KENNETH KOCH

at the Signet Society

October 6, 1998

The poet Kenneth Koch '48 arrived at Harvard on Tuesday without much fanfare. A few posters in the Yard, most of them already covered by ads for IOP functions and offers for cheap futons, publicized his lecture that afternoon at the Graduate School of Education (GSE); his evening reading at the Signet went, with the exception of a few notices sent to student email lists, almost entirely unpromoted. Somehow it did not seem to matter: his lecture at the GSE drew a large audience, perhaps a hundred people, and the small space for his reading at the Signet filled up so quickly that additional seating had to be brought in to accommodate the crowd.

This kind of unnoticed popularity has long been the status quo for Koch, who, despite having published fifteen books of poems, several plays, two works of fiction and three very influential volumes on teaching poetry, despite his long-standing membership in the famous "New York School" of poets, and despite his decades-long association with many of the most significant names in American literature, has never been of great interest to the academic critical establishment. His new books, when they appear, are readily available and widely read, but they never seem to generate much critical dialogue, to the point that his New York School peers John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler have out-grown him as literary figures. He is too prominent a participant in literary history to be thought of as only a minor poet, but too slight a critical icon to be considered a major one. It's strange--even after winning the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1995 and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize in 1996, Koch still seems to be a poet whose presence on the literary scene is undermatched by the attention paid to it.

Of course, none of this seemed to be bothering Koch when he made his entrance at the GSE Tuesday afternoon. His lecture, held in the Askwith Educational Forum and titled "The Pleasures of Writing and Reading Poetry," was comprised largely of material from his recent book on verse, Making Your Own Days, and showed him from the start to be a delightful figure, his manner relaxed, forthright, a little absent-minded; his delivery earnest but clever; his lanky form animated in a way that made him seem very much younger than his seventy odd years.

Arguing for a return to pleasure as the focal point of the poetic experience, Koch dismissed the postmodern literary theory which has been the center of academic pedagogy for the last three decades: "As a primary approach to a work of art, it doesn't make any more sense than as a primary approach to swimming." He held instead that a simpler, more casual approach was a better way into the poetic experience, claiming that "writing poetry should be a little like being at a party. You dance, you drink, you flirt, and you don't have to come to any conclusions."

Throughout, Koch bantered with himself and entertained the audience with a decidedly quirky wit. "D.H. Lawrence compared puberty to being crucified on a cross of sex," he said at one point. "Well, it's not that bad, but then Lawrence always took things rather hard." Later, when questioned by an audience member about poetry's ability to help students learn to spell, Koch snapped back, "You don't teach ballet to improve someone's posture."

The lecture lasted more than two hours, and dragged toward the end when Koch displayed the Wallace Stevens poem "Anecdote of the Jar" on an overhead projector to demonstrate some keys to reading poetry. Alarmingly, he turned Stevens' very sophisticated poem into a cartoon,delighting in the story of "this magic little jarwhich conquers Tennessee," and, while allowingthat more nuanced readings of the poem werepossible, he seemed so strongly by temperament toresist such readings that he effectively arguedagainst them. The key to enjoying this poem, heheld, lay in the music of its sounds and thesilliness of its story, and there was analmost-but-not-quite implied "and nowhere else"following his critique. The lecture ended havinglasted just a little too long.

Some of the sensibility common to the work ofthe New York School poets was learned from thevisual arts, Abstract Expressionism in particular,and much of the work Koch read at the SignetTuesday evening exhibited what Robert Creeley hascalled "that lovely, usefully uncluttereddirectness of perception" shared between New Yorkpainting and New York poetry. Following a verynice introduction by Signet president ScottRothkopf '99, he took his seat at the front of alovely, ornate old room in the Signet Societybuilding, and, sipping occasionally from a glassof Coke, read for nearly an hour, following thatdirectness of perception through poems fromseveral of his recent works, including theaward-winning One Train.

His performance was exceptional; Koch hasmastered the art of bringing out the subtleties oftone and changes of mood in a poem withoutoverdramatizing it, remaining respectful to thepoem without making it monotonous. Particularlyeffective was the poem "Straits," which was alsothe best poem he read, shifting rapidly betweenscenes of political revolution, literary history,sixteenth-century maritime exploration, musicalperformance, conversation about bankers andphilosophical abstractions about love. Kochcaptured each shift with subtle variations of thepitch and intensity of his voice, and brought theelements together at the conclusion of the poemwith great lyrical skill. His subtle intensitymade the line "Do you remember the idea ofrevolution?" ominous, memorial and melancholy allat once.

Some of the work itself became tedious--Kochhas a tendency to fall into endless strings ofparallel declarative statements, such as in "OneTrain Can Hide Another," where he cycles throughdozens of variations of the title's formula, "oneX can hide another"; it's easy to see how he canwork so well with children, handing outassignments such as "a poem in which every firstline begins with 'I wish..."--but the readingitself was never disappointing. Koch was charming,and funny; even when his work became homiletic, orsubstituted a joke for real development, he kepthis audience thoughtful, alert and entertained.

Still, the tendency to de-intellectualizepoetry, which made his afternoon lecture soalternately refreshing and frustrating, wasdetectable in the platitudes, the easy jokes andthe strings of parallel declarations whichinterfered in many poems with the directperception, the simple truths honed fromcomplexity, so present in "Straits." Koch seemsvery much to want not only his poetry, butpoetry to be accessible to everyone, andalmost immediately accessible: in reducing his ownwork to homilies and jokes, Koch showed the sametemperament that allowed him to turn the Stevenspoem into a cartoon, sacrificing what hederisively referred to as "meaning" for what heseemed to consider counter to it, "pleasure."

This seems an unsatisfactory pairing ofopposites; surely it is not enough to save poetryfrom the theorists if one immediately turns itover to the greeting-card industry. Koch'saversion to the New Critical attitude that thelinguistic surfaces of poems necessarily mask a"hidden meaning" is well-founded--and there is noreason to think that Koch himself would sell theMuses to Hallmark if given the chance--but iftaken too far in the direction Koch's attitudesuggests, it jeopardizes any continuingintellectual interest in poetry at all.Meaning, too, has its claims.

Koch's position here may partially explain thecritical indifference his work has met inmainstream academia: if he construes the critic'smain task as "finding meaning," and his own poetictask as "providing pleasure," Koch may simply bewriting a verse whose place is elsewhere; as hedefines the terms, he may have no desire to givethe critic anything to find. There is certainlynothing wrong with a poetry of the enjoyable,particularly given that Koch's stance is a rareone in contemporary American literature. Despitetheir flaws, his poems and his attitude can feellike a breath of fresh air, especially when theyare presented as winningly as he presented themduring his visit.

Following his reading, the Signet hosted adinner for Koch, toward the end of which he wasasked what he thought about the current state ofAmerican poetry. He seemed surprised by thequestion, and blinked in thought before answering."Well," he said finally. "I suppose Americanpoetry is right where it needs to be. I thinkAmerican poetry will be just fine." What acharming optimism--and whatever is true forAmerican poetry, it seems lucky to think that Kochmight just as well have been speaking for himself.Courtesy of KnopfOLD SCHOOL: Teacher-Poet KennethKoch