Kenneth Koch, Poet Of New York School, 77
DGH
Kenneth Koch, a poet of the New York School whose work combined the
sardonic wit of a borscht-belt comic, the erotic whimsy of a Surrealist
painter and the gritty wisdom of a scared young soldier, died July 6,
2002, after a long battle with leukemia at his home in Manhattan, New
York, at the age of 77.
Mr. Koch's literary career spanned more than 50 years and resulted in
the publication of at least 30 volumes of poetry and plays whose
linguistic exuberance and experimental zest were bested only by their
omnivorous subject matter. He wrote elegies, parodies, Dadaist dramas
and fragmented shards of loosely structured verse on a palette of topics
that ranged from his father's furniture business in southern Ohio to
Japanese baseball stars to the pleasures of eating lunch.
Mr. Koch (pronounced coke) was considered a founding member of the New
York School, an avant-garde poetic movement that was forged in the
Manhattan of the 1950's when the beer at the Cedar Tavern flowed as
smoothly as the passionate talk about Abstract Expressionist art. He and
his contemporaries — the poets, John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, and the
painters, Jane Freilicher and Larry Rivers — took up the brash,
anti-establishment mantle of their beatnik predecessors, but with a more
classically European touch and with less machismo and facial hair.
Later in life, Mr. Koch became well known as a professor of poetry,
mainly at Columbia University, where he lectured on literature and
inspired budding writers for nearly 40 years. He was a spontaneous,
high-octane teacher who was not above leaping on to desks to prove a
point and who, for many years, taught writing to grade-school children,
claiming that poetry was as thrilling as stickball.
Kenneth Jay Koch was born February 27, 1925 in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son
of Stuart Koch, who owned a furniture store, and Lillian Koch, who wrote
amateur literary reviews. After graduating high school, he served in the
Philippines during World War II, a harrowing experience that he did not
translate into verse until the very end of his life.
When the war ended, Mr. Koch enrolled at Harvard. He studied writing
with the poet Delmore Schwartz and embarked on a lifelong friendship
with Mr. Ashbery. By his own account, he was hungry for the poet's life
but naïve about the art of making poems. "I was so dumb I thought Yeats
was pronounced Yeets," he said in an interview in 1977.
"I think we may have been more conscious than many poets of the surface
of the poem, and what was going on while we were writing and how we were
using words," he said of the New York School in the same interview. "I
don't think we saw any reason to resist humor in our poems."
Indeed, Mr. Koch's poetry is at once lyrical and humorous, aching with
emotion and achingly funny. He managed to write verse that is breathy
and expansive in tone, yet still rooted in the American predilections
for pop culture references and proper nouns.
This is an excerpt from Mr. Koch's poem, "Thank You":
The only thing I could publicize well would be my tooth,
Which I could say came with my mouth and in a most engaging manner
With my whole self, my body and including my mind,
Spirits, emotions, spiritual essences, emotional substances, poetry,
dreams, and lords
Of my life, everything, all embraceleted with my tooth
In a way that makes one wish to open the windows and scream "Hi!" to the
heavens,
And "Oh, come and take me away before I die in a minute!"
"His great ability as a poet was to combine modernism and lyricism and
to write poems that gave you a feeling as joyous as Whitman," said Ron
Padgett, a former student of Mr. Koch's and a poet himself.
Speaking of Mr. Koch's long poem, "The Duplications," one reviewer said
it read like a collaboration between Lord Byron, Walt Disney, Frank Buck
and Andre Breton.
Collaboration was, in fact, a crucial part of Mr. Koch's art. He and Mr.
Rivers, for instance, worked together on a series of painting-poems
called "New York, 1950-1960" and "Post Cards." He also wrote the
librettos to operas set to music by, among others, the composer Ned
Rorem.
Mr. Koch once told an interviewer that, as a child, he kept a little
orange book named the "Scribble-in Book," which he filled with his
sketches and musings. In high school, he set out to write what he called
"obscene and angry" poems, which he showed to his junior-year English
teacher, Katherine Lappa. Although he thought the verses would horrify
Ms. Lappa, she told Mr. Koch — at least, as he recalled it — "That's
exactly the way you should be feeling when you're 17 years old."
This fall, two of his books will be issued posthumously — one contains
many of his previously unpublished poems from the early 1950's, and the
other is a gathering of new works. His most recent book was "New
Addresses," a collection of apostrophes to abstract ideas like World War
II and Judaism.
He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and won
several prizes over the course of his career, including the Bollingen
Prize in 1995 and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry
in 1996. He was awarded three Fulbright scholarships and a National
Endowment for the Arts grant.