Things Go Better With Koch

...Dread drafted all with its atomic clink The Waste Land gave the time's most accurate data, It seemed and Eliot was the Great Dictator Of Literature One haidlv dared to wink Or fool around in any war in poems And Critics pounded out awful jeroboams To irony ambiguity, and tension...

...And the Cold War like Samson Agonistes Went roughly on and we were at the brink No time for Whitsuntides or Corpus Christis...

...Writers & Writing THINGS GO BETTER WITH KOCH BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL EIGHT YEARS ago Kenneth Koch, then 61, looked back with amusement at that long-gone era when he first began to establish himself as one of America's funniest poets It was the time, it was the nineteen fifties When Eisenhower was President, I think...

...And other things I do notwish to mention Characteristically, Koch (whose name is pronounced like the country's favorite cola) put the postwar literary culture m a satirical nutshell the pervasive fear of Communism and the H-bomb, T S Eliot ruling artistic tastes as if he were Charlie Chaplin's caricature of Adolf Hitler, and the tyranny of such men as Allen Tate, Ivor Winters and Randall Jarrell, laying down the law not only about what novelists and poets should write but the style they should employ Yet, as we recognize now, all sorts of subversive verse movements were fomenting in those days In Boston, future Confessional poets were sitting at the feet of Robert Lowell, while from Columbia University and San Francisco the Beats began to issue their Whitmamc manifestos At the same time, a cotene of young art enthusiasts—including Koch, John Ashbery and the late Frank O'Hara—were busily forging what came to be known as the New York School of poetry They undermined artistically fashionable solemnity and seriousness with celebrations of the ephemeral and silly, opening the door to impulse Today, Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg are looking pretty hoary to the students of Generation X, and Eliot seems as remote as the late Victonan authors The joke is that those bards of the passing scene, Ashbery and Koch, continue to flourish Indeed, today they appear to exemplify the tenets of postmodernism Koch's latest volume of verse, One Train (Knopf, 74 pp , $20 00), and new collection, On the Great Atlantic Ramway Selected Poems 1950-1988 (Knopf, 324 pp , $25 00), convey his perennial freshness in at least two senses of that word novelty and cheekmess He has a subtle grasp of the nuances of language as well as a gift for hilarious parody, and behind his casual, friendly manner there is formidable technique andlearn-uig The workings of Koch's mind can be gleaned from a gloss in Rainwav on an early poem, "The Brassiere Factory' "On the ship that took me to France for the first time, for lifeboat drill we were lined up on deck beside a crate with the big word BRASSIERES printed on it These brassieres of course were life jackets, I hadn't realized till then the euphemistic quality of the English word (something to put your arm through) The phrase 'Arm in arm we fled the brassiere factory' came into my mind then and the rest of the poem about a year later' When Koch exploits the light side of his imagination the effects are often surreal, and in the more successful cases can be most amusing Three of his "Four Short Plays," for instance, read like the craziest sort of method acting exercises In one, "seven actresses, impersonating hens and chickens, should while retaining then human modesty and dignity, act out m as chicken-like a way as possible the drama of the lost feed [each fowl suspects the others of causing this calamity] Their accusations should be lather flat and rather general, accusations which could be leveled at anybody aboutjust about anything Chicken life is not thought to be very differentiated Readers who used to chortle over Robert Benchley's synopses of fictive operas will enjoy thesejeux d 'espi it, too One Tiain offers fivejaunty "Poems by Ships at Sea," employing the various styles and themes liners and men-of-war might choose to compose in Koch even pokes fun at fellow poets occasionally Though an admirer of William Carlos Williams, who in fact was one of his spiritual mentors, he willfully skewers the older man's much-anthologized apology for eating someone else's plums ("This Is Just to Say") with a series of wild burlesques They culminate in a sly reference to Williams' penchant for womamzmg Last evening we went dancing and I broke vow leg Forgive me I was clumsy and I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor'" At other points, Koch