About the Author:
Kenneth Koch has published many volumes of poetry, including New Addresses, Straits and One Train. He was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1995, in 1996 he received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry awarded by the Library of Congress, and he received the first Phi Beta Kappa Poetry award in November of 2001. His short plays, many of them produced off- and off-off-Broadway, are collected in The Gold Standard: A Book of Plays. He has also written several books about poetry, including Wishes, Lies, and Dreams; Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?; and, most recently, Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry. He taught undergraduates at Columbia University for many years. He passed away in 2002.
From Publishers Weekly:
Koch passed away this summer at 77 after a battle with leukemia, having recently produced some of the strongest work of his career: 2000's New Addresses (an NBA finalist). These two volumes-one of new work and one of poems that preceded his 1960 debut Ko, or A Season on Earth-show Koch at his various best. Sun Out catches Koch assembling the dictions (and plentiful exclamation points) he would later synthesize into his distinctive hall of linguistic mirrors, yet these '50s poems, like those of Koch's New York School brethren Ashbery and O'Hara, speak remarkably directly to our own "circumstances the Afghanistan flowers/ The feet under the hue of/ The mid-Atlantic." The long poem "When the Sun Tries to Go On" looks back to Stevens's "The Comedian as the Letter C," and forward to O'Hara's "Second Avenue." A Possible World's one-act verse plays, one-line poems, autobiographical reminiscences and long, mock-Byronic narratives display Koch's verve and light touch, but are unmistakably colored by requiem. The opening "Bel Canto" gives thanks "For love itself, and friendship its co-agent" in the ottava rima of Koch's long poem Ko, while "Variations on Home and Abroad" returns to Ko's thoughts about national origins. "To Buddhism" harks back to last year's New Addresses, and introduces the short poems about European and Asian travel that comprise much of the book. Those poems combine autobiographical nostalgia with a trademark whimsy: "The Acropolis has a uniform/ That no schoolboy can wear because it is invisible./ 'It goes to the Periclean School!' " The title poem's typographical festival pays Mallarm an homage to "Mondo universal collectivity/ Mondo aggrandizement/ Mondo nothing left to teach," while the concluding "A Memoir," finds, wryly, "Someone is singing/ On the landing below/ The arc strike of a pen on paper/ Doesn't put one in the show." Koch, as these two books amply demonstrate, most definitely remains in our collective performance. (Oct. 19)
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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