Koch Redux Jan. 28, 2013
As with many of her complex poems, the Ode to Kenneth Koch
about a lecture he gave back in 2001 needs a more thorough review than the one
I gave a couple of days ago.
Again, it is unclear exactly when she wrote this piece. I’m
assuming it is something she penned back in 2001 after she attended the lecture
at Columbia University.
The poem was written as a tribute to him.
An already award-winning poet at one of the most prestigious
universities in the world, she may or may not have actually given the poem to
Koch as testimony to her ability to imitate his style.
Koch saw no harm in imitating poets you like, and, in fact,
believed it was essential to eventually finding a voice of your own.
He may even have been very impressed by her parody of him.
By parody, I mean in the higher, literary sense, not the buffoonery
the everyday public might think of such as the National Lampoon or Mad Magazine.
Literary parody means adopted the style of another writer,
using her or her techniques as a way of better understanding the original artist,
in this case, paying homage to one of the greatest poets of the latter part of
the 20th Century.
While I’m not fan of Koch the way she clearly is, or for
that matter, Koch’s closest friend, John Ashbery, all of my fellow writers at
college adored him. As a result, I read a significant amount of his works over
the years and recognize her genius and the equal genius of her parody, her use
of mutual imagery, language, and even structure to create a Koch-like piece of
literature reflecting his appearance on campus a year before he passed away.
She is not parodying Koch’s early works written prior to 1954
– which are more or less language poems, surrealist paring of odd words and
phrases in a kind of nonsense poetry, more word music than poetry of meaning.
Her parody seems to focus on his mid and later work, where
he became much intensely political and began to explore deep sexual themes,
although never abandoning his work play aspect, while incorporating narrative
aspects into his surrealist game playing.
The style of her ode to Koch is so dramatically different
from the many poems she’s posted on her site over the last year that it becomes
very obvious she is imitating another style, and she has included a number of cultural
references in common with Koch. The tribute is unmistakable.
Literary parody is extreme difficult, especially for a
brilliant poem like her, because in order to create such a parody you have to
suppress your own literary voice and surrender to the voice of the poet you are
trying to imitate.
She seems to have accomplished this on a number of levels,
in content, word play as well as the rhythm. While this is clearly her poem and
not a cheap imitation of Koch, it is crafted in such a way that it makes use of
many of his techniques and themes, indicating that she had more than just a superficial
knowledge of his body of work.
She opens her poem with an image of light and color that is
very Koch-like, “Patches of Corduroy, blues, browns and the day was green, when
mine was triumphant.”
She is using color references she rarely uses in her other poems,
but which are consistently used by Koch in his work, such as “the stars were green
and blue,” or in another poem, the sun shines down through violet besprinkled
fields,” or in another, “fresh green seems to spawn there.” Koch appears to be
in love with primary colors, so we get the wind blowing in from the “big blue
seas,” while fields are full of white and green. As in the opening lines of her
poem, Koch often comments on the color and attributes of light.
Her poem also uses an interesting metaphor in describing her
pile of book that looks like a porcupine with sticky notes. Koch also uses metaphors that turn inanimate
objects into animals, as well as making animals and other living things into
things that are inanimate: “a red Chinese giraffe that imitates a rose,” “America
is an elephant,” or “the bench you are sitting on is made of a boa constrictor.”
Her tribute to Koch is a lot like Koch’s tribute to Walt
Whitman (48 States) where he uses Whitman’s structure but contains many of his
own odd-word couplings, and sometimes even incorporates his own version of Hopkins’
sprung verse, even though that particular work is free form.
Like Koch, she uses a bit of internal rime to create the Koch-like
effect: The stuck door the MIT kid couldn’t unstick.”
The stuck door metaphor seems to imply more than just an
event that took place that day, but a larger vision of legacy, the newbie poet
with the text full of sticky notes in a rite of passage in which she nearly
gets stuck until she took “a turn in an uncommon direction,” which someone
averted disaster – bringing them back to good times.
Clearly there is more implied in this passage than simply a
stuck door and may well refer to Yeats’ “Doors of Perception,” and her need to
somehow alter herself, take an uncommon turn to get back on the right track.
Although Koch was versed in nearly all the great poets, he
had a particular fondness for Yeats and Whitman, and is often seen as a more
academic version of the Ginsberg beat poets.
