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Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (New Series) Part Four: Mitch Sisskind [by Angela Ball]

 

Two Poems After Koch


1.

If you want to write a love poem don’t say
Your girlfriend smells like a new car but
Maybe you could say, ‘I love you like I love
‘The smell of a new car that portends many
‘Pleasurable and interesting possibilities
‘Whether it’s a long drive to Arizona or
‘A quick spin to the seashore on a Sunday
‘I will always keep your top down because
‘You are my beautiful convertible, Julia,
‘Built for comfort and built for speed.’
I used the name Julia because Robert Herrick
In the 17th Century was great at this stuff
And he had a poem called ‘Upon Julia’s Clothes.’
Ha! Upon Julia’s Clothes! That’s so terrific!


2.

If I could push a button and write
A new Kenneth Koch poem
I would push a button and write
That I could push a button and
We are hitchhiking again near
Vallauris and the sky is cloudy
But who cares since we’re young
And kind of silly and when rain falls
We keep on skylarking as they said
In the army until we knock it off
As they also said in the army and
We make love and write poems
And if we get old I push the button
Again a hundred thousand times.

                                                      -Mitch Sisskind

I was born and raised in Chicago, then attended Columbia University where I met Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, plus other aspiring writers like myself. Subsequently I had various employments including diamond appraiser, night desk clerk, and high school football coach. I've done two books of short fiction: Visitations (1984) and Dog Man Stories (1993) and have more recently concentrated on poetry in Do Not Be a Gentleman When You Say Goodnight (2016) and Collected Poems 2005 - 2020. I live in Los Angeles with my wife and two daughters. 

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The New York School Diaspora (New Series) Part Four: Mitch Sisskind

Mitch Sisskind’s revelatory “Two Poems After Koch” emphasizes aspects of Kenneth’s poetic character that aren’t often discussed: his unabashed love of immediate gratification combined with a kind of courtliness and a fanatic’s love of repetition. The title of his ground-breaking book on teaching poetry to children, Wishes, Lies, and Dreams, is a rather good summation of Koch’s own poetry oeuvre.

The first poem of the two leaps from the gate teaching, with Koch’s own bravura elán: “If you want to write a love poem don’t say / Your girlfriend smells like a new car but. . .”  The suggestion that follows hilariously combines the literal and metaphorical: “I will always keep your top down because / You are my beautiful convertible, Julia, / Built for comfort and built for speed.” These lines both exemplify and spoof a famous male impulse: to treat women as objects, to ‘toy’ with them. They remind us of how Koch, no less than the other three preeminent poets of the New York School, was unabashedly himself. It seems to me that Frank O’Hara, flaneur, was a public poet of impulse; Koch more often privately impulsive. As examples I’ll quote O’Hara’s rallying cry to Lana Turner, “We love you, get up!” and Koch’s more reflective but still urgent, “Did you ever glance into a bottle of sparkling pop?” from his important “Fresh Air.”

Sisskind himself winks at the camera with the following lines:

     I used the name Julia because Robert Herrick

     In the 17th Century was great at this stuff

     And he had a poem called ‘Upon Julia’s Clothes.’

     Ha! Upon Julia’s Clothes! That’s so terrific!

Sisskind’s willingness to express unvarnished enthusiasm in a sophisticated context might be a distinguishing feature of his work. I think his ‘That’s so terrific!” accesses the childlike joy we feel at poetic surprise. It’s even better than a clown popping from a music box at a crank of its handle. And “great at this stuff”  is an expressive and radically simple evocation of poetic mastery.

Maybe above I should have said not “immediate gratification” but “immediate enthusiasm.”

We are given something we didn’t even know we wanted till we did.

Sisskind’s second homage to Kenneth Koch expresses an impulse made famous by behavioral psychology. He wittily turns a desire he has already manifested into an infinite regress:

     If I could push a button and write

     A new Kenneth Koch poem

     I would push a button and write

     That I could push a button and

Then, with a Kochian lack of preamble, he transports us to the romantic Vallauris, one-time Alpine Riviera hang-out of Pablo Picasso, and the kind of youthful devil-may-careness Koch was fond of invoking in poems like “The Circus”:

     But who cares since we’re young

     And kind of silly and when rain falls

     We keep on skylarking as they said

It’s no accident that an early meaning of the word “silly” was “pious” or “holy.” There is something saintly about the openness to experience here expressed.  I’ve always loved the moment in “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” when Auden says to him, “You were silly like us.” Plus “skylarking” slyly alludes to one of Koch’s foundational influences, Percy Bysshe Shelly, author of “To a Skylark.”

     In the army until we knock it off

     As they also said in the army and

     We make love and write poems

      And if we get old I push the button

     Again a hundred thousand times.

“Knock it off,” that blunt, dismissive idiom, contrasts beautifully with “skylarking.” And anything said in the army is going to go right to the point. As does this poem, summing things up for all of us, but Koch and Sisskind in special, “We make love and write poems, / And if we get old I push the button / Again a hundred thousand times.”

I think it’s safe to say that Kenneth Koch is the only person who would title a book One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays. The plays fairly burst from their slim volume. For Koch, repetition did not tarnish but magnified the beauty of experience. Advising graduate teaching assistants during a long-ago visit to the school I teach in, Koch suggested they ask students to re-start their essays, beginning with the last paragraph. The poem’s final gesture takes in both the despair of age and its inexhaustible hopefulness, present for us to enjoy in the poems of Kenneth Koch and in these two immensely celebratory poems by Mitch Sisskind.-Angela Ball

 


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I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark


from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman

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