Straits: Poems

by Kenneth Koch

Kenneth Koch continues to expand the range of what is possible to do in poetry. His title poem is a stirring collection of disconnected and connected sentences on such themes as love, politics, and the exploration of sub-polar seas. "Vous etes plus beaux que vous ne pensiez" is a series of bright, rapid sketches of the lives of ten artists and writers. Writing in a variant of the style of the eighteenth-century poet James Thomson, Koch revives an old genre--praise of the seasons--with his own characteristic mixture of clarity and sensuous excitement. A group of twenty-five poems called "Songs from the Plays" creates a new songs written for plays that don't exist but from which plays might be imagined or constructed. "My Olivetti Speaks" is perhaps Koch's clearest and wittiest meditation on the nature of poetry itself. The themes of time and change in individual lives are given an unusual look in "Study of Time" and the Villon-like "Ballade."

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Hardcover

First published May 5, 1998

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

[Madison Santos]

i will scream the virtues of kenneth koch at anyone with ears til i am cold and alone in the ground.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is nothing sacred? The book, the sky,
The women on the blue and red screen
Painted in Japan about five hundred years ago. Someone
Has tipped the screen over. I'll set it back up
Putting all the emotion in the thing felt at the thing done. A mirror can be clearer
Than a dog, but a small dog can run. Sacred
Is perhaps the relation that caused
My daughter to be born. Yet is she sacred?
She is a woman with someone's arm
Around her shoulder. She is of this world
The way that pipe is, that goes from the well to the house,
And the way the grass is that at this season leaps about up and under it,
And as the cigarette is that the gardener throws in the grass.
Has it a sacred flame? The pipe going to the house. Later, who knows?
The sacred is the sacrament. And it is what
We wanted once to be -
Give me some more coffee,
Some more milk, some more bread, some more breakfast!
Is nothing new sacred? The screen is standing up.
My daughter and her baby come for tea. The baby comes for milk.
They're here in time.

- The Human Sacrement, pg. 3

* * *

Botticelli lived
In a little house
In Florence
Italy
He went out
And painted Aphrodite
Standing on some air
Above a shell
On some waves
And he felt happy
He
Went into a café
And cried
I'll buy
Everybody a drink
And for me
A punt e mes
Celebrities thronged
To look at his painting
Never had anyone seen
So beautiful a painted girl
The real girl he painted
The model
For Aphrodite sits
With her chin in her hand
Her hand on her wrist
Her elbow
On a table
And she cries,
"When I was
Naked I was believed,
Will be, and am."

- Vous Êtes Plus Beaux Que Vous Ne Pensiez, 1, pg. 13

* * *

One bird deserves another. One white and orange tabletop.
One twenty-five-year-old deserves another
Twenty-five-year-old. One harlequin deserves another harlequin. One rich cocktail of flames deserves another
And one extravagant boast: I am the Obvious. My hunch is me.
One brain deserves a brain that has been hatched in the tropics
One broken heart a heart that has been differently broken.
It seems to me time to get something done. But if I get in the car
I am forty-five years old and you are nineteen. We are
Not going anywhere. The car won’t start. And if I get out
I am sixty years old. I look around but don’t see you there.
I expect it’s a good presumption that you are coming back,
But hurry. If I go into the drugstore
I am thirty-three. The boy behind the counter
Is not a girl, but we discuss national politics anyway.
That fucking Nixon. Or That damned unholy war! If I read a magazine
At the stand, on the other side of the drugstore,
I am twenty-five, and you, dressed with some hoop-la, come in.
I am sixteen when I am lying on the floor, with you beside me
Reading a newspaper. One stone man
Deserves one stone woman, and one glad day of being alone
And in good health. If at seventy
I get up and close the door,
I am fourteen and you are twenty. I’ll put on
My blue shirt. My white tie, I’m twenty, twenty-one. Now we are eighty.
One five o’clock sunny day
Deserves another. We are both fifty-four. You pick up the bar that holds the door
And hit it as hard as you can at twenty. The floor deserves the floor
Of heaven that is a ceiling as we see it. One coldly affected group
Deserves another. We both very much enjoy engaging in sports.
You fall down, I pick you up. I am eight
You are sixty-six. Today is your birthday. You stand opening a cantaloupe. You say, Let’s
Try another! You are sitting in the car,
You are twenty-three, I am forty-four and singing a Spanish song.
If she is nine years old, then I am fifty.
The birthdays come and go talking of Prospero. Good-bye, house!
Do you remember when we used to live in you
And be forty-eight years old? One age deserves another. One time deserves another time.

- Study of Time, pg. 23

[joel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highlights from this late-era Koch collection he wrote in his 70s:

“The Seasons” - updates the 18th century James Thomson poem, blank verse and all, with the incredible opening lines: "Now pizza units open up, and froth / streams forth on beers in many a frolic bar / new-opened-up by April"

“My Olivetti Speaks” - Koch's ars poetica ("Birds don't sing, they explain.")

The titular “Straits” - dedicated to Shklovsky and pulls language from, at the very least, Third Factory and the Mayakovsky book, in long, paratactical, stretching lines