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*Kenneth Koch. When the Sun Tries to Go On. 1969. 113 pp.

This is the 1969 edition published by Black Sparrow with illustration of Larry Rivers. I've owned it for years as part of my collection, but I don't think I ever read it straight through before now. Koch wrote it in 1953; it predates the poems of Thank You! and is contemporaneous with O'Hara "Easter" and "Hatred," more or less. A long poem that simply goes on and on without ever shifting gears or turning into something else.

I'm starting a new series, today, 9,000 books of poetry. I'm still reading novels, but I still once in a while read books of poetry too. Once I get to 9,000 I'll stop (for a while).

*(1)

Ron Padgett. How to be Perfect. 2007.

I read this in the public library while Julia was in her trumpet lesson, often laughing out loud as discreetly as I could manage. Padgett has perfect pitch for a certain kind of poem. Kenneth Koch is a big presence in this book. The title poem is an advice poem along the lines of "Some General Instructions" by KK. There's also a poem in which he compares his own method for writing with that of Koch.

The White Horse

The youth walks up to the white horse, to put its halter on

and the horse looks at him in silence.

They are so silent they are in another world.

--D.H. Lawrence

This was one of Kenneth Koch's favorite poems, I'm guessing, because he put it in his anthologies "Sleeping on the Wing" and "Making Your Own Days." It's the basis of a writing exercise in "Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?" and I think in "I Never Told Anybody" as well, his book about teaching poetry to people in convalescent homes.

Reading it today it suddenly hit me that this kind of D.H. Lawrence poem was a source for "deep image" poetry. That particular tone is like that of Bly's

"Old men are sitting before their houses on car seats

In the small towns. I am happy,

The moon rising above the turkey sheds."

(Differences of quality aside, of course.) That's a more plausible source than a lot of the European poetry critics have seen behind Bly's poetry. I'm not sure why I hadn't thought of it till now.

"And then I had always liked the old miracle and morality plays in which no word has any ambiguity at all. I don’t like ambiguity. I suppose it’s all right if the ambiguous things a work means are interesting and exciting, but often they’re not"

--Kenneth Koch, interview with David Shapiro

That's a pretty revealing statement. Imagine coming along in the 1950s and not liking ambiguity, that mainstay of New Critical and paleo-modernist poetics, and even deconstruction as it was practiced in the 80s. This explains a lot about why few people have written about Koch academically, even to this day. Even Frank O'Hara, no Robert Lowell himself, uses a lot of ambiguity. Ashbery too. Koch isn't fond of it.

I'm aware too that I read Koch more ironically than he in fact means to be. I think he wants to keep you guessing about his tone, so that the earnestness when it does appear is always framed by whimsy. That's another form of ambiguity.

Also, when a sophisticated, modern poet abjures ambiguity it is a different effect from a medieval play celebrating baby Jesus with no sense of irony. It's funny how I won't accept certain things in poetry when done bluntly, with no sense of style, but would accept the same thing if it were signalled to me somehow that the poet knows better but is doing it anyway. Rhyme, Shelleyan apostrophe, sentimentality, didacticism--they work in Koch but they wouldn't in a poet who hadn't worked out a way to make them work.

I thought I didn't have that much to say about Frank O'Hara and Lorca, but now my O'Hara chapter has split off from my Koch chapter: at 50 pages it was becoming unwieldy to consider both of them together.

Writing a lot of prose, I am very aware of mannerisms that creep in.

in fact, of course, it is clear, obviously, it could be argued, ostensibly

All that metadiscursive argumentation! It is clear that I want to present certain ideas as clear, obvious, and factual, but that language must be calibrated later on, of course.

I'm also falling victim to some confirmatory bias. In my defense I'll say that I didn't quite realize how much Koch loved Lorca, so when I find increasing evidence of this, the more I research the question, I'm letting my guard down. His son-in-law has translated Poet in New York so I'm looking forward to reading that.

Anyone know anything about the composer Peter Hartman? He set an O'Hara poem to music but information about him is scarce.

"The comic, in a poet like O'Hara or Wallace Stevens or Byron, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Lautréamont, Max Jacob, is a part of what is most serious for art to get to--ecstasy, freedom, completeness, dionysiac things. One can get a hint of this ecstasy, a whiff from these heights even in a small parody, in one funny line someone writes."

--Kenneth Koch, "An Interview with Jordan Davis."

That's an essential insight. Koch goes on to argue against the tedious idea of humor as "the absurd" in everyday life. I'ts not about "thinking the world sweet and finding it bitter." We can take ourselves back to the existentialist absurdism of Koch's postwar period of formation. Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Sartre. Sisyphus and Charlie Brown. Against this absurdist comic dourness place "I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut" or "I sailed the Indian Ocean for a dime." It's revolutionary. A poem in Ottava Rima featuring cartoon characters...

I don't think that the comic in Wallace Stevens is that close to Aristophanes, or Byron to Max Jacob for that matter. Yet I can see how they all converge in Koch.

Isn't Koch also funnier than the postmodern fiction writers like Barth and Barthelme? Only Sorrentino at his funniest comes close.

Final Exam on Surrealism in American Poetry

Is "surrealism" a style? A method? A movement? A tone?

"We sailed the Indian Ocean for a dime."

Is that surrealism? Why do people call things surrealist that ain't?

"Who are the great poets of our time, and what are their names?"

When did having a book cover with a Magritte painting become the cliché that it now is? A Joseph Cornell box?

Is Russell Edson a surrealist? Why or why not? Why is Max Jacob a more influential model than André Breton?

