Great irony played with the poem she posted today which has almost nothing to do with what she intended.
This falls under “it’s a small world” category
Her poem – circa 2001 – looks back on her days at Columbia and is an ode to one of the great literary professors Kenneth Koch with whom she apparently studied, prior to his passing away in 2002.
I met him back in the late 1970s when his former student and a close friend of mine, David Shapiro, introduced me to him when I was attending William Paterson College.
I was an interloper, not one of the college’s literary elite that included Joel L and Michael R, who Shapiro also introduced to Koch.
Michael R was the real poetic talent of the school, someone who should have gone on to become one of the next generation of great American poets, worthy of meeting Koch and later Koch’s friend, John Ashbery, to whom I was also introduced.
In fact, one of the art professors introduced me to Ashbery, claiming I was a great writer – which I certainly was not at the time.
Koch met Ashbery at Harvard, where he studied writing with poet Delmore Schwartz, and later started a rebellious school of New York poetry that many of those I studied with openly admired.
Professors at colleges like William Paterson tended to have pet students, who they foresee as becoming great. I was a decade older than other students at time and brought real life experience to the school and to my art and so impressed some professors such as Dr. Grant, the head of the theater department, who had be writing performance pieces for some of his programs or more impressively, having Dr. Mollenkott – one of the leading feminist writers of the 1970s and a well-established scholar of Milton, who compared me to William Faulkner.
I was already leaning towards journalism (having come out of the underground news of the late 1960s) and was often compared to the other darling of the college, Glenn K, who Shapiro also introduced to Koch.
Her poem is largely a description of a Koch lecture she apparently attended when she rushed through a door with her books “made porcupine” with sticky notes,” on a day of patches of corduroy in blues, browns, a green triumphant day that allowed her to precede him through the door, only to have it get stuck. Another student, a physics student from MIT couldn’t get it unstuck, neither could a call via cellphone (perhaps to maintenance), but somehow it came unstuck by pushing it the other way.
In the poem, she expresses her admiration for the great poet, whose long career at Columbia no doubt gave him an unassuming command of the buildings – caressing and spanking the streets, perhaps an allusion to his ability to cut through the artistic bullshit and get directly to the point.
His lecture took place in a room that was “punctuated” with light patches, “pollocking” (a reference to Jason Pollack’s brilliant splash technique of painting, describing his lecture as “violent atmospheric strokes,” violent addressing youth in a series of interjections strung together. And she ponders whether sour hot dogs too early or late in the day distract him, a possible reference to a book of kids’ poetry Koch edited or perhaps the more sexual reference made in his poetic exchange with Ashbery, or even the tradition of Hotdog Days of Summer at Columbia.
Koch was notorious for his surprises during his lectures and was admired by his students for his unorthodox teaching techniques, such as making up impromptu poems to show the relation of lines and rhymes.
She appears to quote a Koch poem criticizing many of the traditional literary texts in which artistic altruism is “drowned in high-falutin theories” that only breed their own “post-colonial species.”
Koch was a political poet like my friend Ginsberg but managed to avoid the beat (nik) tag.
The poem goes on to show her disappointment about how the crowd of students when the lights come on rush to the concession stand for snacks perhaps missing out on the real message he was trying to convey.
The poem goes on to talk about the dollar fifty she spent got traverse the 102 block trip and the six fight of stairs, the fragments all over the page of every other minute of past, present future, perhaps referring to a poem she may have offered him, a kind of love note,” and reference to the Paris diagrams on the board, possibly a reference to Koch’s study of memory, how much he remembered about Paris after having lived there, and how impossible it was to remember all the details of a specific time and place.
Why she decided to post this poem now may have to do with Koch himself and how in his later years, he looked back fondly at the past and the people he had spent time with, and this sense of community that faded away over time so that even memory could not be trusted.
For all of his admirers, in the end, he seems to have felt very alone. This seems to be true of her as well.
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