is perhaps Koch’s best contribution in this volume. Here linear time is supplanted by Koch’s cyclic interpretations, the rhythms of day and night and of “The seasons’ lazy susan.” It calls forth New York urban pastoralism—hot-dog stands, the World Series, opera, and snowplows—and finds renewal even in autumn: “harbinger of rebirth/ Of school and love and work.”

New Addresses

In Koch’s New Addresses, he presents fifty free-verse poems, each an ode to a different subject (“To Psychoanalysis,” “To My Father’s Business,” “To ’Yes’”), making the “addresses” in his title quite literal. It is perhaps his most autobiographical collection, a volume that recalls, for the first time in his poetry, a pivotal moment in his life: his military service during World War II. Putting such an experience into verse proved a challenge he could not resist: “I’d never really been able to write [about the war] because it’s like being psychotic to be in a war. You’re walking around with a gun . . . and they shoot you!” However, the poet found that treating the war as a character, like any other person, “enabled me to get some of the feelings back, like the crazy idea that I couldn’t be killed because I had to write.” His encounter with a faulty explosive in “To Carelessness” is unnerving with its understated lesson in the dumb luck of staying alive in battle. “To World War Two,” a much longer poem, captures the combatant’s sense of his sheer insignificance: “If you could use me/ You’d use me, and then forget. How else/ Did I think you’d behave?/ I’m glad you ended. I’m glad I didn’t die.”

Other bits of Koch’s life are also revealed throughout the addresses (for example, childhood is probed in “To Piano Lessons”; later periods in Koch’s life in “To My Fifties”), where readers find the speaker accusing, praising, or querying abstract concepts, emotions, his character, and his past. Some are overtly emotional (“To My Father’s Business” or “To Jewishness”), while some favor his characteristic playfulness (“To Testosterone” or “To Some Abstract Paintings”).

Bibliography

Auslander, Philip. The New York School Poets as Playwrights: O’Hara, Ashbery, Koch, Schuyler, and the Visual Arts. New York: Peter Lang, 1989. Auslander discusses the plays written by these poets who attended the New York School of Art. Their life in New York affects their artistic endeavors, regardless of their form: poetry, experimental drama, short story, or visual art. This survey is useful as it gives an idea of Koch’s competency in varied artistic media.

Carruth, Hayden. “Kenneth Koch.” In Contemporary Poets, edited by James Vinson and D. L. Kirkpatrick. 4th ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. Carruth, an outstanding poet in his own right, outlines Koch’s background and work. Carruth first covers Koch’s apprenticeship with the New York School of poets in the 1950’s, then discusses Koch’s current poetry, which is simpler and more effective than his earlier work. A good introduction for all students.

Howard, Richard. Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950. New York: Atheneum, 1969. In his chapter on Koch, Howard discusses his emphasis on the individual moment and (paradoxically) its movement. Howard also notes Koch’s ability to be funny, calling him a master parodist, and mentions devices that Koch uses in his “improvisational plays.”

Koch, Kenneth. Interview by Anselm Berrigan. Publishers Weekly 247, no. 13 (March, 2000): 72. An interview with Koch and a discussion of New Addresses.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “An Interview with Kenneth Koch.” Interview by John Tranter. Scripsi 4 (November, 1986): 177-185. In this interview, Koch discusses the evolution of his work from his rebellious New York School days to his 1980’s poetic style. He also talks about his work in the theater, which is experimental and plentiful. For all students.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Kenneth Koch.” Interview by Daniel Kane. In What Is Poetry: Conversations with the American Avant-Garde, edited by Kane. New York: Teachers & Writers Books, 2003. Koch describes his life, works, and influences.

Lang, Nancy. “Comic Fantasy in Two Postmodern Verse Novels: Slinger and Ko.” In The Poetic Fantastic: Studies in an Evolving Genre, edited by Patrick D. Murphy and Vernon Ross Hyles. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989. This article compares the use of fantasy for fun in Koch’s Ko: Or, A Season on Earth and Edward Dorn’s Slinger.

Merrin, Jeredith. “The Poetry Man.” Southern Review 35, no. 2 (Spring, 1999): 403-409. Merrin discusses Koch’s poetry and nonfiction writing.