Starting Kenneth Koch Properly

We'll soon be leaving Frank O'Hara behind and move on to the third core member of the New York School's First Generation, Cincinnati-born-and-raised Kenneth Koch. Koch actually completed a year of classes at UC before enlisting to serve during World War II, having completed high school a year early. He'd eventually matriculate to Harvard (where he'd meet Ashbery and O'Hara) then Columbia, where he earned his doctorate. After a brief stint teaching at the New School, Koch returned to Columbia, where he'd teach for more than forty years, until his death in 2002.

If Frank O'Hara was the social center of New York's poets (as Allen Ginsberg acknowledged in his tribute to the late poet, "City Midnight Junk Strains"), and Ashbery took the greatest risks, challenging his peers to match his daring experiments, Koch clearly put the "school" in the New York School. As an innovative professor, whose poetry classes served as the foundation of the contemporary poetry workshop, he taught a great number of the Second Generation poets, and through his own poetry, as well as a number of books on poetry pedagogy, he provided numerous models and formulas for unlocking one's creative potential.

I'd like you to start off by reading David Lehman's chapter, "Kenneth Koch: the Pleasures of Peace" in The Last Avant-Garde (203), and for a different perspective on the poet, check out Melanie Rehak's profile from the Nation, "Dr. Fun." Another wonderful resource is the Poetry Foundation's podcast, "The Poetry Assassination of Kenneth Koch," which describes a particularly interesting episode from the poet's life. If you're looking for a little more background information, here are a few more links:

• a 1993 interview with David Kennedy
• Jacket's Koch Tribute from 2001, which editor John Tranter assembled after Koch's leukemia diagnosis. Fortunately, Koch was able to read and enjoy the issue before his death
• David Lehman's obituary from the Columbia College magazine

In terms of the schedule, I'd like to take advantage of the extra day you've had to keep ahead of things. At the end of next week, we can reevaluate where we stand in terms of Koch and the whole first generation, before the midterm exam.

Friday, January 30th:

from Thank You and Other Poems (1962)

• To You (80)
• In Love With You (85)
• The Circus (97)
• The History of Jazz (102)
• Collected Poems (105)
• Fresh Air (122)
• You Were Wearing (133)
• Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams (135) (See William Carlos Williams' "This is Just to Say")
  
• Taking a Walk with You (143)

Monday, February 2nd:

from The New American Poetry: 1945-1960

• Mending Sump (click here) (see Robert Frost's "Mending Wall")
  

from The Pleasures of Peace (1969)

• Sleeping with Women (165)
• We Sailed the Indian Ocean for a Dime (174)
• A Poem of the Forty-Eight States (183)
  
• The Pleasures of Peace (228)

from The Art of Love (1975)

• The Circus (241)
• The Magic of Numbers (245)

from The Burning Mystery of Anna in 1951 (1979)

• Our Hearts (301)
• Fate (307)
• The Boiling Water (330)

Wednesday, February 4th:

from Days and Nights (1982)

• In Bed (371)
• Girl and Baby Florist Sidewalk Pram Nineteen Seventy Something (389)
  
• Days and Nights (400)

from One Train (1994)

• One Train May Hide Another (441)
• Passing Time in Skansen (443)
• Energy in Sweden (444)
• Poems by Ships at Sea (476)

from Straits (1998)

• The Human Sacrament (511)
• Vouz Êtes Plus Beaux que Vous ne Pensiez (522)
• My Olivetti Speaks (534)

Friday, February 6th:

from New Addresses (2000)

• To Life (592)
• To the Ohio (593)
• To Carelessness (599)
• To World War Two (601)
• To Jewishness (611)
• To My Old Addresses (628)
• To the Past (650)
• To Various Persons Talked to All at Once (653)
• To Old Age (656)

from A Possible World (2002)

• Zones (677)
• The Moor Not Taken (720)
• Thor Not Taken (721)