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A Possible World
"For the last thirty years or more, Kenneth Koch has been writing the most exuberant poems in America. In an arena where such good spirits are rare, he has become a national treasure. In his book of personal addresses to what has mattered most in his seventy-plus years on the planet, there is a dimension of pathos and joy rare in the poetry of any era." —National Book Award (2000) finalist citation for New Addresses
The three long poems -- “Bel Canto,” “Possible World,” and “A Memoir” -- in this brilliant successor to New Addresses are ambitious attempts at rendering the complete story of a life. Taken together they present a dazzling picture of the pleasures and confusions of existence, as well as the pleasures and difficulties of expressing them.
Other poems bring Koch’s questioning, lyrical attention to more particular aspects of experience, real and imagined—a shipboard meeting, the Moor not taken, or the unknowable realm of mountaintops. As in all of Koch’s work, one hears the music of unconquerable exuberance in stormy conflict with whatever resists it—death, the injustice of power, the vagaries of life in Thailand, China, or Rome.
Thomas Disch has written in the Boston Book Review that “Koch is the most capable technician on the American scene, the brightest wit, and the emeritus most likely to persist into the next millennium . . . His work is full of ribaldry and wit, musicianship, pitch-perfect mimicry of the Great Tradition, and the celebration of pleasure for its own sunlit sake.”
The ebullience and stylistic variety that one has come to expect of this protean poet is everywhere present in this scintillating collection.
The three long poems -- “Bel Canto,” “Possible World,” and “A Memoir” -- in this brilliant successor to New Addresses are ambitious attempts at rendering the complete story of a life. Taken together they present a dazzling picture of the pleasures and confusions of existence, as well as the pleasures and difficulties of expressing them.
Other poems bring Koch’s questioning, lyrical attention to more particular aspects of experience, real and imagined—a shipboard meeting, the Moor not taken, or the unknowable realm of mountaintops. As in all of Koch’s work, one hears the music of unconquerable exuberance in stormy conflict with whatever resists it—death, the injustice of power, the vagaries of life in Thailand, China, or Rome.
Thomas Disch has written in the Boston Book Review that “Koch is the most capable technician on the American scene, the brightest wit, and the emeritus most likely to persist into the next millennium . . . His work is full of ribaldry and wit, musicianship, pitch-perfect mimicry of the Great Tradition, and the celebration of pleasure for its own sunlit sake.”
The ebullience and stylistic variety that one has come to expect of this protean poet is everywhere present in this scintillating collection.
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
2 people are currently reading
29 people want to read
About the author
Kenneth Koch
111 books89 followersKenneth 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 24, 2022
The sun is high, the seaside air is sharp,
And salty light reveals the Mayan School.
The Irish hope their names are on the harp,
We see the sheep's advertisement for wool,
Boulders are here, to throw against a tarp,
From which comes bursting forth a puzzled mule.
Perceval seizes it and mounts it, then
The blood-dimmed tide recedes and then comes in again.
Fateful connections that we make to things
Whose functioning's oblivious to our lives!
How sidewise news of light from darkness springs,
How blue bees buzz from big blooms back to hives
And make the honey while the queen bee sings
Leadbelly in arrangements by Burl Ives—
How long ago I saw the misted pine trees
And hoped, no matter how, to get them into poetry!
Stendhal, at fifty, gazing as it happened
On Rome from the Janiculum, decided
That one way he could give his life a stipend
Was to suspend his being Amour's fighter
And get to know himself. Here he had ripened
Accomplished, loved, and lived, was a great writer
But never had explored in true detail
His childhood and his growing up. So he set sail
Composing La Vie de Henry Brulard
But in five hundred pages scarcely got
Beyond his seventeenth year, for it is hard
To take into account what happens here
And fit it all onto an index card.
Even one moment of it is too hot,
Complex and cannibalistically connected
To every other, which is what might be expected.
Sterne's hero has a greater problem, never
Getting much past his birth. I've had a third one.
My autobiography, if I should ever
Start out to write it, quickly seems a burden
An I-will-do-that-the-next-time endeavor.
Whatever life I do write's an absurd one
As if some crazy person with a knife
Cut up and made a jigsaw puzzle of a life.
