Kenneth Koch
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Kenneth Koch
Intensely serious beneath a surface of lightness and wit, Kenneth Koch’s poems “maintain power,” Denis Donoghue wrote, “by rarely choosing to exert it.” Koch’s virtuosity—he has written many plays, an extravagant novel (The Red Robins), and short stories (Hotel Lambosa), and has done numerous collaborations with painters—seems part of a continuing and energetic attempt to write (in the words of Ariosto) “things never said in prose before or in verse.” Almost every poem is a new kind of poem, a new flight—in this volume, for example, the theme and variations of…
Kenneth Koch
Kenneth Koch, who has already considerably “stretched our ideas of what it is possible to do in poetry” (David Lehman), here takes on the classic poetic device of apostrophe, or direct address. His use of it gives him yet another chance to say things never said before in prose or in verse and, as well, to bring new life to a form in which Donne talked to Death, Shelley to the West Wind, Whitman to the Earth, Pound to his Songs, O’Hara to the Sun at Fire Island.
Koch, in this new book, talks to things important in his life—to Breath, to World War Two, to…
On the Great Atlantic Rainway: Selected Poems 1950-1988
Kenneth Koch
In this new selection of the poetry of Kenneth Koch—“one of our greatest poets” (John Ashbery)—Koch’s brilliance, aesthetic daring, and virtuosity are everywhere apparent. Included here are selections from his book-length narrative poems, “Ko” and “The Duplications”, and from his dazzlingly incomprehensible (by ordinary means), fractured epic “When the Sun Tries to Go On”; poetic plays such as “Pericles”, “Guinivere”, “Bertha”, and six of his “One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays”; instructional poems—from “The Art of Love “— in which an old genre is splendidly…
