Kenneth Koch

I At the Poem Society a black-haired man stands up to say “You make me sick with all your talk about restraint and mature talent! Haven’t you ever looked out the window at a painting by Matisse, Or did you always stay in hotels where there were too many spiders crawling on your visages? Did you ever glance inside a bottle of sparkling pop, Or see a citizen split in two by the lightning? I am afraid you have never smiled at the hibernation Of bear cubs except that you saw in it some deep relation To human suffering and wishes, oh what a bunch of crackpots!” The black-haired man sits down, and the others shoot arrows at him. A blond man stands up and says, “He is right! Why should we be organized to defend the kingdom Of dullness? There are so many slimy people connected with poetry, Too, and people who know nothing about it! I am not recommending that poets like each other and organize to fight them, But simply that lightning should strike them.” Then the assembled mediocrities shot arrows at the blond-haired man. The chairman stood up on the platform, oh he was physically ugly! He was small-limbed and –boned and thought he was quite seductive, But he was bald with certain hideous black hairs, And his voice had the sound of water leaving a vaseline bathtub, And he said, “The subject for this evening’s discussion is poetry On the subject of love between swans.” And everyone threw candy hearts At the disgusting man, and they stuck to his bib and tucker, And he danced up and down on the platform in terrific glee And recited the poetry of his little friends—but the blond man stuck his head Out of a cloud and recited poems about the east and thunder, And the black-haired man moved through the stratosphere chanting Poems of the relationships between terrific prehistoric charcoal whales, And the slimy man with candy hearts sticking all over him Wilted away like a cigarette paper on which the bumblebees have urinated, And all the professors left the room to go back to their duty, And all that were left in the room were five or six poets And together they sang the new poem of the twentieth century Which, though influenced by Mallarmé, Shelley, Byron, and Whitman, Plus a million other poets, is still entirely original And is so exciting that it cannot be here repeated. You must go to the Poem Society and wait for it to happen. Once you have heard this poem you will not love any other, Once you have dreamed this dream you will be inconsolable, Once you have loved this dream you will be as one dead, Once you have visited the passages of this time’s great art! 2 “Oh to be seventeen years old Once again,” sang the red-haired man, “and not know that poetry Is ruled with the sceptre of the dumb, the deaf, and the creepy!” And the shouting persons battered his immortal body with stones And threw his primitive comedy into the sea From which it sang forth poems irrevocably blue. Who are the great poets of our time, and what are their names? Yeats of the baleful influence, Auden of the baleful influence, Eliot of the baleful influence (Is Eliot a great poet? no one knows), Hardy, Stevens, Williams (is Hardy of our time?), Hopkins (is Hopkins of our time?), Rilke (is Rilke of our time?), Lorca (is Lorca of our time?), who is still of our time? Mallarmé, Valéry, Apollinaire, Éluard, Reverdy, French poets are still of our time, Pasternak and Mayakovsky, is Jouve of our time? Where are young poets in America, they are trembling in publishing houses and universities, Above all they are trembling in universities, they are bathing the library steps with their spit, They are gargling out innocuous (to whom?) poems about maple trees and their children, Sometimes they brave a subject like the Villa d’Este or a lighthouse in Rhode Island, Oh what worms they are! they wish to perfect their form. Yet could not these young men, put in another profession, Succeed admirably, say at sailing a ship? I do not doubt it, Sir, and I wish we could try them. (A plane flies over the ship holding a bomb but perhaps it will not drop the bomb, The young poets from the universities are staring anxiously at the skies, Oh they are remembering their days on the campus when they looked up to watch birds excrete, They are remembering the days they spent making their elegant poems.) Is there no voice to cry out from the wind and say what it is like to be the wind, To be roughed up by the trees and to bring music from the scattered houses And the stones, and to be in such intimate relationship with the sea That you cannot understand it? Is there no one who feels like a pair of pants? 