In any case a life that's hardly possible
In the conditions that we really live in,
Where easy flying leaps to inaccessible
Mountainy places where love is a given
And misery, if there, infinitesimal,
Are quite the norm. Here none by pain is driven
That is not curable by the romanza
That's kept in readiness to finish any stanza.
Whatever, then, I see at this late stage of
My life I may or may not have stayed ignorant
Of that great book I've strained to write one page of
Yet always hoping my page was significant.
Be it or not, for me and for the ages
I leave it as it is. Yet as a figurant
Who has not stopped, I'm writing in addition
More lines to clarify my present disposition.
One person in a million finds out something
Perhaps each fifty years and that is knowledge.
Newton, Copernicus, Einstein are cunning.
The rest of us just rise and go to college
With no more hope to come home with the bunting
Than a stray dachshund going through the village.
However, what a treat our small successes
Of present and of past, at various addresses!
To be in all those places where I tarried
Too little or too late or bright and early
To love again the first woman I married
To marvel at such things as melancholy,
Sophistication, drums, a baby carriage,
A John Cage concert heard at Alice Tully—
How my desire when young to be a poet
Made me attentive and oblivious every moment!
Do you remember Oceanview the Fair?
The heights above the river? The canoes?
The place we beached them and the grass was bare?
Those days the sandbars gave our knees a truce?
The crooked line of pantry shelves, with pear
And cherry jam? And Pancho, with his noose?
Do you remember Full and Half and Empty?
Do you remember sorrow standing in the entry?
Do you remember thought, and talking plainly?
Michel and I went walking after Chartres
Cathedral had engaged our spirits mainly
By giving us an insight into Barthes.
Michel said he was capable of feigning
Renewed intentions of the soul's deep part,
Like this cathedral's artificial forces
That press a kind of artless thought into our faces.
And yet — The moor is dark beneath the moon.
The porcupine turns over on its belly
And new conceptions rap at the cocoon.
Civilization, dealing with us fairly,
For once, releases its Erectheion
Of understanding, which consoles us, nearly.
Later we study certain characteristics
That may give us a better chance with the statistics.
How much I'd like to live the whole thing over,
But making some corrections as I go!
To be a better husband and a father,
Be with my babies on a sled in snow.
By twenty I'd have understood my mother
And by compassion found a way to know
What separates the what-I-started-out-as
From what-I-sometimes-wished-I-was-when-in-the-mountai ns.
To be once more the one who what was worthy
Of courtship courted—it was quite as stressful
As trying to, er, as they say, give birth to
A poem and as often unsuccessful,
But it was nice to be sublime and flirty
With radiant girls, and, in some strange way, restful.
I could be everything I wasn't usually—
And then to get somebody else to feel it mutually!
In poems the same problem or a similar.
Desire of course not only to do old things
But things unheard of yet by nuns or visitors
And of the melancholy finch be co-finch
In singing songs with such a broad parameter
That seamstresses would stare, forget to sew things,
Astronauts quit the sky, athletes the stadium
To hear them, and the rest of what they hear be tedium.
Such wild desires, I think it's recognizable
Are part and parcel of the Human Image
And in a way, I'd say, no less predictable
Than Popeye's feelings for a can of spinach.
Yet if we're set on course by the Invisible,
All pre-determined, what about the language
That teases me each morning with its leanings
Toward the Unprogrammed Altitudes beyond its meanings?
Are you, O particles, O atoms, nominatives
Like Percevals and Stendhals, set in motion
By some Ordaining Will that is definitive?
Is this invading chill and high emotion,
This tendency to know one is regenerative,
Is this, all, tidal take-home like the ocean?
Be what you may, my thanks for your society
Through the long life I've had, your jokes and your variety,
The warmth you've shown in giving me a temperature
That I can live with, and the strength you've shared with me
In arms and legs—and for your part in literature,
What can I say? It is as if life stared at me
And kissed my lips and left it as a signature.
Thank you for that, and thank you for preparing me
For love itself, and friendship, its co-agent.
Thank you for being this, and for its inspiration.
* * *
Pure finality of bedding -
Intellectual life -
This article to reassure me -
Others are alive -
Then unexpectedly awake
Middle of the night -
What are they thinking -
Afraid? Probably. Succeeding
At something? Likely -
All night
Breathing, rain.
