Selected Poems: 1950-82

by Kenneth Koch

239p white paperback with red lettering and illustration to front cover, minor wear to covers, binding tight, hinges intact, red page edges, pages clean with minor discolouration, black and white plates clean and bright, used but in very good condition, signed by Kenneth Koch to friend of the author Nadia Fusini, this copy published in the year 1985

Genres: Poetry

236 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

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

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd enjoyed what few of Kenneth Koch's poems I'd read before a couple weeks ago, and this selection didn't disappoint. Calling it a "selection" barely does justice to it. Looking at the table of contents for his collected poems, it appears that this book is more like a "collected poems with a few omissions." I usually balk at "selected" and prefer to read individual collections in their entirety, but this is what the library had, and there's barely anything missing from the five books this covers.

Anyway, after all that, I particularly liked the poems from Thank You, but there's a lot to enjoy in the rest of the book, too. Some of the longer poems didn't quite hold my attention, but I liked them more than I disliked them, and look forward to reading more of Koch's work.