Mentor Poet: Kenneth Koch - Essay Example

Mentor Poet Kenneth Koch Poetry provides an antenna for the age. Shakespeare's plays were applauded even during the premiere because the audience could place and respond to their allusions with authority. To be like a man of renaissance took much learning and a rare sensibility. Perhaps the audience was as enlightened as the playwright himself! Times have changed. Both in the US and UK, poetry schools, each with its own protocol, have come and gone. American poetry from Emerson and Thoreau to Plath and Lowell have established a tradition of its own in line with the nation's own ideology of freedom, equality and the pursuit of happiness. Although most of the pioneering efforts of the early writers till the period of the American Renaissance (1836-1865) was aimed at establishing a neo literary tradition, it was the literature of Modernism (1912-1940) that strove to redefine the established canons and trace new tracks. The literature of the Postwar America (1940-1975) saw a generation of poets as diverse as Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, A R Ammons and Adrienne Rich. Perhaps the new trends that entered this era were marked by an acceptance of ethnicity and a rejection of poetry as a pale English descendant. An increased regional diversity also entered American poetry after World war II. Strong ecological concerns, celebration of the American landscape and critiquing the American society were the other major areas touched upon. Various schools of poetry came up after the war to defy the old and define the new. Of these the 'New York school' was particularly famous. The main poets of this school are John Ashberry (b.1927) and Kenneth Koch (1925-2002). "They turned inward to a spontaneous recording of imaginative moments and wished above all to be amusing, intimate, secular, and colloquial - a contrast with both the political fierceness of Pound and the elegiac solemnity of Eliot1." A rare exuberance characterizes Koch's poetry. His experience as a teacher, playwright and composer endows it with genuine versatility too. His poems have been accepted more for their verve than for their content. In an interview by David Kennedy, Koch confesses that 'it seems true enough that there is a good deal of irony in this world a good deal of deception also. I mean, if you live in a world of politicians and advertising there is obviously a lot of deception. But I am urging the reader in a somewhat over simple way that despite the fact he lived in such a time not to be hardened and spoiled by it2." This joie de vivre is what brings to his poetry unique buoyancy. 'Desire for Spring' is a poem that mocks at our wrong priorities. Privileging nurture over nature, we tend to forget the basics of life. Koch tells us that we do not forget to feed our bones and blood, but we do not care for the heart. Here, 'heart' is more of a symbol than the organ in itself. It is actually a synecdoche for our basic human traits. Koch asks how one can feed the heart so as not to be 'disheartened'. His desire is to stay afloat even in the midst of tragedies. I want spring, I want to turn like a mobile In a new fresh air! I don't want to hibernate Between walls, between halls! I want to bear My share of the anguish of being succinctly here! In a poem called 'To My Heart at the Close of Day', Koch has a related matter to tell his contemporaries. Your mighty posture Takes its stand in my chest and swing swing swing You warm up, then you take a great step Forward as the ball comes smashing toward you, home Plate. And suddenly it is evening. In both the poems Koch expresses the deep pleasures of being alive and the need to be aware of this gift of beingness. But the philosophical acknowledgement of this gift is done with a levity that is characteristically Koch's. 'Down at the Docks' too has the hallmark of most of the poems by Koch: a blending of man and nature. The poet succinctly integrates human life with the manifold nature. It is said that language is a net cast over the abundance of nature; Koch's poetry is made up of a language (within a language) that shows the potential to point out the truths of life through a veneer of candour. 'Down at the Docks' does not stare at you with a gravity that is threatening. It is almost a lyric with a solid message. Jealous gentlemen, study how Wood comes from the maple Then devise your love So that it seems To come from where All is it yet something more Indian philosophy tells a story of how a savant made water his master. Water taught him how to give away cleanliness by accepting impurities. This natural master, among many such, was all that a man needed to decipher the gravitas of life. Perhaps the most splendid lines of the poem are Arrogant little waves Knocking at the dock It's for you I've made this chanson For you and that big dark blue. The last lines of the poem open itself to many strategies of reading. The poem could be addressed to the 'arrogant little waves' ( The real ones or do the 'waves' stand for we human beings After all, we are often arrogant and 'little'.), but 'you' and the 'big dark blue' signify both nature in its essence and its manifestations. It is a pity that Koch is often called a comic poet. 'Down at the Docks' is incontrovertible proof of the 'mislabel'. The Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996 has written a poem called 'Museum'. It is also about our wrong priorities; how we mistake the trivial for the real. The poetry of Koch seems to bear a striking resemblance with that of Szymborska. Here are a few lines form the Nobel Laureate's poem: The crown has outlasted the head. The hand has lost out to the glove. The right shoe has defeated the foot3. 'Museum' is a lamentation. Of how we immortalize 'crown', 'glove' and 'shoe' through our misconception of time and value. Koch's 'Mountain' is a song in praise of something we look but do not see. (Szymborska has a poem in which she says that her favorite act is the sixth - which we do not see - where the laborers come and take away the props.) Although the poem is called 'Mountain', the poet is impressed more by the tip of it than by the whole of it. He stands awe struck on seeing its placid supremacy. However, this submission before hugeness is not done with reverence but with a sense of humor. Thus the poem is an enjoyable collage of disparate feelings: the appearance of the top of the mountain and its comparison with the balding head of a human being, the subtle, irreverent joke that we are ignoramuses, our craze for dates, the mouse and the mountain, the uniqueness of the mountain tip all combine to give us a taste not only of the paradox of progress but also the impression that great poetry can grow in any terrain. Every line of the poem is a masterpiece and hence it would be nave if not absurd to pick a few in an attempt to showcase its brilliance. However, remembering George Steiner who in his classic Tolstoy or Dostoevsky says when great works of art pass through us like storm-winds flinging open our doors of perception and press upon the architecture of our life with their transforming powers, (one is compelled) through some act primary instinct of communion to convey to others the quality and force of the experience, one has to do one's best - quote. You don't have a history Do you, mountain top This doesn't make you either a mystery Or a dull person and you're certainly not a truck stop. No industry can exploit you No developer can divide you into estates or lots No dazzling disquieting woman can tie your heart in knots I could never lead my life on one of those spots You leave uncovered up there. No way to be there But I am moved. Easily this is one of the finest that Koch has written. Its wry humor and self-irony reminds one of some of the finest poems of Larkin like 'Church Going' and 'Whitsun Weddings'. In fact, all the qualities of Movement poetry seem to be throbbing in Koch's too. He himself has admitted that the poetry of the New York School had as one of its main subjects the fullness and richness of life and the richness of possibility and excitement and happiness. Humor also was its pepper. Although Koch was influenced more by classics and the formalists, the footprints of the past are exceptionally subtle in his poetry. What one finds, on the other hand, is a sensibility driven by a love for life and a passion for writing. Way back in the 50s, when Koch was grappling with French, he realized that language has the potential to mean and to confuse; at times to do both simultaneously. This observation contributed a lot to his way of writing. He wanted to shun the seriousness of writing and bring in a tinge of hilarity into whatever he wrote even while admitting the profundity of the vocation. His favorite pastime was to bask in the possibilities of meanings of words. Kenneth Koch died in 2002 of leukemia. Although nicknamed Dr Fun, Koch was one of those poets who did not hanker after prestige but chose to remain incognito and yet write with verve. His obit in The Nation (January 23, 2002) wept, "How mournful to lose a well spring of such loving energy." May be the medium was only talking what millions were feeling. Works cited 1. Atwan, Robert et al. The Harper American Literature. New York: Harper Collins, 1996. 2. Steiner, George. Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1959. Read More