Catching Chickens As They Hatch
The clown who hides a broken heart beneath his gags is a stock figure in opera. But there aren't many Pagliaccis among contemporary poets, most of whom cultivate a prim solemnity of tone. The late poet, playwright, novelist, and longtime Columbia University professor Kenneth Koch (19252002) may have been the great exception. His poems brim with exuberance and yet there is often a startling undertone of sadness to his work. It is as if he needed all the bells and whistles, the slapstick wordplay, and the unstoppable madcap style for which he became famous, merely to clear a momentary space in which he could for once say something quite plain and simple and truthful.
This is especially apparent in "On the Edge: Collected Long Poems" (Knopf, 432 pages, $35), which gathers the six longer poems that Koch published between 1959 and 1987 in one chronologically ordered sequence (and so forms a companion volume to "The Collected Poems" of 2005). In the best of these, "The Duplications" of 1977, Koch wrote, "I like works to be endless." The reader comes to realize, with something of a sinking heart, that he was as good as his word. The wit, zest, and unflagging verbal inventiveness of these lengthy poems cannot really compensate for that looming sense of the interminable that hangs over every stanza, however ingenious.
In the world of Koch's longer poems, anything can happen and usually does. These are cartoon epics. Donald Duck, embroiled in some unsavory antics with Minnie Mouse, figures prominently, much to the distress of a cuckolded Mickey; high culture rubs shoulders with pop culture, Piranesi and Proust pop up alongside Fu Manchu. In "Ko, or A Season on Earth," Ko is a Japanese baseball player with a fatal fastball who not only capsizes grandstands with his pitch, but wakes a long-dead catcher from 30 years of hibernation with a lucky throw. In Kansas City Koch, who was born in Ohio, used the Midwest often in his poems all the high school girls strip and parade through the streets naked to the delight of tourists; the fad catches on and spreads to England. As Koch remarks,
A man is cheered to see a naked girl
Milking a cow or standing in a streetcar,
Opening a filing cabinet, brushing a curl
Back from her eyes while driving in a neat car
Through Wichita in summer like the pearl
In the oyster, she makes it a complete car.
This is charmingly whimsical, but when improbable events accumulate continually, they become monotonous; where everything is surprising, there's no room for genuine surprise. Koch, who reacted vehemently against stale "academic" verse, made something of a fetish of the unexpected. Unlike his lyrics, these six long poems take their impetus from what, in "Ko," the wacky daughter of "an important poet," who's been turned into a yapping dog, calls "the poem's unreality." Two of the poems in this book display that unreality at its worst. "When the Sun Tries to Go On" is a dreadful 70-page farrago of random verbiage, lacking even the virtue of nonsense. "O dog! knee-Decembers of an egg / Sabbath, the dispensaries in a south of foods' / Mailed "bowwow" summer " is a typical passage. And the late "Impressions of Africa," which borrows its title from the wonderfully original work by Raymond Roussel, who invented the continent in his imagination, is little more than a dreary travelogue in listless free verse. Neither should have been republished.
The most successful of the poems collected here are, with apt unexpectedness, in strict form, the measure known as "ottava rima." This involves an eight-line stanza of alternating rhymes capped by a couplet; it's a form made famous by the Italian poet Ariosto in "Orlando Furioso" and by Byron in "Don Juan," both of whom served as constant models for Koch. This tight form didn't so much liberate Koch as act as a fruitful irritant. He needed something to chafe against. And so he hobbled his cadences and fractured his rhymes and out of this battered elegance he sometimes created quite beautiful effects:
If clarity is what we seek in life,
Then life's a disappointment and a fraud,
For nothing's ever really clear, not wife,
Or home, or work, or people who applaud
The finest work you do. But if a knife
Like deep sensation worthy of a god
Is what you're after, life can furnish plenty
Some earlier than, some at, some after twenty.
This is one of those sad moments that slips in amid the anarchic razzle-dazzle Koch so loved. And there are others, as in the moving title poem where he writes to his ex-wife, "Do you remember the storms, the depressions, the unbelievable / Disasters? And when you think of them, can you sleep / And eat?" Along with his friends Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, Koch was one of the so-called New York Poets. In "Seasons on Earth," the final poem collected here, Koch laments that "time's splintering lattice" took O'Hara to an early death while turning Mr. Ashbery into "an Eminence," and yet, of the three, Koch, the least lionized, had the largest natural gift. If his work was marred by haste and unruliness, that was because, as Koch said in "The Duplications," "I'm in a hurry," always hoping
To catch my feelings while they pass me fleetingly
And so don't want to stop at every boner
Like scholars who er-umly and indeedingly
Lard everything so much you wish a stone or
A rowboat's oar would batter them obediently
Then magically fly back to its owner
Who thus would not be punished. I like catching
Pure chickens of discourse while they're still hatching.
eormsby@nysun.com
