Giving Up Solemnity For Lent -- on Kenneth Koch [by Angela Ball]

Possibility is the enemy of the solemn.  Solemnity is a drying agent, a fixative.  It says that we should not only own the tradition we inherit, but wash and wax it and shampoo its carpet.  The New York School of poets saw and sees such veneration as beside the point.  Humor is in our blood, and we should let it circulate!

The kind of  transcendence (through mediation and/or drugs and/or study of Asian religious models) aspired to by Beats has been eschewed by the NYS.  One thinks of Wallace Stevens’ rejection of “the dividing blue.” Once we can live horizontally--on the surface of the earth instead of escaping it—multivalent connections grow.

 We may live in the city, but we should also resist it.  What is the city without the country?  Critics including Timothy Gray have pointed out that urban poets have traditionally used the pastoral as foil and as escape from their daily identities. Even socialites want to be milkmaids once in a way, as the businessman may wish to be a fishpond.

Each poem is, in a way, sui generis.  It shoulders its way into view, throwing off or evading all that is not-poem, attracting all that is.  All possible forms, all possible dictions are available to it, withal.

 Freedom of form provides its own change of scene.  Kenneth Koch emulating Byron’s terza rima (but in his own way—often hilariously rhyming banalities), Frank O’Hara writing quasi-Keatsean odes, John Ashbery creating a pastoral cartoon sestina—all have one thing in common: pleasure, both comic and sublime.  We laugh the tops of our heads off.

  (DOGS IN BED)  "In the dog bed / I cannot sleep" - Kenneth Koch, "In Bed"

I first read Kenneth Koch’s “You Were Wearing” in 1971.  It was included in Mark Strand’s wonderful anthology, The Contemporary American Poets: American Poetry Since 1940.  As others, including Billy Collins, have reported, it was a revelation to me.  It begins, as you will recall: “You were wearing your Edgar Allan Poe printed cotton blouse.” / In each divided up square of the blouse was a picture of Edgar Allan Poe.”  Though it didn’t occur to me at the time, Koch was a prophet of the Postmodern.  He understood the addition of meaning to surface, and the commodification of same, before it had truly gotten underway.  (I think that the names dropped in “You Were Wearing” also parody the Greek and Roman mythology pasted onto the solemn poems of the  university quarterlies and reviews of the day—intellectual currency.)  Indeed, the “printed cotton blouse” of the first line is fashion-speak—the talk that sells the clothes that make us. Both Roland Barthes (in Mythologies) and Walker Percy (in Message in a Bottle) portray the Postmodern distancing of experience—the gradual replacement of the genuine, whatever that is, with nostalgic facsimile, until we become souvenirs of ourselves.  As Koch’s poem goes on to follow its “you” and “I” through various activities, the products grow more three-dimensional.  They sit on the “Abraham Lincoln swing”: “You sat on the eyes, mouth, and beard part, and I sat on the knees.” Then, in a final burst of genius, the poem shows us a brand that has broken through to the world at large, comically threatening, crazily opposing the “George Washington, Father of His Country, shoes” with the sovereignty of insanity: “In the yard across the street we saw a snowman holding a garbage can lid smashed into a likeness of the mad English king, George the Third.”

Susan Elliot, graduate poet, has long been a fan of Wilfred Owen and other poets of WWI.

Of Kenneth Koch, her reading journal says this:

Reading “To World War Two” was an experience that indeed reminded me of the trench poets. Koch balances a delicate tension between the ever-presence of death and the possibility of hanging on long enough to have a life after the war is over. Koch writes, “I could write poetry / Fall in love / And have a daughter / And think / About these things / From a great distance / If I survived” (Selected Poems 158). Each of these possible future events gets its own line, giving each one significant weight and showing the reader how prominent these things are the in the mind of the author. The most powerful line in this sequence is, of course, the last one I quoted: “If I survived”. Each of the previous lines hinges on this one. 

And another graduate poet, Allison Campbell, speaks of the mixed emotions she finds in Koch:

 “Do not be defeated by the / Feeling that there is too much for you to know. That / Is a myth of the oppressor. You are / Capable of understanding life. And it is yours alone / And only this time.” -from “Some General Instructions”

The optimism Koch has in these lines, seems infused. But somehow infused in a negative sense. Like he is giving himself a shot in the arm as he writes it, to be able to keep writing it. Maybe I read him this way because I come when the “days of Allegory are over. The Days of Irony are here.” But I read so many of his poems as nostalgic, and therefore inherently melancholy, even when they are not being at all directly depressive.

Of course, with his two versions of “The Circus” it becomes easy to read him this way. But it’s more than those two poems. There is something of a covert, but consistent, tone in Koch, that is not quite as happy as it seems (or might like to be?). As if, he is writing from a place he wishes he were, rather than where he is -- even when his general instructions are to go, “You cannot come back until these lessons are learned”. He has learned them. He knows them and they are right and for some reason he is still sadden by them (or our chance at them?).

He is not as elusive as Ashbery and not as tangibly present as O’Hara. He seems to float between these extremes and at times his lines seem homeless.  - Allison Campbell

I think that Koch’s greatest formal innovation is his renovation of the apostrophe—a poem’s direct address to a power outside or beyond it, as in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Apostrophe to Silence.” In poems like “To ‘Yes’” Koch doesn’t remain apart, but enters the abstraction, to populate it with his own thoughts, which become ours. How does he do this?  Playfully, with many questions, and a complete lack of certainty.  Here is the end of his address to “Yes”:  “I love your development / From the answer to a simple query to a state of peace / That has the world by the throat.  Am I lying?  Yes. / Are you smiling?  Yes.  I’ll follow you, yes?  No reply.”

 -- Angela Ball

Comments

[DL]

Agreed that the apostrophe, in "New Addresses," is a major advance for Kenneth -- and especially wonderful that it came so late in his career. He was always haunted by the fear that his best work was collected in "Thank You" (1962) but he crafted at least three new styles, of which the apostrophe, because of its autobiographical dimension, seems the most exhilarating. Nice analysis, Angela.

[Mark Statman]

The apostrophes seem a natural follow to the introspection that starts in The Art of Love, especially given the second "Circus." I don't remember Kenneth being haunted by the fears of everything being in Thank You --though he did often wonder why his later readings were often greeted with laughter when he wasn't being funny. It was just expected that he would be. That Kenneth gives us a more nuanced emotional voice in the last several decades of his life is one of the joys of his poetry.
MS