Remembering a Teacher for His Poetry
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Talking about the poet Kenneth Koch, a friend once said to me, “I love his poems. He makes me feel like I could write poetry myself.”
It’s a remark that I’m sure would have pleased Koch, who was a tireless advocate of poetry. In spite of 19 books of verse, Kenneth Koch is often first thought of as a teacher of poetry to children – and, later in life, to those in nursing homes. He chronicled his experiments in poetic pedagogy in three remarkable books, “Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children To Write Poetry,” “Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?: Teaching Great Poetry To Children,” and “I Never Told Anybody: Teaching Poetry Writing in a Nursing Home.” He taught poetry to children in the cancer ward of the hospital while he himself was undergoing treatment for leukemia. This is certainly an indication of the depth of his calling.
But it is as a poet that he will be celebrated by posterity, and, with the new publication of “The Collected Poems” (Alfred A. Knopf, 816 pages, $40) and “The Collected Fiction” (Coffee House Press, 408 pages, $30, $18 paper), we can at least begin to take his creative measure.
The fiction is uneven,but his startling novel “The Red Robins” is unlike anything you will have read before. It is about a group of young pilots in Asia, the Red Robins of the title, who unknowingly serve a master criminal, named “Santa Claus,” who is the archenemy of yet another master criminal “the Easter Bunny.” In it Koch’s hyperactive imagination takes flight and loosens the bonds of earth. Plot takes a vacation, as does character development. All the female pilots are nubile and desirable.All the male pilots are dashing. One of the pilots is, of course, a poet.The dramatis personae include “slimy green things,” a traveling Noh troupe, and a tribe of apes who war with human beings. The novel is only held together by Koch’s wizardry with language.
“The Hotel Lambosa” is much more satisfying, and much more anchored in reality.It is a semi-autobiographical collection of interrelated stories, many only a page in length, that follow a young-to-middle-aged stand-in for Koch as he travels in Italy, France, China, Greece, Mexico, and Africa, sometimes with family in tow, sometimes alone. But other times the presumed narrator is someone leading a parallel life, single, or with a son, or a lover. Koch was moved to write the pieces by the terse “Palm of the Hand Stories” of the Japanese Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata. Koch’s stories are also in the spirit of haiku, incredibly compact and suggestive of a world beyond the immediate frame of the story. They linger in the memory.
Koch is usually identified as a member of the New York School of poets, along with Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and sometimes Barbara Guest.This school is usually associated with the Abstract Expressionist painters with whom they were friends (O’Hara, Mr. Ashbery, and Schuyler also wrote art criticism). The free-form shape of the poetry and the disjointedness of their language, and often their incomprehensibility, owed much to the techniques of these painters.Though he admired his fellow poets, Koch’s own work moved away from abstraction in the direction of greater clarity and simplicity.
It is ironic that, in 2002, Koch’s very first book was published posthumously at Koch’s direction along with his last. “Sun Out” was written between 1952 and 1954,and Koch remarked of the poems that “they seem more like early oddities than like something that goes with the rest of my poetry.”Yet clearly he was fond of these poems and didn’t want to see them lost.There is a kind of loopy joy in his diction in these early poems, eschewing sense for sound.
You must struggle manfully to make sense of such lines as these, from “January Nineteenth”: “The bone Andes are still pledging facial Switzerland to Peruvian intestinal prisms / Too coffeelike to replace the face; but then that tissue paper is their business.”But ultimately you just give in, enjoying the Joycean puns (“Anna Dine”and “Marriage of Figure”) and lunatic word combinations (“marjoram chinchilla”).You read the poems in much the same way that you would read the nonsense poems of Edward Lear. Lear himself could have penned the phrase “The pears are dancing.”
With the publication of his book “The Art of Love,” Koch achieved new heights. The title poem is a comic instruction book, which begins with a bit of sadomasochistic fantasy: “Tie your girl’s hands behind her back and encourage her / To attempt to get loose.” Among other things, it enumerates 10 things an older man must never say to a younger woman, including “I’m dying,” “I can’t hear what you’re saying,” “How many fingers are you holding up?” and “What wings are those beating at the window?”And it ends with the poignant and moving
There is no
Substitute for or parallel to love, which gives to the body
What religion gives to the soul, and philosophy to the brain,
Then shares it among them all. It is a serious matter. Without it, we seem only half alive.
I wish I could quote the whole of the long “Art of Poetry,” the collection’s second great poem. Before releasing a poem to the world, Koch wrote, a poet should ask: “1) Is it astonishing? / Am I pleased each time I read it? Does it say something I was unaware of / Before I sat down to write it? And 2) Do I stand up from it a better man / Or wiser, or both? Or can the two not be separated? … 10) Would I be happy to go to Heaven with this pinned on to my / Angelic jacket as an entrance show? Oh, would I?”
Koch’s sense of delight and wacky sense of humor shine throughout his oeuvre – even in his final collection, “Possible Worlds,” partly composed when he was being treated for the leukemia that killed him. But as he matured, he developed a touching and tender lyricism and a philosophical depth. These qualities came through vividly in his late poems, written when he was facing the knowledge of his imminent death. In the first poem of “Possible Worlds,” “Bel Canto,” these qualities are on display – along with his mastery of his craft. Here he thumbs his nose at fate and any sense that things are predetermined by asking, “what about the language / That teases me each morning with its leanings / Toward the Unprogrammed Altitudes beyond its meanings?” “Bel Canto” is a poem of gratitude for a full life:
It is as if life stared at me
And kissed my lips and left it as a signature.
Thank you for that, and thank you for preparing me
For love itself, and friendship its co-agent. Thank you for being this, and for its inspiration.
One can only admire the courage and wit with which his faced death, as in “Proverb”:
Les morts vont vite, the dead go fast, the next day absent!
Et les vivants sont dingues, the living are haywire.
Except for a few who grieve, life rapidly readjusts itself … The dead go quickly
Not knowing why they go or where they go. To die is human, to come back divine.
The poetry of Kenneth Koch is filled with riches, and with the sense of how fleeting,how funny,and how sad life can be. But it is also filled with the sense of the miraculous in quotidian reality, and celebrates the utter joy that can attend us as we pass through life.
Mr. Volkmer, the deputy treasurer of the village of Southampton, writes regularly about books and music for the Southampton Press.