* * *
Who was my teacher at Harvard. Did not wear overcoat
Saying to me as we walked across the Yard
Cold brittle autumn is you should be wearing overcoat. I said
You are not wearing overcoat. He said,
You should do as I say not do as I do.
Just how American it was and how late Forties it was
Delmore, but not I, was probably aware. He quoted Finnegans Wake to me
In his New York apartment sitting on chair
Table directly in front of him. There did he write? I am wondering.
Look at this photograph said of his mother and father.
Coney Island. Do they look happy? He couldn't figure it out.
Believed Pogo to be at the limits of our culture.
Pogo. Walt Kelly must have read Joyce Delmore said.
Why don't you ask him?
Why don't you ask Walt Kelly if he read Finnegans Wake or not.
Your parents don't look happy but it is just a photograph.
Maybe they felt awkward posing for photographs.
Maybe it is just a bad photograph. Delmore is not listening
I want to hear him tell me something sad but however true.
Delmore in his tomb is sitting. People say yes everyone is dying
But here read this happy book on the subject. Not Delmore. Not that rueful man.
* * *
It takes a lot of a person's life
To be French, or English, or American
Or Italian. And to be at any age. To live at any certain time.
The Polish-born resident of Manhattan is not merely a representative of
general humanity
And neither is this Sicilian fisherman stringing his bait
Or to be any gender, born where or when
Betty holding a big plate
Karen crossing her post-World War Two legs
And smiling across the table
These three Italian boys age about twenty gesturing and talking
And laughing after they get off the train
Seem fifty percent Italian and the rest percent just plain
Human race.
O mystery of growing up! O history of going to school!
O lovers O enchantments!
The subject is not over because the photograph is over.
The photographer sits down. Murnau makes the movie.
Everything is a little bit off, but has a nationality.
The oysters won't help the refugees off the boats,
Only other human creatures will. The phone rings and the Albanian
nationalist sits down.
When he gets up he hasn't become a Russian émigré or a German circus
clown
A woman is carrying a basket—a beautiful sight! She is in and of
Madagascar.
The uniformed Malay policeman sniffs the beer barrel that the brothers of
Ludwig are bringing close to him.
All humanity likes to get drunk! Are differences then all on the surface?
But even every surface gets hot
In the sun. It may be that the surface is where we are all alike!
But man and woman show that this isn't true.
We will get by, though. The train is puffing at the station
But the station isn't puffing at the train. This difference allows for a sense
of community
As when people feel really glad to have cats and dogs
And some even a few mice in the chimney. We are not alone
In the universe, and the diversity causes comfort as well as difficulty.
To be Italian takes at least half the day. To be Chinese seven-eighths of it.
Only at evening when Chang Ho, repast over, sits down to smoke
Is he exclusively human, in the way the train is exclusively itself when it is
in motion
But that's to say it wrongly. His being human is also his being seven-eighths
Chinese.
Falling in love one may get, say, twenty percent back
Toward universality, though that is probably all. Then when love's gone
One's Nigerianness increases, or one's quality of being of Nepal.
An American may start out wishing
To be everybody or that everybody were the same
Which makes him or her at least eighty percent American. Dixit Charles
Peguy, circa 1912,
"The good Lord created the French so that certain aspects of His creation
Wouldn't go unnoticed." Like the taste of wheat, sirrah! Or the Japanese.
So that someplace on earth there would be people who were
Writing haiku. But think of the human body with its arms
Its nose, its eyes, its brain often subject to alarms
Think how much energy, work, and time have gone into it,
To give us such a variegated kind of humanity!
It takes fifteen seconds this morning to be a man,
Twenty to be an old one, four to be an American,
Two to be a college graduate and four or five hours to write.
And what's more, I love you! half of every hour for weeks or months for
this;
Nine hundred seconds to be an admirer of Italian Renaissance painting,
Sixteen hours to be someone awake.
One is recognizably American, male, and of a certain generation. Nothing
takes these markers away.
Even if I live in Indonesia as a native in a hut, someone coming through
there
Will certainly gasp and say Why you're an American!
My optimism, my openness, my lack of a sense of history,
My distinctive facial muscles ready to look angry or sad or sympathetic
In a moment and not quite know where to go from there;
My assuming that anything is possible, my deep sense of superiority
And inferiority at the same time; my lack of culture,
Except for the bookish kind; my way of acting with the dog, come here
Spotty! God damn!
