Kenneth Koch

Kenneth Koch (1925-2002). Courtesy Poets & Writers.

Kenneth Jay Koch (February 27, 1925 - July 6, 2002) was an American poet, playwright, and academic.

Life

Youth and education

Koch (pronounced coke) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Stuart Koch, who owned a furniture store, and Lillian Koch, who wrote amateur literary reviews. He began writing poetry at an early age, discovering the work of Shelley and Keats in his teenage years. At the age of 18, he served in World War II as a U.S. Army infantryman in the Philippines.

After his Army service, he attended Harvard University, where he met future New York School poet John Ashbery. He graduated from Harvard in 1948, and moved to New York City, where he studied for and earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Career

In 1951 Knott met Janice Elwood, at University of California, Berkeley; they married in 1954, and lived in France and Italy for over a year. Their daughter, Katherine, was born in Rome in 1955.

In 1959 Knott joined the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He he taught classes at Columbia for over 40 years.

In 1962, Koch was writer in residence at the New York City Writer's Conference at Wagner College.

The 1960s saw his first published books of poetry, but his poetry did not garner wider popular acclaim until the 1970s with his book The Art of Love: Poems (1975). He continued writing poetry and releasing books of poetry up until his death.

In 1970, Koch released a pioneering book in poetry education, Wishes, Lies and Dreams: Teaching children To write poetry. Over the next 30 years, he followed this book with other books and anthologies on poetry education tailored to teaching poetry appreciation and composition to children, adults, and the elderly.

Koch had a brush with the infamous anti-art affinity group Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers in early January 1968. During a poetry reading at St. Mark's Church, a member of the group walked in and pointed a handgun at the podium, shouting "Koch!" before firing one blank round. The poet regained his composure and said to the "shooter," "Grow up."

Koch wrote hundreds of avant-garde plays over the course of his 50 year career, highlighted by drama collections like 1000 Avant-Garde Plays (1988), which only contains 116 plays, many of them only one scene or a few minutes in length. His prose work is highlighted by The Red Robins (1975), a sprawling novel about a group of fighter pilots flying for personal freedom under the leadership of Santa Claus. He also published a book of short stories, Hotel Lambosa (1988), loosely based on and inspired by his world travels. He also produced a libretto, and several of his poems have been set to music by composers.

Koch taught poetry at Columbia University, where his classes were popular. His wild humor and intense teaching style, often punctuated by unusual physicality (standing on a table to shout lines by Walt Whitman) and outbursts of vocal performance often drawn from Italian opera, drew non-English majors and alumni. Some of the spirit of these lectures is contained in his final book on poetry education, Making Your Own Days (1998). His students included poets Ron Padgett, David Shapiro, Alan Feldman, David Lehman, Jordan Davis, Jessy Randall, David Baratier, Loren Goodman, and Carson Cistulli.

His poems were translated in German by the poet Nicolas Born in 1973 for the renowned "red-frame-series" of the Rowohlt Verlag.

Janice Koch died in 1981. Koch married Karen Culler in 1994.

He died from a year-long battle with leukemia in 2002.

Writing

Koch was a prominent poet of the New York School of poetry, a loose group of poets including Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery that eschewed contemporary introspective poetry in favor of an exuberant, cosmopolitan style that drew major inspiration from travel, painting, and music.

Koch asked in his poem "Fresh Air" (1956) why poets were writing about dull subjects with dull forms. Modern poetry was solemn, boring, and uneventful. Koch described poems “Written by the men with their eyes on the myth / And the missus and the midterms…” He attacked the idea that poetry should be in any way stale.

Koch wrote of how:

     The Waste Land gave the time’s most accurate data,
     It seemed, and Eliot was the Great Dictator
     Of literature. One hardly dared to wink
     Or fool around in any way in poems,
     And critics poured out awful jereboams
     To irony, ambiguity, and tension –
     And other things I do not wish to mention.
                    (Excerpt from ‘'Seasons on Earth',’ 1987)

Though not against T.S. Eliot, Koch opposed the idea that in order to write poetry one had to be depressed or think that the world is a terrible place. His ideas were developed with close friends Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, along with painters Jane Freilicher and Larry Rivers, among others.

He once remarked that “Maybe you can almost characterize the poetry of the New York School as having as one of its main subjects the fullness and richness of life and the richness of possibility and excitement and happiness.” In his poem The Art of Poetry (1975) Koch offered guidelines to writing good poetry. Among his 10 suggestions are “1) Is it astonishing?” and “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 once remarked that “Children have a natural talent for writing poetry and anyone who teaches them should know that.” In his poems:

1. He mixed word usage with various levels of imagery;
2. He set 2 contrasting tones next to each other, simplicity and silliness at the same time;
3. He spoke to everything, animate and inanimate objects;
4. He used parody of other poets to express his own views, both serious and comic.