3 Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.” The yellow hobbyhorse rocks to and fro, and from the chimney Drops the Strangler! The white and pink roses are slightly agitated by the struggle, But afterwards beside the dead “poet” they cuddle up comfortingly against their vase. They are safer now, no one will compare them to the sea. Here on the railroad train, one more time, is the Strangler. He is going to get that one there, who is on his way to a poetry reading. Agh! Biff! A body falls to the moving floor. In the football stadium I also see him, He leaps through the frosty air at the maker of comparisons Between football and life and silently, silently strangles him! Here is the Strangler dressed in a cowboy suit Leaping from his horse to annihilate the students of myth! The Strangler’s ear is alert for the names of Orpheus, Cuchulain, Gawain, and Odysseus, And for poems addressed to Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, To Ezra Pound, and to personages no longer living Even in anyone’s thoughts—O Strangler the Strangler! He lies on his back in the waves of the Pacific Ocean. 4 Supposing that one walks out into the air On a fresh spring day and has the misfortune To encounter an article on modern poetry In New World Writing, or has the misfortune To see some examples of some of the poetry Written by the men with their eyes on the myth And the Missus and the midterms, in the Hudson Review, Or, if one is abroad, in Botteghe Oscure, Or indeed in Encounter, what is one to do With the rest of one’s day that lies blasted to ruins All bluely about one, what is one to do? O surely one cannot complain to the President, Nor even to the deans of Columbia College, Nor to T. S. Eliot, nor to Ezra Pound, And supposing one writes to the Princess Caetani, “Your poets are awful!” what good would it do? And supposing one goes to the Hudson Review With a package of matches and sets fire to the building? One ends up in prison with trial subscriptions To the Partisan, Sewanee, and Kenyon Review! 5 Sun out! perhaps there is a reason for the lack of poetry In these ill-contented souls, perhaps they need air! Blue air, fresh air, come in, I welcome you, you are an art student, Take off your cap and gown and sit down on the chair. Together we shall paint the poets—but no, air! perhaps you should go to them, quickly, Give them a little inspiration, they need it, perhaps they are out of breath, Give them a little inhuman company before they freeze the English language to death! (And rust their typewriters a little, be sea air! be noxious! kill them, if you must, but stop their poetry! I remember I saw you dancing on the surf on the Côte d’Azur, And I stopped, taking my hat off, but you did not remember me, Then afterwards you came to my room bearing a handful of orange flowers And we were together all through the summer night!) That we might go away together, it is so beautiful on the sea, there are a few white clouds in the sky! But no, air! you must go . . . Ah, stay! But she has departed and . . . Ugh! what poisonous fumes and clouds! what a suffocating atmosphere! Cough! whose are these hideous faces I see, what is this rigor Infecting the mind? where are the green Azores, Fond memories of childhood, and the pleasant orange trolleys, A girl’s face, red-white, and her breasts and calves, blue eyes, brown eyes, green eyes, fahrenheit Temperatures, dandelions, and trains, O blue?! Wind, wind, what is happening? Wind! I can’t see any bird but the gull, and I feel it should symbolize . . . Oh, pardon me, there’s a swan, one two three swans, a great white swan, hahaha how pretty they are! Smack! Oh! stop! help! yes, I see—disrespect for my superiors—forgive me, dear Zeus, nice Zeus, parabolic bird, O feathered excellence! white! There is Achilles too, and there’s Ulysses, I’ve always wanted to see them, And there is Helen of Troy, I suppose she is Zeus too, she’s so terribly pretty—hello, Zeus, my you are beautiful, Bang! One more mistake and I get thrown out of the Modern Poetry Association, help! Why aren’t there any adjectives around? Oh there are, there’s practically nothing else—look, here’s grey, utter,agonized, total, phenomenal, gracile, invidious, sundered, and fused, Elegant, absolute, pyramidal, and . . . Scream! but what can I describe with these words? States! States symbolized and divided by two, complex states, magic states, states of consciousness governed by an aroused sincerity, cockadoodle doo! Another bird! is it morning? Help! where am I? am I in the barnyard? oink oink, scratch, moo! Splash! My first lesson. “Look around you. What