All these and hundreds more declare me to be what I am.
It's burdensome but also inevitable. I think so.
Expatriates have had some success with the plastic surgery
Of absence and departure. But it is never absolute. And then they must bear
the new identity as well.
Irish or Russian, the individuality in them is often mistaken for nationality.
The Russian finding a soul in the army officer, the Irishman finding in him
someone with whom he can drink.
Consider the Volga boatman? One can only guess
But probably about ninety percent Russian, eighty percent man, and thirty
percent boatman, Russian, man, and boatman,
A good person for the job, a Russian man of the river.
This dog is two-fifths wolf and less than one-thousandth a husband or
father.
Dogs resist nationality by being breeds. This one is simply Alsatian.
Though he may father forth a puppy
Who seems totally something else if for example he (the Alsatian) is attracted
To a poodle with powerful DNA. The puppy runs up to the Italian boys
who smile
Thinking it would be fun to take it to Taormina
Where they work in the hotel and to teach it tricks.
A Frenchwoman marvels at this scene.
The woman bends down to the dog and speaks to it in French.
This is hopeful and funny. To the dog all human languages are a perfumed
fog.
He wags and rises on his back legs. One Italian boy praises him, "Bravo!
canino!"
Underneath there is the rumble of the metro train. The boy looks at the
woman.
Life offers them these entangling moments as—who?—on a bicycle goes
past.
It is a Congolese with the savannah on his shoulders
And the sky in his heart, but his words as he passes are in French—
"Bonjour, m'sieu dames," and goes speeding off with his identity,
His Congolese, millennial selfhood unchanging and changing place.
* * *
There is no way not to be excited
When what you have been disillusioned by raises its head
From its arms and seems to want to talk to you again.
You forget home and family
And set off on foot or in your automobile
And go to where you believe this form of reality
May dwell. Not finding it there, you refuse
Any further contact
Until you are back again trying to forget
The only thing that moved you (it seems) and gave what you forever will
have
But in the form of a disillusion.
Yet often, looking toward the horizon
There — inimical to you? — is that something you have never found
And that, without those who came before you, you could never have
imagined.
How could you have thought there was one person who could make you
Happy and that happiness was not the uneven
Phenomenon you have known it to be? Why do you keep believing in this
Reality so dependent on the time allowed it
That it has less to do with your exile from the age you are
Than from everything else life promised that you could do?
And salty light reveals the Mayan School.
The Irish hope their names are on the harp,
We see the sheep's advertisement for wool,
Boulders are here, to throw against a tarp,
From which comes bursting forth a puzzled mule.
Perceval seizes it and mounts it, then
The blood-dimmed tide recedes and then comes in again.
Fateful connections that we make to things
Whose functioning's oblivious to our lives!
How sidewise news of light from darkness springs,
How blue bees buzz from big blooms back to hives
And make the honey while the queen bee sings
Leadbelly in arrangements by Burl Ives—
How long ago I saw the misted pine trees
And hoped, no matter how, to get them into poetry!
Stendhal, at fifty, gazing as it happened
On Rome from the Janiculum, decided
That one way he could give his life a stipend
Was to suspend his being Amour's fighter
And get to know himself. Here he had ripened
Accomplished, loved, and lived, was a great writer
But never had explored in true detail
His childhood and his growing up. So he set sail
Composing La Vie de Henry Brulard
But in five hundred pages scarcely got
Beyond his seventeenth year, for it is hard
To take into account what happens here
And fit it all onto an index card.
Even one moment of it is too hot,
Complex and cannibalistically connected
To every other, which is what might be expected.
Sterne's hero has a greater problem, never
Getting much past his birth. I've had a third one.
My autobiography, if I should ever
Start out to write it, quickly seems a burden
An I-will-do-that-the-next-time endeavor.
Whatever life I do write's an absurd one
As if some crazy person with a knife
Cut up and made a jigsaw puzzle of a life.
In any case a life that's hardly possible
In the conditions that we really live in,
Where easy flying leaps to inaccessible
Mountainy places where love is a given
And misery, if there, infinitesimal,
Are quite the norm. Here none by pain is driven
That is not curable by the romanza
That's kept in readiness to finish any stanza.