Koch was labeled by some as just a comedic poet. He acknowledged this in an interview and offered his comments:

I don’t think the nature of my poetry is satirical or even ironic, I think it's essentially lyrical.... The comic element is just something that it seems to me enables me to be lyrical in the same way – not to compare myself qualitatively to these great writers – but in the same way that it enables Byron to write his best poetry and certainly Aristophanes and certain others too.

He gives a picture of this in “To Kidding Around,” where the joys of being a joker are proclaimed:

     To be rid of troubles
     Of one person by turning into
     Someone else, moving and jolting
     As if nothing mattered but today
     In fact nothing
     But this precise moment...
               (Excerpt from "To Kidding Around," 2000)

Recognition

While a student at Harvard, Koch won the prestigious Glascock Prize in 1948.

Koch won the 1995 Bollingen Prize for One Train (1994) and On The Great Atlantic Rainway: Selected poems, 1950-1988 (1994), and the Phi Beta Kappa Poetry Award for New Addresses (2000).

He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996.

Publications

Poetry

• Poems. New York: Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1953.
• Ko; or, A Season on Earth. New York: Grove, 1959.
• Permanently. New York: Tiber Press, 1960.
• Thank You, and other poems. New York: Grove, 1962.
• Poems from 1952 and 1953 (limited edition). Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1968.
• The Pleasures of Peace, and other poems. New York: Grove, 1969.
• When the Sun Tries to Go On. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1969.
• Sleeping with Women (limited edition). Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1969.
• The Art of Love. New York: Random House, 1975.
• The Duplications. New York: Random House, 1977.
• The Burning Mystery of Anna in 1951. New York: Random House, 1979.
• Days and Nights. New York: Random House, 1982.
• Selected Poems, 1950-1982. New York: Random House, 1985.
• On the Edge. New York: Viking, 1986.
• Seasons on Earth (includes Ko; or, A Season on Earth and The Duplications). New York: Penguin, 1987.
• Selected Poems. Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 1991.
• One Train: Poems. New York: Knopf.
• On the Great Atlantic Rainway: Selected poems, 1950-1988. New York: Knopf, 1994.
• Straits: Poems. New York: Knopf, 1998.
• New Addresses: Poems. New York: Knopf, 2000.
• Sun Out: Selected poems, 1952-1954. New York: Knopf, 2002.
• A Possible World. New York: Knopf, 2002.

Plays

• Bertha, and other plays (includes Bertha, Pericles, George Washington Crossing the Delaware, The Construction of Boston, The Return of Yellowmay, The Revolt of the Giant Animals, The Building of Florence, Angelica, The Merry Stones, The Academic Murders, Easter, The Lost Feed, Mexico, Coil Supreme, The Gold Standard, and Guinevere; or, The Death of the Kangaroo). New York: Grove, 1966.
• A Change of Hearts: Plays, films, and other dramatic works, 1951-1971 ( contains Bertha and Other Plays, A Change of Hearts, The Tinguely Machine Mystery; or, The Love Suicides at Kaluka, The Moon Balloon, E. Kology, Without Kinship, Youth, The Enchantment, and the film scripts Because, The Color Game, Mountains and Electricity, Sheep Harbor, Oval Gold, Moby Dick, L'École normale, The Cemetery, The Scotty Dog, and The Apple). New York: Random House, 1973.
• One Thousand Avant-garde Plays (produced in New York, NY, 1987). New York: Knopf, 1988.
• The Gold Standard: A book of plays. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Fiction

• Interlocking Lives (with Alex Katz). New York: Kulchur Foundation, 1970.
• The Red Robins. New York: Random House, 1975.
• Hotel Lambosa, and other stories, Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1993.

Non-fiction

• Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching children to write poetry. New York: Chelsea House, 1970.
• Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? Teaching great poetry to children. New York: Random House, 1973.
• I Never Told Anybody: Teaching poetry writing in a nursing home. New York: Random House, 1977
  • revised edition. New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1997.
• The Art of Poetry (literary criticism). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996.
• Making Your Own Days: The pleasures of reading and writing poetry. New York: Scribner, 1998.

Edited

• Sleeping on the Wing: An anthology of modern poetry, with essays on reading and writing (edited with Kate Farrell). New York: Random House, 1981.
• Talking to the Sun: An illustrated anthology of poems for young people (edited with Kate Farrell). New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art / Holt, 1985.
• Joseph Ceravolo, The Green Lake Is Awake: Selected poems (edited with others, & author of introduction). Minneaplois, MN: Coffee House Press, 1994.

