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.
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