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Once more with feeling, from the late Kenneth Koch

Sunday, December 01, 2002

By Kirk Weixel

When Kenneth Koch died in July, he was eulogized as a principal member of the New York School of poetry and as an innovative teacher of poetry writing.

As a teacher, Koch (pronounced coke) was unparalleled. In the late 1960s, he taught poetry to Manhattan children in the first six grades of P.S. 61. Determined to feed the imagination of his students, Koch gave them exercises that encouraged them to trust the images they conjured up and to see poetry as a playful arrangement of those images, not as a rigid pattern of rhyme, rhythm and meter.

	A Possible World: Poems By Kenneth Koch Knopf ($24)

In 1970, he published "Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry," a record of his students' success and an instruction manual that has become a staple for writing teachers.

A tireless promoter of poetry, Koch wrote three other books on the craft, including "I Never Told Anybody: Teaching Poetry Writing in a Nursing Home."

After graduating from Harvard, Koch joined his undergraduate friends John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara in New York in the 1950s. There, the poets drew their inspiration from painters Jackson Pollock and Larry Rivers and composer John Cage, among others.

Although Koch never achieved the international stature of his friends, he was a prolific author, writing eight volumes of prose, six collections of plays and more than 20 books of poetry. At the time of his death, his publisher was preparing two additional collections, including this collection of new poems.

In the course of his writing life, Koch had supporters and detractors, and this collection is unlikely to change many minds.

Previous readers of Koch's poems will recognize the range of verse -- from ottava rima to stream of consciousness -- and the penchant for literary parody and puns.

Some of Koch's best-known humorous poetry consists of parodies, and he is up to his old tricks here. Frost's famous definition of the word home in "The Hired Man" is jokingly applied to accommodations:

A hotel is where when you go there they have to let you in
If a room is available and you can convince them you can pay.

Koch acknowledges that the life he writes about is "an absurd one,"

As if some crazy person with a knife
Cut up and made a jigsaw puzzle of a life

He has some regrets: that he wasn't a better husband and father, for one. He writes to "clarify my present disposition." If life is "hardly possible," it is possible nevertheless.

How well he writes concerns him, too. In "Bel Canto," Koch expresses a wish to do things unheard of, to sing ...

... songs with such a broad parameter
That seamstresses would stare, forget to sew things,
Astronauts quit the sky, athletes the stadium
To hear them, and the rest of what they hear be tedium.

If the collection never reaches that parameter, it offers readers the trained voice of a well-traveled singer in his final performance. Those who have for decades listened to that voice with pleasure will appreciate hearing it one more time.

Kirk Weixel is professor of English at St. Francis University in Loretto, Pa., where he teaches writing and literature.