Except where noted, bibliographic information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

Theatre

Koch collaborated with composer Ned Rorem on an opera, Bertha, which received its premier in 1971. His short play, George Washington Crossing the Delaware, was produced in 1962. Numerous others of his plays have been produced.

• Little Red Riding Hood, produced in New York, 1953.
• Bertha, produced in New York, 1959; produced as an opera (music by Ned Rorem), 1971.
• Pericles, produced off-Broadway, 1960.
• The Election, produced in New York, 1960.
• George Washington Crossing the Delaware, produced off-Broadway, 1962.
• The Construction of Boston, produced off-Broadway, 1962; produced in Boston as an opera (music by Scott Wheeler), 1990-1991.
• Guinevere; or, The Death of the Kangaroo (also see below), produced in New York, 1964.
• The Tinguely Machine Mystery; or, The Love Suicides at Kaluka (also see below), produced in New York, NY, 1965.
• The Moon Balloon, produced in New York's Central Park, 1969.
• The Artist (opera; based on poem of the same title; music by Paul Reif), produced in New York, NY, 1972.
• A Little Light, produced in Amagansett, NY, 1972.
• The Gold Standard, produced in New York, NY, 1975.
• Rooster Redivivus, produced in Garnerville, NY, 1975.
• The Red Robins (based on novel of the same title; produced in New York, NY, 1978, Theatre Arts, 1979.
• The New Diana, produced in New York, NY, 1984.
• A Change of Hearts (opera), produced in New York, NY, 1985.
• Popeye among the Polar Bears, produced in New York, NY, 1986.
• (With composer Marcello Panni) The Banquet, produced in Bremen, Germany, 1998.

Except where noted, information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

Audio / video

"The Pleasures of Peace" by Kenneth Koch

• The Teaching and Writing of Poetry: An interview (with Lois Rosenthal; cassette). Cincinnati, OH: Writer's Voice, 1974.
• Kenneth Koch Visiting Poetics (cassette). Naropa Institute, 1979.
• Kenneth Koch: Reading his poems (cassette). New Rochelle, NY: Spoken Arts, [1980?]
• Wishes, Lies, and Dreams (cassette). New Rochelle, NY: Spoken Arts, 1987.
• Kenneth Koch (CD). New York: Academy of American Poets, 1994.

Except where noted, information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• New York School poets
• List of U.S. poets
• List of English-language playwrights

References

• Benfey, Christopher. "Wise Guy." The New Republic 13 Mar. 1995: 39-42. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Texas a&M University, College Station, Tx. 25 Oct. 2006. Keyword: Kenneth Koch.
• Block, Avital and Umansky, Lauri. "Impossible to Hold: Women and Culture in the 1960s." New York: NYU Press, 2005.
• Kenneth Koch. Academy of American Poets. 21 Sept. 2006[1].
• Koch, Kenneth. Interview with David Kennedy. 5 Aug. 1993. 21 Sept. 2006[2]
• Koch, Kenneth. Interview with John Stoehr. City Beat. 17 May 2001. 21 Sept. 2006http://www.citybeat.com/2001-05-17]
• Koch, Kenneth. The Art of Poetry. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan P, 1996.
• Merrin, Jeredith. "The Poetry Man." The Southern Review: 403-409. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Texas a&M University, College Station, Tx. 3 Oct. 2006. Keyword: Kenneth Koch.
• Pettingell, Phoebe. "The Power of Laughter." The New Leader May-June 2000: 39-41. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Texas a&M University, College Station, Tx. 3 Oct. 2006. Keyword: Kenneth Koch
• Rehak, Melanie. "Dr. Fun." The Nation (2006): 28-32. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Texas a&M University, College Station, Tx. 3 Oct. 2006. Koch.
• Salter, Mary J., Margaret Ferguson, and Jon Stallworthy. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 5th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2005.

External links

Poems

• "To Stammering" at Poetry 180
• Kenneth Koch profile & 3 poems at the Academy of American Poets.
• Kenneth Koch 1925- 2002 at the Poetry Foundation.
• Kenneth Koch biography & poems at American Poems
• Kenneth Koch at PoemHunter (20 poems)

Prose

• "The Language of Poetry" (excerpt)

Audio

• Kenneth Koch at YouTube

Books

• Kenneth Koch at Amazon.com

About

• Kenneth Koch at NNDB
• "Kenneth Koch, 77, Poet of New York School" obituary, New York Times
• KennethKoch.org Official website.
• An interview with Kenneth Koch (1993)
• Review of The Language of Poetry, New York Review of Books.