On St. Patrick’s Day, The New School and Library of America put on “Kenneth Koch at 100: A Celebration.” The program featured thirteen speakers, all but one of whom knew Koch—that playful and continuously surprising leprechaun of American poetry—rather well. Our fearless leader at this website, David Lehman, wasn’t able to be there; however, he was remembered in the welcoming remarks.
I never met KK, but I’d loved the poems of his I’d begun to read in the 1970s and remain enthralled by his two books on teaching children to write poetry, books that encouraged the founding of Poets in the Schools programs around the world. Like Arlene Croce (who quoted the following opening lines in one of her New Yorker columns) I also loved his poem to the New York City Ballet:
“Oh dancers of New York, arranged by Balanchine,
You are more beautiful than groves of evergreen!
You have aesthetic distance, like the blue-white sea
Outside the porthole--Agon or Symphony in C!”
In the event, I went to The New School to learn something about the poet, and I did learn about him from two sources: the speakers and the anthology of photos of him, which played continuously on a screen above the stage.
From the speakers:
-- He was as adept at improvisation as in formal writing, and his oeuvre includes many plays—embodying his high concept of “play” as a major principle of artmaking. Furthermore, as in his lamentation to Marina, he could be playfully sorrowful. He was funny (Tony Towle), but his idea of play went beyond the comic. It was a philosophical idea of how the universe worked.
-- "He was high avant-garde, yeah. It was unchecked modernism.” (Alex Katz, appearing by way of a video statement)
-- He was an avid tennis and ping-pong player. His papers are in the Berg Collection of The New York Public Library. (Jordan Davis)
-- Whatever the “New York School” of poetry was—spiritual institution grounded in Greenwich Village or a roving band of bards associated with The New School and Columbia plus a few smaller storefronts and bars--KK belonged to it. Some of his fellow travellers were Ron Padgett, Jane Freilicher, David Shapiro, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, Jim Dine (“We had the same rabbi, same temple, same summer camp”), Jim Jarmusch, and, of course, Frank O’Hara. (Passim)
-- KK once, at a party, had a “pissing contest” with Leonard Bernstein about Shakespeare. (Jim Dine) He was “the Pied Piper of joy and pleasure, sensuality and fresh air,” and, during the ‘50s, he spent five days a week in psychoanalysis, which may or may not have have helped him to pipe it all. He was also a “charismatic teacher,” which is why Phillip Lopate refused to take KK’s popular courses at Columbia while, on his own, accruing neuroscientific detail concerning KK’s thoughts and motivations in the writing of prose fiction. (Phillip Lopate)
-- The legendary performer; editor of The Paris Review; agent; bittersweet muse to other legends; red-headed goddess of New York lit who still looks like a million; Maplewood, New Jersey native; and the only woman on the KK Celebration line-up, Maxine Groffsky, intersected with KK throughout many of her careers, including as a “real client” whom she represented--“15 %”—and whom she immortalized as the inventor of “Dog Baseball.” (Maxine Groffsky)
From the photos:
Has anyone ever taken so many pictures, in so many decades of life, that show the subject broadly smiling as KK took? He’s smiling next to John Ashbery and with Allen Ginsberg (who once declared that, next to KK’s fandom, he—the Bard of the Beats—had fallen into obscurity). He’s smiling while shaking the hand of the mayor: Koch on Koch. He’s grinning while being escorted (under arrest?) by an armed guard down stairs that look like some at Columbia. Yet one portrait photo, by Wren de Antonio (daughter of the documentarian Emile de Antonio and the third of his six wives), offered a unique glimpse of personal depth. From his Bob Dylan-hair style and leather jacket, it seems to have been taken in the ‘60s. KK is smiling, but not all the way, and his eyes look as if they come from another level of being, where tears are always going by. This was, by my lights, the handsomest photo of KK in the group—the one that offered up an individual I could believe wrote not only “Sleeping with Women” and “The Pleasures of Peace” but also both “Circus” poems (John Keane) and “Marina,” in which the poet, a quarter century after the fact, reflects on how he threw away his life with a lover in his helpless pursuit of what poets traditionally lust after: fame.
--Mindy Aloff