An ode to Kenneth Koch Jan. 26, 2013
Great irony played with the poem she posted today which has
almost nothing to do with what she intended.
This falls under “it’s a small world” category
Her poem – circa 2001 – looks back on her days at Columbia
and is an ode to one of the great literary professors Kenneth Koch with whom
she apparently studied, prior to his passing away in 2002.
I met him back in the late 1970s when his former student and
a close friend of mine, David Shapiro, introduced me to him when I was
attending William Paterson College.
I was an interloper, not one of the college’s literary elite
that included Joel L and Michael R, who Shapiro also introduced to Koch.
Michael R was the real poetic talent of the school, someone
who should have gone on to become one of the next generation of great American
poets, worthy of meeting Koch and later Koch’s friend, John Ashbery, to whom I was
also introduced.
In fact, one of the art professors introduced me to Ashbery,
claiming I was a great writer – which I certainly was not at the time.
Koch met Ashbery at Harvard, where he studied
writing with poet Delmore Schwartz, and later started a rebellious school of
New York poetry that many of those I studied with openly admired.
Professors at colleges like William Paterson tended to have
pet students, who they foresee as becoming great. I was a decade older than
other students at time and brought real life experience to the school and to my
art and so impressed some professors such as Dr. Grant, the head of the theater
department, who had be writing performance pieces for some of his programs or
more impressively, having Dr. Mollenkott – one of the leading feminist writers
of the 1970s and a well-established scholar of Milton, who compared me to
William Faulkner.
I was already leaning towards journalism (having come out of
the underground news of the late 1960s) and was often compared to the other
darling of the college, Glenn K, who Shapiro also introduced to Koch.
Her poem is largely a description of a Koch lecture she
apparently attended when she rushed through a door with her books “made
porcupine” with sticky notes,” on a day of patches of corduroy in blues, browns,
a green triumphant day that allowed her to precede him through the door, only
to have it get stuck. Another student, a physics student from MIT couldn’t get
it unstuck, neither could a call via cellphone (perhaps to maintenance), but
somehow it came unstuck by pushing it the other way.
In the poem, she expresses her admiration for the great poet,
whose long career at Columbia no doubt gave him an unassuming command of the
buildings – caressing and spanking the streets, perhaps an allusion to his
ability to cut through the artistic bullshit and get directly to the point.
His lecture took place in a room that was “punctuated” with
light patches, “pollocking” (a reference to Jason Pollack’s brilliant splash
technique of painting, describing his lecture as “violent atmospheric strokes,”
violent addressing youth in a series of interjections strung together. And she
ponders whether sour hot dogs too early or late in the day distract him, a possible
reference to a book of kids’ poetry Koch edited or perhaps the more sexual
reference made in his poetic exchange with Ashbery, or even the tradition of
Hotdog Days of Summer at Columbia.
Koch was notorious for his surprises during his lectures and
was admired by his students for his
unorthodox teaching techniques, such as making up impromptu poems to show the
relation of lines and rhymes.
She appears to quote a Koch poem criticizing many of the
traditional literary texts in which artistic altruism is “drowned in
high-falutin theories” that only breed their own “post-colonial species.”
Koch was a political poet like my friend Ginsberg but managed to
avoid the beat (nik) tag.
The poem goes on to show her disappointment about how the crowd of
students when the lights come on rush to the concession stand for snacks perhaps
missing out on the real message he was trying to convey.
The poem goes on to talk about the dollar fifty she spent got
traverse the 102 block trip and the six fight of stairs, the fragments all over
the page of every other minute of past, present future, perhaps referring to a
poem she may have offered him, a kind of love note,” and reference to the Paris
diagrams on the board, possibly a reference to Koch’s study of memory, how much
he remembered about Paris after having lived there, and how impossible it was
to remember all the details of a specific time and place.
Why she decided to post this poem now may have to do with Koch
himself and how in his later years, he looked back fondly at the past and the
people he had spent time with, and this sense of community that faded away over
time so that even memory could not be trusted.
For all of his admirers, in the end, he seems to have felt very
alone. This seems to be true of her as well.
Comments
Post a Comment