What was surrealism? What wasn't it? When did it stop being what is was or wasn't?

Is Merwin a surrealist? Spicer? Wright? Ashbery? Lorca? Why is "surrealism" so boring? Why didn't Roland Barthes like it?

(Ron Padgett is not a surrealist.)

Is this a surrealist poem? Explain.

Maybe you never thought about in this particular way, but the surrealism of the New York school isn't really surrealist. It doesn't put faith in the unconscious, irrational mind. New York school poetry is all about being attentive, hyperconscious of reality. It's zany and kind of fun, not quite as vatic and self-important. It doesn't exalt dreaming at the expense of everyday reality.

When O'Hara gets vatic and oracular, you can tell he's not taking himself too seriously. As in "Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets." He knows he's not Shelley, but he allows himself to go "purple" anyway.

Of course, this doesn't prevent Auden from distrusting this aspect of Ashbery (see preface for Some Trees). Or Elizabeth Bishop complaining in a letter that O'Hara is too surrealist.

Then too you notice the preference for modern French poets who come just before surrealism. Reverdy, Apollinaire. Or those who come after, like Michel Deguy. When Kenneth Koch describes Deguy in a brief essay, he could be describing his own poetry. How it includes a lot, doesn't want to be tied down to a narrow surrealist dependence on the unconscious mind as source of sacred truth.

***

There's a new Góngora translation out from the University of Chicago Press. Apparently I think it's good, because I have a blurb on the dust-jacket, which I wrote a few months ago and promptly forgot about until someone reminded me of it today. It's an excellent blurb that will convince you to buy this book.

It should be clear to almost anyone now that Kenneth Koch is a "major" (yikes!) poet, not just a name to be mentioned along side of other New York School poets in the obligatory list. The range and depth of his work is breathtakingly ambitious and successful, in so many genres and modes. Brilliant and influential.

You know those critical books published in the 80s and 90s dealing with the REPRESENTATIVE VOICES OF OUR AGE. There was usually a chapter on Ashbery (or O'Hara if the critic was a little hipper), a chapter on Adrienne Rich, one on Merrill or Merwin. Koch was not taken seriously. When I wrote a grad paper on him for Sorrentino more than twenty years ago I had the feeling of doing something new and slightly outrageous: critical prose on Kenneth Koch. Such a thing still barely exists. There is Harry Mathews on The Duplications, for example, but you couldn't imagine one of those Bloomian blurbs on a Koch book. You can imagine a Dissertation Director telling a student to take Koch out and put Ashbery or Ammons there in his stead.

It's not a lack of gravitas in the true sense. It's a lack of what people recognize as gravitas in, say, Heaney, Walcott, Merwin, Merrill, Rich, Graham, Ammons, and even Gluck or Strand. I don't want to tie that albatross around his neck. The albatross of "faux-gravitas." It doesn't fit, precisely because of his levitas. Some prefer the unexuberant, the humorless, the solemnly self-important poet. Merwin, say.

For a few years I have searched through the poems of Kenneth Koch for this passage, but could never find it, despite my clear memory of having read it there:

So many lousy poets
So few good ones
What's the problem?
No innate love of
Words, no sense of
How the thing said
Is in the words, how
The words are themselves
The thing said: love, auto...

Well yesterday I finally found it. I also discovered the reason why I had been unable to find it. It is in "The Morning of the Poem" by James Schuyler. I probably had been reading it the same time as one of those later Kenneth Koch poems about writing. I don't think Kenneth would disagree with JS in this case either.

Schuyler grew up wanting to be John O'Hara. He could have been this elegant New Yorker short story writer. Instead he became a New Yorker poet (Howard Moss liked his work so he published there a lot).

"The Morning of the Poem" is not as good as "Hymn to Life." Not as good as my memory of itself. Today I might read "A Few Days" which in my faulty memory is the best of these three poems.

Disagreeing with Geneva Convention: Kenneth Koch, who thinks Kenneth Koch was a happy guy:

"I have to disagree: I think the dominant mood in Koch is a kind of anxious hilarity. There's a disquieting restlessness in his work from start to beginning. Frustration, misunderstanding, vulnerability, anxiety, and anger are just a few of the negative emotions in his work I can think of right off the top of my head. Sure, it can be a manic pick-me-up in times of depression, but did it occur to you that he was doing that to himself, too? In other words, the same thing you were looking for in your reading of him, he was doing for himself by writing these poems?"

Linguist Mark Liberman makes an eloquent point here: that the idea of a perfect, elegant, and correct language is always displaced unto a past, but that this past is always imaginary. That is to say, people never have spoken in this *perfect* language, and nobody seriously thinks that we should return to 18th century, or 17th century, norms--or to the norms of whatever period is considered the golden age of language usage. It's a fundamentally dishonest argument, because the norms of usage, whatever they are, must always necessarily be those of the present, never those of the past. [I hope my paraphrase does some justice to Liberman's post]

And so it is too with the norms of the "poetry language" (Kenneth Koch). We can't seriously propose to bring back Victorian ideals, or Elizabethan ideas, because we wouldn't be happy with the result even if we could actually bring back those ideals. We are stuck in the present, and that present is more lively and interesting because it is *our* time. "As if you would never leave me and were / the inexorable product of my own time."

Part of time is the way in which time is *felt*. I'm thinking of the "feel" of a musician or poet for time itself. Think of how Charlie Parker changed the way we perceive the passage of time from one second to the next! (Cortázar wrote about this in his story "El perseguidor.") Creeley felt and understood Parker's innovation.

Time to teach grammar!