Kenneth Koch

Kenneth Koch ( ; February 27, 1925 – July 6, 2002) was an American poet, playwright, and professor, active from the 1950s until his death at age 77. He was a prominent poet of the New York School of poetry. This was 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. Comical, narrative, punning and exuberant are adjectives that have been associated with his work.

Life

Koch (pronounced coke 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 WWII as a U.S. Army infantryman in the Philippines.

After his service, he attended Harvard University, where he met future New York School poet John Ashbery. After graduating from Harvard in 1948 and moving to New York City, Koch studied for and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University.

In 1951, he met his first wife, Janice Elwood, at UC 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 1982, Katherine married poet Mark Statman, one of Koch's former students). In 1959, he joined the faculty in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia where he would teach for over forty years. 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:

He mixed word usage with various levels of imagery; He set two contrasting tones next to each other, simplicity and silliness at the same time; He spoke to everything, animate and inanimate objects; 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:

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)

Theater

Koch collaborated with the composer Ned Rorem on an opera, Bertha, which received its premier in 1973. His short play, George Washington Crossing the Delaware, was produced in 1962. Numerous others of his plays have been produced.

Teaching

After teaching at the New School, beginning in 1959, Koch taught poetry at Columbia University, where he would remain as a tenured professor for 40 years. His exuberant, 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, made his courses extremely popular

In 1977 he published I Never Told Anybody: Teaching Poetry Writing in a Nursing Home. In it, Koch describes the program he developed to teach poetry in nursing homes and some of the poems that resulted from it. A review of Koch's program in The British Journal of Social Work praised its results and advocated the adoption of similar efforts in the UK.

Selected works Poems (1953) Ko: or, A Season on Earth (1959) Permanently (1961) Thank You and Other Poems (1962) Bertha, & other plays (1966) Poems from 1952 and 1953 (1968) The Pleasures of Peace and Other Poems (1969) Sleeping with Women (1969) When the Sun Tries to Go On (1969) The Art of Love (1975) The Duplications (1977) The Burning Mystery of Anna in 1951 (1979) From the Air (1979) Days and Nights (1982) On the Edge (1986) Seasons on Earth (1987) On the Great Atlantic Rainway: Selected Poems 1950–1988 (1994) One Train (1994) Straits (1998) New Addresses (2000) A Possible World (2002)