do you think and feel?”Uhhh. . . “Quickly!”This Connecticut landscape would have pleasedVermeer. Wham! A-Plus. “Congratulations!” I am promoted. OOOhhhhh I wish I were dead, what a headache! My second lesson: “Rewrite your first lesson line six hundred times. Try to make it into a magnetic field.” I can do it too. But my poor line! What a nightmare! Here comes a tremendous horse, Trojan, I presume. No, it’s my third lesson. “Look, look! Watch him, see what he’s doing? That’s what we want you to do. Of course it won’t be the same as his at first, but . . .” I demur. Is there no other way to fertilize minds? Bang! I give in . . . Already I see my name in two or three anthologies, a serving girl comes into the barn bringing me the anthologies, She is very pretty and I smile at her a little sadly, perhaps it is my last smile! Perhaps she will hit me! But no, she smiles in return, and she takes my hand. My hand, my hand! what is this strange thing I feel in my hand, on my arm, on my chest, my face—can it be . . . ? it is! AIR! Air, air, you’ve come back! Did you have any success? “What do you think?” I don’t know, air. You are so strong, air. And she breaks my chains of straw, and we walk down the road, behind us the hideous fumes! Soon we reach the seaside, she is a young art student who places her head on my shoulder, I kiss her warm red lips, and here is the Strangler, reading the KenyonReview! Good luck to you, Strangler! Goodbye, Helen! goodbye, fumes! goodbye, abstracted dried-up boys! goodbye, dead trees! goodbye, skunks! Goodbye, manure! goodbye, critical manicure! goodbye, you big fat men standing on the east coast as well as the west giving poems the test! farewell, Valéry’s stern dictum! Until tomorrow, then, scum floating on the surface of poetry! goodbye for a moment, refuse that happens to land in poetry’s boundaries! adieu, stale eggs teaching imbeciles poetry to bolster up your egos! adios, boring anomalies of these same stale eggs! Ah, but the scum is deep! Come, let me help you! and soon we pass into the clear blue water. Oh GOODBYE, castrati of poetry! farewell, stale pale skunky pentameters (the only honest English meter, gloop gloop!) until tomorrow, horrors! oh, farewell! Hello, sea! good morning, sea! hello, clarity and excitement, you great expanse of green— O green, beneath which all of them shall drown!

I remember when I wrote The Circus I was living in Paris, or rather we were living in Paris Janice, Frank was alive, the Whitney Museum Was still on 8th Street, or was it still something else? Fernand Léger lived in our building Well it wasn’t really our building it was the building we lived in Next to a Grand Guignol troupe who made a lot of noise So that one day I yelled through a hole in the wall Of our apartment I don’t know why there was a hole there Shut up! And the voice came back to me saying something I don’t know what. Once I saw Léger walk out of the building I think. Stanley Kunitz came to dinner. I wrote The Circus In two tries, the first getting most of the first stanza; That fall I also wrote an opera libretto called Louisa or Matilda. Jean-Claude came to dinner. He said (about “cocktail sauce”) It should be good on something but not on these (oysters). By that time I think I had already written The Circus When I came back, having been annoyed to have to go I forget what I went there about You were back in the apartment what a dump actually we liked it I think with your hair and your writing and the pans Moving strummingly about the kitchen and I wrote The Circus It was a summer night no it was an autumn one summer when I remember it but actually no autumn that black dusk toward the post office And I wrote many other poems then but The Circus was the best Maybe not by far the best Geography was also wonderful And the Airplane Betty poems (inspired by you) but The Circus was the best. Sometimes I feel I actually am the person Who did this, who wrote that, including that poem The Circus But sometimes on the other hand I don’t. There are so many factors engaging our attention! At every moment the happiness of others, the health of those we know and our own! And the millions upon millions of people we don’t know and their well-being to think about So it seems strange I found time to write The Circus And even spent two evenings on it, and that I have also the time To remember that I did it, and remember you and me then, and write this poem about it At the beginning of The Circus The Circus girls are rushing through the night In the circus wagons and tulips and other flowers will be picked A long time from now this poem