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Kenneth Koch
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Kenneth Koch feels lucky he can write a lot of poetry. And write a lot, he does. After 21 volumes of poetry, three works of fiction, nine books of non-fiction, 21 avant-garde plays and parodies, and countless articles for newspapers and magazines, this 75-year-old Cincinnati native continues to write at a remarkable rate.
As one of the founding members of the so-called New York school of poets in the 1950s, voluminous output seems only natural. And being prolific wasn't the only thing that came naturally: Innovation was what defined the New York school. The '50s was an era dominated by New Critical literary theory whose predominant figurehead was the draconian T.S Eliot, author of The Waste Land. Poetry, therefore, according to Koch, suffered from acute boredom and sterility, and Koch and other poets of his generation felt suffocated by the established poetic hegemony. So they forged technical and conceptual innovations to combat poetic tedium.
Along with Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, whom preeminent critic Harold Bloom called the best living poet in the country in his book, The Western Canon, Koch breathed new life into the atrophying lungs of modernist poetry by using fresh imagery, lightness, color, humor and good old-fashioned cheekiness.
The New York school was also inspired by abstract expressionist painters working at the time, and much of their output during those fertile years was the product of many nights of drunken carousing and feverish collaboration. To characterize the freshness and spontaneity the New York school poets wanted to capture in verse, Frank O'Hara once wrote, "If I'm writing a poem and a cat walks under the table, then the cat goes into the poem." Koch, too, wrote about the movement, though he would never call it that, in "Fresh Air," a landmark poem that some might call the final break from the tyranny of institutional poetasters.
" 'Fresh Air' is all about that awful academic poetry that I hated, that, I suppose, I was reacting against," Koch says. "I mean, all of these drippy people writing poems about being professors and having affairs with students and their marriages breaking up and Thor and Odysseus and all this stuff. It was boring."
Koch's thirst for excitement and hatred of anything dull began early on in his life as a youngster growing up in Cincinnati during the 1940s. In his most recent published volume, New Addresses, Koch addresses the numerous muses that have affected his life and career, one of which is the Ohio River, the earthy body that separated the staid normalcy of Cincinnati from the carnivalesque revelry of Kentucky.
"What I'm talking about (in "To the Ohio") was in Kentucky there was gambling and whorehouses," says Koch. "And we didn't have that in Cincinnati at the time. Or they may have been there, but I didn't know about it. (Cincinnati) was the normal life for me. Whereas Kentucky was a place that we went to be crazy."
When asked if his occasional exoduses to Kentucky as a youngster bore any resemblance to his ultimate exodus from Cincinnati to metropolitan New York, he replies, "No. No, it was a different kind of move. It was more artistic and intellectual. Certainly going to Kentucky was not that."
After winning numerous literary awards, including the prestigious Bollingen Prize, a kind of medal of honor in poets' circles, Koch finally pays a visit to Cincinnati after a 15-year hiatus on Thursday and Friday to read his work at the Main Public Library and at the University of Cincinnati. CityBeat caught up with Koch at his Long Island home to talk about painting, Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, the '60s riots at Columbia University, poetic movements and what young poets can do to be great.
CB: You were associated with the so-called New York school of poets. Can you give our readers an idea of what the climate in New York was like at the time and what it is you were counter to, if anything?
Kenneth Koch: After I graduated from Harvard and moved down to New York, I had the great good chance to find a room in a building on Third Avenue, also the building of Jane Freilicher, the painter. She was a very good friend of Larry Rivers (another painter), who came over all the time. And then John Ashbery came down and came to be very close to all of us, and then Frank O'Hara came and won everybody's hearts.
We were all very excited about what we were doing, and excited about each other. We collaborated a lot. The first painter I collaborated with was Larry. I was inspired to do it by his collaboration with Frank O'Hara. But that was very much in the air. I guess we were very much inspired by the surrealists in France who did a lot of collaborations. We poets wrote some poems together, too.
There was a very fizzy atmosphere around, and the painters were talking about their work and painting these terrific things. The painters had not gotten famous yet, so it was all energy contained in a small space. We meant a lot to each other, because we hardly had any other audience as poets and painters.
CB: You had been working quite a bit in the '50s and '60s, and by 1970 you had gotten a job teaching at Columbia University. Did the student uprisings affect your work or make you reconsider anything?
KK: It affected my work, but then it wasn't the main thing that did it. Do you know a poem of mine called "The Pleasures of Peace"? It was a protest against the Vietnam War, but I found I couldn't write very well about the horrors of war. It ended up being a celebration of the peace movement, which was very exhilarating.
It's too bad you have to have a horrible war to find that you have a lot in common with other people. You know, it was really exciting for us to suddenly feel that what one had to say might mean something and be helpful to people.
But (writing political poetry) is difficult. The best remark I ever heard about writing political poetry was made by Bertolt Brecht. He said, "You can't write poems about the trees when the woods are full of policemen."
CB: You've had a long career and you must have seen many developments, such as the language poets and the new formalists and other earlier movements. Have there been any particular poetic movements that have inspired you or dismayed you?
KK: I'm going to take the fifth for dismay. As for inspiring me, I don't particularly believe in poetic movements -- all very well and good for journalism and even for college courses talking about movements and schools.
I was in a writing course in Harvard with Delmore Schwartz. It was the first writing course I ever took. There were about 30 of us in the course, and Delmore says, "How many of you want to be great writers?" We all raised our hands. Delmore was a little sad. He said, "You know, any age in which there are more than three or four great writers is known as a Renaissance."
Nobody turned down his hand, of course. But I sort of agree with that. I mean, school schmools. Moment, schmovement. A movement is useful if it gives a couple of good writers or painters people to go to parties with and talk to, show their work to. You can be interested in movements, but I'm more interested in individual works. I mean, movements are interesting, but good art is fantastic.
CB: Do you have any words of caution or wisdom for our poet readers?
KK: I think that the way that one becomes a good poet or a better poet, I suppose, one starts off with certain amount of talent for language and a certain amount of energy and a certain amount of crazy determination. But the way to develop them is to read a lot of poetry and be influenced by it. And to write a lot of poetry, to let yourself be influenced and become fearless in the way you write.
Extremely valuable for me, perhaps the most valuable in the whole career part of my life, was having friends like John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, whom I was envious of and inspired by. It was absolutely wonderful, because it's all very well to be the poet in the little place where nobody else is a poet, and everybody says, "Oh isn't that wonderful? You're a poet." But it doesn't really inspire you; it doesn't make you nervous enough to try for more things. Whereas Frank and John and I were always showing each other our poems. Every evening, we'd see each other and pull poems out of our pockets, and it was unnerving and inspiring.