Koch reflects this uncommon turn in several of his later
poems such as when he wrote, “I was with you again, but we were going in
different directions. We met and started to go in the same direction, and this
is the foundation of (our) emotions.”
Her poem makes reference to Koch’s familiarity with the campus
where he taught for many years: Unassuming command of the buildings,” then goes
on to reflect as aspect of his character as his “feet simultaneously caressing
and spanking the streets.”
There is something sadomasochistic about this line,
reflecting his sometimes-cruel treatment of students, while also alluding to
some of his writings about love.
“When pleasure is mild, you should enjoy it,” he wrote in a
very his poem called General Rules. “When it is violent, permit it as far as
you can enjoy it.”
Koch goes much further in his brilliant satire on The Art of
Love, where he gives instruction on how to meet, treat and make love to women.
“Thank you, parents of loving and passive girls, even a
little bit masochistic one,” he wrote, offering detailed instructions on how to
tie up and do other such semi-violent acts.
“With the girl tied up this way, you want his her up and
down if you like to do that,” he wrote, then goes into greater detail still.
He talks about how to meet women in the college cafeteria
and suggests pretending to be a poet or a professor.
“What matters is getting the woman alone so you can speak
your desires,” he wrote, and in another poem, said, “life is full of horrors
and hormones.”
In several poems, he speculated on how to win the affection
of a girl half his age, or even one fifth his age (since by then, he was an old
man).
Her poem seems to reflect this violent sexuality in Koch, using words like “punctuated,”
or phrases like “Violent atmospheric strokes,” and how “violently” he addressed
his students in a serious of interjections.
Although seen as academic as compared to Ginsberg and the Beats,
Koch rebelled against the masters of his craft, something she reflects in her
poem when she quotes his criticism of dusty academics, the unproved truths of
the “could be’s” and the “altruism drowned in highfalutin theories.”
Koch – especially in his later work – challenged many of the
masters of poetry. Poets are supposed to be mad, he said, although concluded
Blake was not. Wordsworth could be “boring”, and Whitman’s corrections of his
own work were “terrible.”
“Pride in one’s self and the knowledge society approves of
one without getting lousier and lousier and depleted of talent,” he wrote.
As quoted in her poem, much altruism is to propagate their
own colonial species, suggesting many successful poets, who pretending to be
socially aware are coopted by the system.
Koch understood poetry is much larger than any one poet, a
field so vast that each poet needed to focus on a particular aspect.
“Each poet shares only a portion of the vast territory of
rhyme,” Koch wrote.
Koch also understood that poetry was craft, poets needed to
work at, and that instant success has a way of destroying the poem.
“What power is there in having done something once, and then
knowing instinctively it is all for eternity,” he wrote in another poem.
What Koch said during that lecture may well have been
spellbinding for her as to inspire disappointment when the lights came up and
the attendees were ushered to the concession stand, leaving some to remember
most about the whole affair was how someone spilled their soda.
Her poem goes on to talk about the weekend chores she had to
do, and the bus fare she paid to get to the campus, reflecting some of his own
poems about his travels from his one-time apartment on West 10th Street.
In a classic Koch-like word reversal, her poem refers to this
lecture as her “past, present and future in thought, claiming words like his
are worth a thousand pictures.
Koch played off the same cliché when referring to the word pictures
of poetry are worth more than a 1,000 words (I think he said, 10,000 actually.)
Her poem painted him as a painter, creating images on those
who listened, an apt description, since Koch himself played off many master
pieces, especially in some of his poems in which he referred to his favorite
city, Paris – the diagrams of which, she in her poem, were in the lecture hall.
As radical a poet as Koch was, he knew his craft, and even
some of his poems were offering advice on how to create great poems.
“In a poem, one line might hide another,” he wrote. “One
sentence hides another as well.”
One life may hide another.
“One friend may hide another. You sit at the foot of a tree with
one when you get up to leave there is another whom you’d have preferred to talk
to all along, one teacher. It can be important to have waited, at least, a moment
to see what was already here.”
For her, this experience seeing this poet at this time was
one of those moment, this moment “that says the seriousness of the hand that
draws us,” she wrote.
Comments
Post a Comment