wants to get off on its own Someplace like a painting not held to a depiction of composing The Circus. Noel Lee was in Paris then but usually out of it In Germany or Denmark giving a concert As part of an endless activity Which was either his career or his happiness or a combination of both Or neither I remember his dark eyes looking he was nervous With me perhaps because of our days at Harvard. It is understandable enough to be nervous with anybody! How softly and easily one feels when alone Love of one’s friends when one is commanding the time and space syndrome If that’s the right word which I doubt but together how come one is so nervous? One is not always but what was I then and what am I now attempting to create If create is the right word Out of this combination of experience and aloneness And who are you telling me it is or is not a poem (not you?) Go back with me though To those nights I was writing The Circus. Do you like that poem? have you read it? It is in my book Thank You Which Grove just reprinted. I wonder how long I am going to live And what the rest will be like I mean the rest of my life. John Cage said to me the other night How old are you? and I told him forty-six (Since then I’ve become forty-seven) he said Oh that’s a great age I remember. John Cage once told me he didn’t charge much for his mushroom identification course (at the New School) Because he didn’t want to make a profit from nature He was ahead of his time I was behind my time we were both in time Brilliant go to the head of the class and “time is a river” It doesn’t seem like a river to me it seems like an unformed plan Days go by and still nothing is decided about What to do until you know it never will be and then you say “time” But you really don’t care much about it any more Time means something when you have the major part of yours ahead of you As I did in Aix-en-Provence that was three years before I wrote The Circus That year I wrote Bricks and The Great Atlantic Rainway I felt time surround me like a blanket endless and soft I could go to sleep endlessly and wake up and still be in it But I treasured secretly the part of me that was individually changing Like Noel Lee I was interested in my career And still am but now it is like a town I don’t want to leave Not a tower I am climbing opposed by ferocious enemies I never mentioned my friends in my poems at the time I wrote The Circus Although they meant almost more than anything to me Of this now for some time I’ve felt an attenuation So I’m mentioning them maybe this will bring them back to me Not them perhaps but what I felt about them John Ashbery Jane Freilicher Larry Rivers Frank O’Hara Their names alone bring tears to my eyes As seeing Polly did last night It is beautiful at any time but the paradox is leaving it In order to feel it when you’ve come back the sun has declined And the people are merrier or else they’ve gone home altogether And you are left alone well you put up with that your sureness is like the sun While you have it but when you don’t its lack’s a black and icy night. I came home And wrote The Circus that night, Janice. I didn’t come and speak to you And put my arm around you and ask you if you’d like to take a walk Or go to the Cirque Medrano though that’s what I wrote poems about And am writing about that now, and now I’m alone And this is not as good a poem as The Circus And I wonder if any good will come of either of them all the same.

Is the governor falling From a great height? Arm in arm we fled the brassiere factory, The motion-boat stayed on the shore! I saw how round its bottom was As you walked into southern France— Upon the light hair of an arm Cigar bands lay! I kissed you then. Oh is my bar The insect of your will? The water rose, But will the buffalo on The nickel yet be still? For how can windows hold out the light In your eyes! Darling, we fled the brassiere factory In forty-eight states, Arm in arm, When human beings hung on us And you had been arrested by the cloths Were used in making, and I said, “The Goths Know such delight,” but still we fled, away Into a dinner atmosphere From all we knew, and fall asleep this day. O maintenance men, with cruel eyes, Then arm in arm we fled the listless factory! The music changed your fingers’ ends to pearl, I punched you, you foolish girl, For thanks to the metronome we got out alive, in the air Where the sun filled us with cruelty! There’s what to do Except despair, like pages! and laugh Like prawns, about the sea! Oh arm in arm we fled the industry Into an earth of banks And foolish tanks, for what bare breasts might be.