imitates Max Beerbohm's marvelous spoofs of ponderous historical dramas Period figures mill about the stage, referring to all the textbook-important events of the day, to the accompaniment of such offstage noises as "sounds of heavy shipping " This whimsy is not everyone's cup of tea, but I confess it to be mine How regularly does one laugh out loud reading a book of contemporary poetry9 The more senous aspects of Koch's gift also focus on unlikely juxtapositions He relishes associations and ideas that lie buned in the familiar things we say without thinking The warning, "One Train May Hide Another," glimpsed on a sign at a railway crossing in Kenya, evokes a catalog of things that may conceal and be concealed "So one hitch hiker/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 lingering behind " By the poem's end, a kind of philosophy emerges, equally applicable to reading as to managing one's life "When you come to something, stop to let it pass/So you can see what else is there " This advice, however tongue-in-cheek it may be, is not meant to be flippant Out of the poem's playfulness emerges the wisdom of the sentiment it espouses Transformations have always fascinated Koch In his two epics, Ko, 01 A Season on Earth (1960) and The Duplications (1977), the characters undergo startling alterations in being and substance Now, in One Train, he pays homage to a principal influence (Ovid) by retelling, m galloping meter, the story of the girl Io, changed into a cow by Jove A footnote to the tale, likewise in verse, advances the hypothesis that such myths intrigue us because they reflect our sensations upon "falling in love"—which we prize despite their transmogrifying us "In fact, we are so changed by love that what we recognize/When looking in a mirror is a pitiable disguise /We are transformed' It is a horror, and it is a glory" The clearest literary depiction of this feeling, the footnote adds comes in Ovid's Metamorphoses where "The clouds, the woods, streams, beasts, and birds all life's surrounding creatures,/Are what we shall be ?ere and are, and bear our loving featuies " The explanation, a delightful insight into the Roman poet, provides an invaluable key to some of Koch's more surreal work EARLY IN HIS CAREER he frequently invoked the banter and doings of "the heart of a circle of friends" (to use Doroth} Wordsworth's potent phrase)—the writers and painters who made up the New York School of the 1950s He still reveits to this mode now and then, as in the nostalgic "A Time Zone,' rec-ollecting his salad days in the city But Koch is, first and fore-most, a love poet That is apparent in "One Train May Hide Another" and "Io,' in the poignant yet sidesplitting "Talking to Patnzia' (from the new volume, too), and in the bittersweet "To Marina," addressed to a former lover who deeply inspired him The last lyric, and the beautiful verses memorializing Koch's late wife, Janice, give us a rueful commentary on his own poetic development those moments when life and art converged for him, and the times he tried to substitute literature for an unsatisfying reality William Carlos Williams proclaimed,' No ideas but in things " Koch might answer, "No ideas but in exploration" My writing now u as moie investigation Oh, better yet, a soi t of archaeology Set out to find the great civilization That once existed mavbe anapology Also,for what I couldn tdo Sensation Was what it rode on action its theology?Away from all that ti oubled you and me so, In a sort of poeticparadiso Koch often bonows the swashbuckling ottava nma favored by Lord Byron Its conversational lilt, and the smart-alecky humor of many of the rhymes ("me so/paradiso"), suit his breezy style And like Byron, he excels at combining satire and sentiment, speculation and fast-moving plot One could read Ko as his Don Juan, indeed, were one to compare Koch to any poet of another century, Byron would be the obvious choice Love and its shortcomings fuel the imaginations of both men, and both convince us they have something genuine and appealing to say on the matter My single criticism of One Train is that it is too short—a mere 13 poems (even if a few have several parts) One may compensate for this paucity by dipping into On the Gieat Atlantic Rainwav Although over the years Koch has written in an astounding variety of forms, he ties everything together in the best postmodern way, by relentless self-reference Thus a recent lyric will take as its subject the composition of an earlier one In a grave poet this might seem unbearably tedious, but Koch aims to entertain, and he does He is, very simply, a joy to read...