Whatever, then, I see at this late stage of
My life I may or may not have stayed ignorant
Of that great book I've strained to write one page of
Yet always hoping my page was significant.
Be it or not, for me and for the ages
I leave it as it is. Yet as a figurant
Who has not stopped, I'm writing in addition
More lines to clarify my present disposition.
One person in a million finds out something
Perhaps each fifty years and that is knowledge.
Newton, Copernicus, Einstein are cunning.
The rest of us just rise and go to college
With no more hope to come home with the bunting
Than a stray dachshund going through the village.
However, what a treat our small successes
Of present and of past, at various addresses!
To be in all those places where I tarried
Too little or too late or bright and early
To love again the first woman I married
To marvel at such things as melancholy,
Sophistication, drums, a baby carriage,
A John Cage concert heard at Alice Tully—
How my desire when young to be a poet
Made me attentive and oblivious every moment!
Do you remember Oceanview the Fair?
The heights above the river? The canoes?
The place we beached them and the grass was bare?
Those days the sandbars gave our knees a truce?
The crooked line of pantry shelves, with pear
And cherry jam? And Pancho, with his noose?
Do you remember Full and Half and Empty?
Do you remember sorrow standing in the entry?
Do you remember thought, and talking plainly?
Michel and I went walking after Chartres
Cathedral had engaged our spirits mainly
By giving us an insight into Barthes.
Michel said he was capable of feigning
Renewed intentions of the soul's deep part,
Like this cathedral's artificial forces
That press a kind of artless thought into our faces.
And yet — The moor is dark beneath the moon.
The porcupine turns over on its belly
And new conceptions rap at the cocoon.
Civilization, dealing with us fairly,
For once, releases its Erectheion
Of understanding, which consoles us, nearly.
Later we study certain characteristics
That may give us a better chance with the statistics.
How much I'd like to live the whole thing over,
But making some corrections as I go!
To be a better husband and a father,
Be with my babies on a sled in snow.
By twenty I'd have understood my mother
And by compassion found a way to know
What separates the what-I-started-out-as
From what-I-sometimes-wished-I-was-when-in-the-mountai ns.
To be once more the one who what was worthy
Of courtship courted—it was quite as stressful
As trying to, er, as they say, give birth to
A poem and as often unsuccessful,
But it was nice to be sublime and flirty
With radiant girls, and, in some strange way, restful.
I could be everything I wasn't usually—
And then to get somebody else to feel it mutually!
In poems the same problem or a similar.
Desire of course not only to do old things
But things unheard of yet by nuns or visitors
And of the melancholy finch be co-finch
In singing songs with such a broad parameter
That seamstresses would stare, forget to sew things,
Astronauts quit the sky, athletes the stadium
To hear them, and the rest of what they hear be tedium.
Such wild desires, I think it's recognizable
Are part and parcel of the Human Image
And in a way, I'd say, no less predictable
Than Popeye's feelings for a can of spinach.
Yet if we're set on course by the Invisible,
All pre-determined, what about the language
That teases me each morning with its leanings
Toward the Unprogrammed Altitudes beyond its meanings?
Are you, O particles, O atoms, nominatives
Like Percevals and Stendhals, set in motion
By some Ordaining Will that is definitive?
Is this invading chill and high emotion,
This tendency to know one is regenerative,
Is this, all, tidal take-home like the ocean?
Be what you may, my thanks for your society
Through the long life I've had, your jokes and your variety,
The warmth you've shown in giving me a temperature
That I can live with, and the strength you've shared with me
In arms and legs—and for your part in literature,
What can I say? It is as if life stared at me
And kissed my lips and left it as a signature.
Thank you for that, and thank you for preparing me
For love itself, and friendship, its co-agent.
Thank you for being this, and for its inspiration.
- Bel Canto, pg. 3-7
* * *
Pure finality of bedding -
Intellectual life -
This article to reassure me -
Others are alive -
Then unexpectedly awake
Middle of the night -
What are they thinking -
Afraid? Probably. Succeeding
At something? Likely -
All night
Breathing, rain.
- A Review, pg. 8
* * *
Who was my teacher at Harvard. Did not wear overcoat
Saying to me as we walked across the Yard
Cold brittle autumn is you should be wearing overcoat. I said
You are not wearing overcoat. He said,
You should do as I say not do as I do.