The sun is high, the seaside air is sharp, And salty light reveals the Mayan School. The Irish hope their names are on the harp, We see the sheep's advertisement for wool, Boulders are here, to throw against a tarp, From which comes bursting forth a puzzled mule. Perceval seizes it and mounts it, then The blood-dimmed tide recedes and then comes in again. Fateful connections that we make to things Whose functioning's oblivious to our lives! How sidewise news of light from darkness springs, How blue bees buzz from big blooms back to hives And make the honey while the queen bee sings Leadbelly in arrangements by Burl Ives— How long ago I saw the misted pine trees And hoped, no matter how, to get them into poetry! Stendhal, at fifty, gazing as it happened On Rome from the Janiculum, decided That one way he could give his life a stipend Was to suspend his being Amour's fighter And get to know himself. Here he had ripened Accomplished, loved, and lived, was a great writer But never had explored in true detail His childhood and his growing up. So he set sail Composing La Vie de Henry Brulard But in five hundred pages scarcely got Beyond his seventeenth year, for it is hard To take into account what happens here And fit it all onto an index card. Even one moment of it is too hot, Complex and cannibalistically connected To every other, which is what might be expected. Sterne's hero has a greater problem, never Getting much past his birth. I've had a third one. My autobiography, if I should ever Start out to write it, quickly seems a burden An I-will-do-that-the-next-time endeavor. Whatever life I do write's an absurd one As if some crazy person with a knife Cut up and made a jigsaw puzzle of a life. In any case a life that's hardly possible In the conditions that we really live in, Where easy flying leaps to inaccessible Mountainy places where love is a given And misery, if there, infinitesimal, Are quite the norm. Here none by pain is driven That is not curable by the romanza That's kept in readiness to finish any stanza. Whatever, then, I see at this late stage of My life I may or may not have stayed ignorant Of that great book I've strained to write one page of Yet always hoping my page was significant. Be it or not, for me and for the ages I leave it as it is. Yet as a figurant Who has not stopped, I'm writing in addition More lines to clarify my present disposition. One person in a million finds out something Perhaps each fifty years and that is knowledge. Newton, Copernicus, Einstein are cunning. The rest of us just rise and go to college With no more hope to come home with the bunting Than a stray dachshund going through the village. However, what a treat our small successes Of present and of past, at various addresses! To be in all those places where I tarried Too little or too late or bright and early To love again the first woman I married To marvel at such things as melancholy, Sophistication, drums, a baby carriage, A John Cage concert heard at Alice Tully— How my desire when young to be a poet Made me attentive and oblivious every moment! Do you remember Oceanview the Fair? The heights above the river? The canoes? The place we beached them and the grass was bare? Those days the sandbars gave our knees a truce? The crooked line of pantry shelves, with pear And cherry jam? And Pancho, with his noose? Do you remember Full and Half and Empty? Do you remember sorrow standing in the entry? Do you remember thought, and talking plainly? Michel and I went walking after Chartres Cathedral had engaged our spirits mainly By giving us an insight into Barthes. Michel said he was capable of feigning Renewed intentions of the soul's deep part, Like this cathedral's artificial forces That press a kind of artless thought into our faces. And yet— The moor is dark beneath the moon. The porcupine turns over on its belly And new conceptions rap at the cocoon. Civilization, dealing with us fairly, For once, releases its Erectheion Of understanding, which consoles us, nearly. Later we study certain characteristics That may give us a better chance with the statistics. How much I'd like to live the whole thing over, But making some corrections as I go! To be a better husband and a father, Be with my babies on a sled in snow. By twenty I'd have understood my mother And by compassion found a way to know What separates the what-I-started-out-as From what-I-sometimes-wished-I-was-when-in-the-mountains. To be once more the one who what was worthy Of courtship courted—it was quite as stressful As trying to, er, as they say, give birth to A poem and as often unsuccessful, But it was nice to be sublime and flirty With radiant girls, and, in some strange way, restful. I could be everything I wasn't usually— And then to get somebody else to feel it mutually! In poems the same problem or a similar. Desire of course not only to do old things But things unheard of yet by nuns or visitors And of the melancholy finch be co-finch In singing 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. Such wild desires, I think it's recognizable Are part and parcel of the Human Image And in a way, I'd say, no less predictable Than Popeye's feelings for a can of spinach. Yet if we're set on course by the Invisible, All pre-determined, what about the language That teases me each morning with its leanings Toward the Unprogrammed Altitudes beyond its meanings? Are you, O particles, O atoms, nominatives Like Percevals and Stendhals, set in motion By some Ordaining Will that is definitive? Is this invading chill and high emotion, This tendency to know one is regenerative, Is this, all, tidal take-home like the ocean? Be what you may, my thanks for your society Through the long life I've had, your jokes and your variety, The warmth you've shown in giving me a temperature That I can live with, and the strength you've shared with me In arms and legs—and for your part in literature, What can I say? It is as if life stared at me And kissed my lips and left it as a signature. Thank you for that, and thank you for preparing me For love itself, and friendship, its co-agent. Thank you for being this, and for its inspiration.