Kenneth Koch
Kenneth Koch is most often recognized as one of the four most prominent poets of the 1950s-1960s poetic movement "the New York School of Poetry" along with Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery and James Schuyler. The New York School adopted the avant-garde movement in a style often called the "new" avant-garde, drawing on Abstract Expressionism, French surrealism and stream-of-consciousness writing in the attempt to create a fresh genre free from cliché. In his anthology The New York Poets, Mark Ford writes, "In their reaction against the serious, ironic, ostentatiously well-made lyric that dominated the post-war poetry scene, they turned to the work of an eclectic range of literary iconoclasts, eccentrics and experimenters."
Fiercely anti-academic and anti-establishment, Koch's attitude and aesthetic were dubbed by John Ashbery his "missionary zeal." Ford calls him "the New York School poet most ready to engage in polemic with the poetic establishment, and the one most determined to promote the work of himself and his friends to a wider audience." Koch died of leukemia at age 77, leaving a legacy of numerous anthologies of both short and long poems, avant-garde plays and short stories, in addition to nonfiction works dealing with aesthetics and teaching poetry to children and senior citizens.
“I wasn’t readyFor you.I understood nothingSeemingly except my feelingsYou were whirling In your lifeI was keepingEverything in my head"To Marina”
“Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.” /The yellow hobbyhorse rocks to and fro, and from the chimney / Drops the Strangler! The white and pink roses are slightly agitated by the struggle, / But afterwards beside the dead “poet” they cuddle up comfortingly against their vase. They are safer now, no one will compare them to the sea. / Here on the railroad train, one more time, is the Strangler. / He is going to get that one there, who is on his way to a poetry reading. / Agh! Biff! A body falls to the moving floor.”
“I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut / That will solve a murder case unsolved for years / Because the murderer left it in the snow beside a window / Through which he saw her head, connecting with / Her shoulders by a neck, and laid a red /Roof in her heart. For this we lived a thousand years; / For this we love, and we live because we love, we are not /Inside a bottle, thank goodness! ----- from "To You”
“When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!”
“I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.”
“I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.”
“I was excited by what my painter friends were doing, and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too, and that was a wonderful little, fizzy sort of world.”
“You have enchanted me with a single kissWhich can never be undoneUntil the destruction of language”
“I don't know where you'd find such a magazine." ~ on the stipulations set by a benefactor to the Harvard Advocate that the staff contain no Jews, homosexuals, or drunks”
“Maybe poetry took the life out of both of them,Idea and friendship.”