Kenneth Koch's Selected Poems, 1950–1982

Selected Poems, 1950–1982 , by Kenneth Koch. New York: Vintage, Random House, 1985.

Inevitably people seem bemused by humor, if not actively offended. Kenneth Koch has paid the dues of that situation in a number of ways. He's presumed to be confident in his laughter and to be certain of company concerning what amuses him. Neither is very true at all. No one of my generation remembers more accurately or more fully the seemingly incredible grounds for taste and right thinking that our youth had to deal with. Reading the present collection—and I've read him persistently—I recognize once again the heroism of his particularizing anger and the consummately learned abilities that have enabled him "to play a game" of such lonely condition and "to be serious" in a way so hidden from usual habits of recognition.

John Ashbery knows it well, and goes his own brilliant way. Frank O'Hara was its obvious genius also, but his characteristic casualness was more sympathetically open to the randomly met. Kenneth Koch was shier and therefore, paradoxically, seemed more secure. But if one read "Fate," for example, or the truly extraordinary "To Marina," some sense of the actuating experience and risk must come through.

In any case, my delight in this poetry and respect for what he's got done, as this partial selection demonstrates so substantially, are

very great. For one thing, he never forgot where we all began, so that in the poems there is often a wildly parodic judgment of the cul-de-sacs of that time, the dead ends then so touted. He notes that he could not take excerpts from Ko and The Duplications —which is a shame in that their singular force as narrative—Kenneth as master of any shaggy dog that ever lived—may therefore be passed over. But he is a very conscious formalist and knows that such pieces as might be taken out would forfeit the whole, like they say.

His odes have always been terrific, especially in times of one's own self-serious immolation. "On Beauty" answers a question that Keats left as an insistent solipsism, however movingly. Reading, one gets not only signs of the time but a time so accurate you could set your watch by it. So the future is where it always will be, and the past an active present at least that doesn't have to wait till Christmas to be opened.

Years ago Kenneth read at a public gathering a poem he knows I like especially, probably because it is less overtly, subversively, funny: "Sleeping with Women." The sounds, rhythms, so gather in that poem, so quietly, physically. I guess I felt entirely safe with it. Now I'd like to say how much I've felt about all he's written—that it's kept the faith immensely, and the human world its own significant fact, in mind, in heart, in common.