One Train: Poems

by 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 "One Train May Hide Another," the "poems by ships at sea," the post-Apollinairean couplets of "A Time Zone," the Chinese poetry-influenced quatrains of "The First Step," and the hundred or so brief poems that together make up the poem "On Aesthetics."

"Kenneth Koch, a unique poet, has continued to explain his 'own idea of what made sense,' writing poems for forty years, without ceasing to be human and funny, without ever forgetting what poetry is. The result, for the reader, is an unusual delight... He is above all a love poet, therefore a serious one. His idea 'to do something with language / That has never been done before' (Days and Nights), expressed with an immodesty that is only apparent, is made good throughout." Frank Kermode

Genres: Poetry

74 pages, Hardcover

First published December 5, 1994

About the author

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.

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

One Train May Hide Another


In a poem, one line may hide another line,
As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.
That is, if you are waiting to cross
The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at
Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read
Wait until you have read the next line—
Then it is safe to go on reading.
In a family one sister may conceal another,
So, when you are courting, it's best to have them all in view
Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another.
One father or one brother may hide the man,
If you are a woman, whom you have been waiting to love.
So always standing in front of something the other
As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas.
One wish may hide another. And one person's reputation may hide
The reputation of another. One dog may conceal another
On a lawn, so if you escape the first one you're not necessarily safe;
One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs and on the Appia Antica
one tomb
May hide a number of other tombs. In love, one reproach may hide
another,
One small complaint may hide a great one.
One injustice may hide another—one colonial may hide another,
One blaring red uniform another, and another, a whole column. One bath
may hide another bath
As when, after bathing, one walks out into the rain.
One idea may hide another: Life is simple
Hide Life is incredibly complex, as in the prose of Gertrude Stein
One sentence hides another and is another as well. And in the laboratory
One invention may hide another invention,
One evening may hide another, one shadow, a nest of shadows.
One dark red, or one blue, or one purple—this is a painting
By someone after Matisse. One waits at the tracks until they pass,
These hidden doubles or, sometimes, likenesses. One identical twin
May hide the other. And there may be even more in there! The
obstetrician
Gazes at the Valley of the Var. We used to live there, my wife and I, but
One life hid another life. And now she is gone and I am here.
A vivacious mother hides a gawky daughter. The daughter hides
Her own vivacious daughter in turn. They are in
A railway station and the daughter is holding a bag
Bigger than her mother's bag and successfully hides it.
In offering to pick up the daughter's bag one finds oneself confronted by
the mother's
And has to carry that one, too. So one hitchhiker
May deliberately hide another and one cup of coffee
Another, too, until one is over-excited. One love may hide another love or
the same love
As when "I love you" suddenly rings false and one discovers
The better love fingering behind, as when "I'm full of doubts"
Hides "I'm certain about something and it is that"
And one dream may hide another as is well known, always, too. In the
Garden of Eden
Adam and Eve may hide the real Adam and Eve.
Jerusalem may hide another Jerusalem.
When you come to something, stop to let it pass
So you can see what else is there. At home, no matter where,
Internal tracks pose dangers, too: one memory
Certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about,
The eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities. Reading A
Sentimental Journey look around
When you have finished, for Tristram Shandy, to see
If it is standing there, it should be, stronger
And more profound and theretofore hidden as Santa Maria Maggiore
May be hidden by similar churches inside Rome. One sidewalk
May hide another, as when you're asleep there, and
One song hide another song; a pounding upstairs
Hide the beating of drums. One friend may hide another, you sit at the
foot of a tree
With one and when you get up to leave there is another
Whom you'd have preferred to talk to all along. One teacher,
One doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man
May hide another. Pause to let the first one pass.
You think, Now it is safe to cross and you are hit by the next one. It can be
important
To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.

* * *

Passing Time in Skansen


I went dancing in Stockholm at a public dancing place
Out-of-doors. It was a beautiful summer evening,
Summer as it could only come in Sweden in nineteen-fifty.
You had to be young to go there.
Or maybe you could be old. But I didn’t even see old people then.
Humanity was divided into male and female, American and other,
students and nonstudents, etcetera.
The only thing that I could say in Swedish
Was “Yog talar endast svenska”
Which meant I speak only Swedish, whereas I thought it meant
I DON’T speak Swedish.
So the young ladies, delighted, talked to me very fast
At which I smiled and understood nothing,
Though sometimes I would repeat
Yog talar endast svenska.
The evening ended, my part of it did, when they started to do folk dances.
I didn’t even know how to look at them, though I tried to for a while.
It was still light out though it was after eleven p.m.
I got on some kind of streetcar that eventually stopped near my hotel.

* * *

No One Else


I could never have had anything
Quite as radical as all this
Was by reason of having known it
Was very soon to go away
As that movie went away from the little theatre
Crossed by our liberal eyes

The other glass by the beam
Orphaning the house with its bulbs
Its way-walks like tusks
And the cut-up scenes
That straightened the glasses
The steam that shows is knowing everything
Is the fax to a fax of itself

At daytime water came unsyphoned
Spoofing our house
I wore a net necktie a button
Or trees with a breeze for a mouth
But nothing could prevent it
As nothing north or south

A bagpipe failed you like Elijah
Women came forth
Reading and tacking fishnets to a port
An old woman rode in a hansom
Beer was an invidious sport

Idiot agreement - and summer tide
These seemed like works to be taught
One kept walking
"Yours to tour but mine to seek from birth"
Cadillac wrecked
Forgotten and evenings
Boat-flat similar and signed: "No one else."

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 5 out of 5]

"When the elephants came to town
The dry cleaning establishments came with them."

"To be a bear, be active
In the bear world -
Fur, limbs, and claws.
Rampage. Stay. Mate.
Give birth to another bear."

[scarlettraces · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4.5)

[MerryMeerkat · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars. 

 

Library Copy.

 

This book is so sweet. The dinosaur is the child and the parents get angry but always say I love you. Bright colors, rhymes well over all very good.  This may become a favorite of Owen's but not yet.

[Jehan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, On Aesthetics.

[Louise Leonard · Rating 5 out of 5]

My Favorite Kenneth Koch poems -- and I have read a great many.