DJ Spooky and John Ashbery

This just in, via Five Branch Tree (and before that, the Poetry Foundation): DJ Spooky (who takes his name from a character in William S. Burroughs' Nova Trilogy) reads Ashbery's poem, "Paradoxes and Oxymorons" in this short clip:

Kenneth Koch Audio and Video

There's not a whole lot of Kenneth Koch audio available on the web (though seeking out recordings from his estate to expand his PennSound author page is a project I'd like to pursue at some point in the future). For now, if you visit his page, you'll find a single reading from a little over a decade ago. Practically the entire reading is dedicated to micro-dramas from his One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays, or songs from the plays, but he does read a lengthy excerpt from "My Olivetti Speaks" (an Olivetti is a brand of typewriter, by the way; c.f. Ron Padgett's "Olivetti Lettera"), and his reading of "One Train May Hide Another" is breathtaking:

• from My Olivetti Speaks (10:14)
• One Train (5:57)

On UbuWeb, there's a single poem taken from the Giorno Poetry Systems album, Biting off the Tongue of a Corpse, and a hilarious, spontaneously composed collaboration with Allen Ginsberg from the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church on the Bowery:

• Spring (1:33)
• Popeye and William Blake Fight to the Death (with Allen Ginsberg) (7:52)

Again, here's a link to the Poetry Foundation's podcast, "The Poetry Assassination of Kenneth Koch":

• The Poetry Assassination of Kenneth Koch (10:15)

If you follow the link below, you can download a reading Koch did at the Naropa Institute in 1981. and a lecture from 1979 in which he discusses his writing life and his friendships with Ashbery and O'Hara:

• Kenneth Koch reading, June 1981
• Kenneth Koch lecture, June 1979

Finally, here's a short and very new video in which David Lehman and Mitch Sisskind discuss Kenneth Koch as a teacher:

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)
  

Schedule Update

l-r: James Schuyler, John Ashbery & Kenneth Koch (1956)

I hope you all enjoyed our snow day, and that you're all safe and warm with power and without dented automobiles. I've been divided as to how we should proceed, but I think the best course of action is to hold over Frank O'Hara for another day, even as we start to move into our unit on Kenneth Koch, so please come prepared to discuss his work — I think that a good starting point will be extending our discussion of "Ode to Joy" into an examination of "A Step Away From Them" and "The Day Lady Died," and we can discuss any other poems you're interested in as well. Because I think that fruitful discussion is more important than taking a quiz at this point, I'm canceling the O'Hara quiz, and we'll have a quiz on Kenneth Koch's work next week. To get a jump on Koch, however, please start on this first batch of poems for tomorrow's class:

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)
• Taking a Walk with You (143)

We'll have to see if and how we'll adjust the schedule to make up for this missing class. If necessary, we can cut the class that was supposed to follow the midterm, during which we'd look at a few poems by James Schuyler and a small sample of Second Generation poets we won't be covering this quarter. It also might be possible that we'll need to cut one of the poets from the end of the quarter (I'm leaning towards Anne Waldman at this moment), and if so, we'll still spend a day looking at a few poems from her, and you'll be able to write about her for your final essay, so if you've already bought the book, it won't go to waste (however, please note that I haven't yet made the decision to cut anyone).

Weather (Non-)Update

It looks like we'll have to wait until the morning to see whether UC will be open or closed, and I'll defer to the powers that be's judgment in that regard (though looking at the forecast, I can't imagine them thinking it'll be safe to have thousands of students commuting on icy roads and unplowed side-streets). Stay tuned to local TV, or wait for that e-mail from Greg Hand, and I'll either see you tomorrow, or on Friday.

A number of you have e-mailed about the fate of the quiz, and I'd imagine that if we have class, there will be a substantial number of students who won't be there, so I'm going to postpone the quiz until Friday, and it will cover both O'Hara and Koch. The Koch readings will be coming shortly, and I'll try to track down that article about Koch potentially forging "A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island" as well.

Two More O'Hara Readings

Sorry for the delay in posting this — we've been having internet issues on and off all weekend (any other Time Warner customers dealing with this?). Here are two additional readings by Frank O'Hara. The first was recorded September 25, 1964 at SUNY Buffalo, and to my knowledge, is the best known existing reading by the late poet.

1. Mary Desti's Ass (starts in the middle) (1:24): MP3
2. Ave Maria (1:27): MP3
3. Naphtha (1:38): MP3
4. Metaphysical Poem (0:58): MP3
5. Poem ("Lana Turner has collapsed!") (0:42): MP3
6. Poem en Forme de Saw (2:08): MP3
7. Two Tragic Poems (1:42): MP3
8. Fantasy (1:33): MP3
9. Blue Territory (1:56): MP3
10. Lawrence (0:55): MP3
11. Ode to Michael Goldberg('s Birth and Other Births) (10:22): MP3
12. Political Poem on a Last Line of Pasternak (1:23): MP3
13. Poem ("Hoopla! Ya! Ya! Ya!") (0:50): MP3
14. Poem V (F) W (1:08): MP3
15. Old Copies of Life Magazine (0:59): MP3
16. Louise (1:10): MP3
17. Poem ("I don't know if I get what D.H. Lawrence is driving at") (1:40): MP3


Here's a second short recording, taken from the PBS special Poetry: USA (from which several of the videos previously posted came from), in which O'Hara reads and discusses his work:

• complete recording (14:41): MP3

O'Hara Audio and Video

Because recordings of Frank O'Hara are fairly scarce, I'm consolidating links to a number of different recordings under this one thread.

First, there's Frank O'Hara.org's Audio Page, where you can listen to the poet read a number of his poems, along with other readers' interpretations, and a few discussions of his life and work.

UbuWeb's Frank O'Hara Page showcases a handful of recordings taken from various albums that were all part of Giorno Poetry Systems Dial-a-Poem series (a dozen records released between the early 70s and mid 80s which served as mixtapes, of sorts, for America's poetic avant-garde).

Here's a rare video of O'Hara reading "Having a Coke with You," from the WNET program USA: Poetry. The footage was shot in March 1966, and aired in September of the same year, a few months after O'Hara's tragic death.



You can see two more videos from the program on the Frank O'Hara.org Video Page.

Finally, the AMC series Mad Men gave O'Hara's popularity a little boost recently, when they featured the poet, and his collection, Meditations in an Emergency in an episode. Here's a YouTube fan video featuring a reading of the poem "Mayakovsky" taken from the show, and below, the doctored version of the book's cover the show's set design department came up with (right) along with the original version (left):





Before the week's out, I'll try to track down and post recordings of O'Hara's early 60's reading at SUNY Buffalo, which, to my knowledge, is the only full reading on tape.