Just how American it was and how late Forties it was
Delmore, but not I, was probably aware. He quoted Finnegans Wake to me
In his New York apartment sitting on chair
Table directly in front of him. There did he write? I am wondering.
Look at this photograph said of his mother and father.
Coney Island. Do they look happy? He couldn't figure it out.
Believed Pogo to be at the limits of our culture.
Pogo. Walt Kelly must have read Joyce Delmore said.
Why don't you ask him?
Why don't you ask Walt Kelly if he read Finnegans Wake or not.
Your parents don't look happy but it is just a photograph.
Maybe they felt awkward posing for photographs.
Maybe it is just a bad photograph. Delmore is not listening
I want to hear him tell me something sad but however true.
Delmore in his tomb is sitting. People say yes everyone is dying
But here read this happy book on the subject. Not Delmore. Not that rueful man.
- A Momentary Longing To Hear Sad Advice From One Long Dead, pg. 9
* * *
It takes a lot of a person's life
To be French, or English, or American
Or Italian. And to be at any age. To live at any certain time.
The Polish-born resident of Manhattan is not merely a representative of
general humanity
And neither is this Sicilian fisherman stringing his bait
Or to be any gender, born where or when
Betty holding a big plate
Karen crossing her post-World War Two legs
And smiling across the table
These three Italian boys age about twenty gesturing and talking
And laughing after they get off the train
Seem fifty percent Italian and the rest percent just plain
Human race.
O mystery of growing up! O history of going to school!
O lovers O enchantments!
The subject is not over because the photograph is over.
The photographer sits down. Murnau makes the movie.
Everything is a little bit off, but has a nationality.
The oysters won't help the refugees off the boats,
Only other human creatures will. The phone rings and the Albanian
nationalist sits down.
When he gets up he hasn't become a Russian émigré or a German circus
clown
A woman is carrying a basket—a beautiful sight! She is in and of
Madagascar.
The uniformed Malay policeman sniffs the beer barrel that the brothers of
Ludwig are bringing close to him.
All humanity likes to get drunk! Are differences then all on the surface?
But even every surface gets hot
In the sun. It may be that the surface is where we are all alike!
But man and woman show that this isn't true.
We will get by, though. The train is puffing at the station
But the station isn't puffing at the train. This difference allows for a sense
of community
As when people feel really glad to have cats and dogs
And some even a few mice in the chimney. We are not alone
In the universe, and the diversity causes comfort as well as difficulty.
To be Italian takes at least half the day. To be Chinese seven-eighths of it.
Only at evening when Chang Ho, repast over, sits down to smoke
Is he exclusively human, in the way the train is exclusively itself when it is
in motion
But that's to say it wrongly. His being human is also his being seven-eighths
Chinese.
Falling in love one may get, say, twenty percent back
Toward universality, though that is probably all. Then when love's gone
One's Nigerianness increases, or one's quality of being of Nepal.
An American may start out wishing
To be everybody or that everybody were the same
Which makes him or her at least eighty percent American. Dixit Charles
Peguy, circa 1912,
"The good Lord created the French so that certain aspects of His creation
Wouldn't go unnoticed." Like the taste of wheat, sirrah! Or the Japanese.
So that someplace on earth there would be people who were
Writing haiku. But think of the human body with its arms
Its nose, its eyes, its brain often subject to alarms
Think how much energy, work, and time have gone into it,
To give us such a variegated kind of humanity!
It takes fifteen seconds this morning to be a man,
Twenty to be an old one, four to be an American,
Two to be a college graduate and four or five hours to write.
And what's more, I love you! half of every hour for weeks or months for
this;
Nine hundred seconds to be an admirer of Italian Renaissance painting,
Sixteen hours to be someone awake.
One is recognizably American, male, and of a certain generation. Nothing
takes these markers away.
Even if I live in Indonesia as a native in a hut, someone coming through
there
Will certainly gasp and say Why you're an American!
My optimism, my openness, my lack of a sense of history,
My distinctive facial muscles ready to look angry or sad or sympathetic
In a moment and not quite know where to go from there;
My assuming that anything is possible, my deep sense of superiority
And inferiority at the same time; my lack of culture,
Except for the bookish kind; my way of acting with the dog, come here
Spotty! God damn!
All these and hundreds more declare me to be what I am.
It's burdensome but also inevitable. I think so.
Expatriates have had some success with the plastic surgery
Of absence and departure. But it is never absolute. And then they must bear
the new identity as well.
Irish or Russian, the individuality in them is often mistaken for nationality.
The Russian finding a soul in the army officer, the Irishman finding in him
someone with whom he can drink.
Consider the Volga boatman? One can only guess
But probably about ninety percent Russian, eighty percent man, and thirty
percent boatman, Russian, man, and boatman,
A good person for the job, a Russian man of the river.
This dog is two-fifths wolf and less than one-thousandth a husband or
father.
Dogs resist nationality by being breeds. This one is simply Alsatian.
Though he may father forth a puppy
Who seems totally something else if for example he (the Alsatian) is attracted
To a poodle with powerful DNA. The puppy runs up to the Italian boys
who smile
Thinking it would be fun to take it to Taormina
Where they work in the hotel and to teach it tricks.
A Frenchwoman marvels at this scene.
The woman bends down to the dog and speaks to it in French.
This is hopeful and funny. To the dog all human languages are a perfumed
fog.
He wags and rises on his back legs. One Italian boy praises him, "Bravo!
canino!"
Underneath there is the rumble of the metro train. The boy looks at the
woman.
Life offers them these entangling moments as—who?—on a bicycle goes
past.
It is a Congolese with the savannah on his shoulders
And the sky in his heart, but his words as he passes are in French—
"Bonjour, m'sieu dames," and goes speeding off with his identity,
His Congolese, millennial selfhood unchanging and changing place.
- Variations at Home and Abroad, pg. 52-55
* * *
There is no way not to be excited
When what you have been disillusioned by raises its head
From its arms and seems to want to talk to you again.
You forget home and family
And set off on foot or in your automobile
And go to where you believe this form of reality
May dwell. Not finding it there, you refuse
Any further contact
Until you are back again trying to forget
The only thing that moved you (it seems) and gave what you forever will
have
But in the form of a disillusion.
Yet often, looking toward the horizon
There — inimical to you? — is that something you have never found
And that, without those who came before you, you could never have
imagined.
How could you have thought there was one person who could make you
Happy and that happiness was not the uneven
Phenomenon you have known it to be? Why do you keep believing in this
Reality so dependent on the time allowed it
That it has less to do with your exile from the age you are
Than from everything else life promised that you could do?
- Paradiso, pg. 67
June 7, 2010
I really liked "To Buddhism," "Proverb," "A Schoolroom in Haiti," and "Day and Night in Kuala Lumpur." But I really hated the title poem (I could barely finish it), and the others were okay. (It might have enjoyed the poems more if I wasn't trying to tune out Cinderella and fight the Sunday afternoon nap, but I don't think so.)
February 29, 2008
Quite elegant and thought-provoking. A couple poems ("Possible World," "Roma non basta una vita") left me baffled, but otherwise poignant and impressive, especially "Bel Canto."
May 11, 2019
Didn't really do anything. A lot of "I'm doing drugs and women are gorgeous." Lame.
August 1, 2011
I really liked only one poem in this book, To Buddhism... a few others came close, but fell flat before they ended or upon ending. These are uneven in style and tone, some experimental, some very short, some very long, and overall felt often like drafts that got scraped together or hadn't fit in other books and were randomly collected out of unpublished work for this posthumous volume. Then again, this being the 3rd of Koch's books I've read, (I adored New Addresses and really disliked Sun Out), this may be proof that on the whole, I'm not a Koch fan. Not entirely sure yet, but I bought a stack of his books on sale on Ebay at once, so I have at least one more to read before my personal verdict comes down one way or the other. Right now, leaning toward "nope, not my style".
June 20, 2015
There were good and redeeming poems in this collection, but the thing is kind of a mess. There's no structure other than "most of these poems have place names in the title." The autobio ramble at the end was about as pointless a piece of work as I've ever read from a respected poet. It reminded me a little of this recurring newscaster bit in a collection by Juan Felipe Herrera called Senegal Taxi. Not in content, but just in the drop in your stomach dread you have when you turn the page to see the thing keeps going.
January 28, 2008
aah...
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