Kenneth Koch

Kenneth Koch (27 February 1925 – 6 July 2002) was an American poet, playwright, and professor, active from the 1950s until his death at age 77.

He was a prominent poet of the New York School of poetry.

This was a loose group of poets including Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery that eschewed contemporary introspective poetry in favor of an exuberant, cosmopolitan style that Drew Major inspiration from travel, painting, and music.

Koch (pronounced coke ) was born Jay Kenneth Koch in Cincinnati, Ohio.

He began writing poetry at an early age, discovering the work of Shelley and Keats in his teenage years.

At the age of 18, he served in WWII as a U.S. Army infantryman in the Philippines.

After his service, he attended Harvard University, where he met future New York School poet John Ashbery.

After graduating from Harvard in 1948 and moving to New York City, Koch studied for and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University.

While a student at Harvard, Koch won the prestigious Glascock Prize in 1948.

In 1951, he met his first wife, Janice Elwood, at UC Berkeley; they married in 1954 and lived in France and Italy for over a year.

Their daughter, Katherine, was born in Rome in 1955 (In 1982, Katherine married poet Mark Statman, one of Koch's former students).

Koch asked in his poem Fresh Air (1956) why poets were writing about dull subjects with dull forms.

Modern poetry was solemn, boring, and uneventful.

Koch described poems "Written by the men with their eyes on the myth/ And the missus and the midterms..."

He attacked the idea that poetry should be in any way stale.

Koch wrote of how:

The Waste Land gave the time's most accurate data,

In 1959, he joined the faculty in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia and he taught classes at Columbia for over forty years.

The 1960s saw his first published books of poetry, but his poetry did not garner wider popular acclaim until the 1970s with his book The Art of Love: Poems (1975).

He continued writing poetry and releasing books of poetry up until his death.

In 1962, Koch was writer in residence at the New York City Writer's Conference at Wagner College.

Koch had a brush with the anarchist affinity group Up Against the Wall Motherfucker in early January 1968.

During a poetry reading at St. Mark's Church, a member of the group walked in and pointed a handgun at the podium, shouting "Koch!"

before firing one blank round.

The poet regained his composure and said to the "shooter," "Grow up."

In 1970, Koch released a pioneering book in poetry education, Wishes, Lies and Dreams: Teaching Children To Write Poetry.

Over the next 30 years, he followed this book with other books and anthologies on poetry education tailored to teaching poetry appreciation and composition to children, adults, and the elderly.

Koch wrote hundreds of avant-garde plays over the course of his 50-year career, highlighted by drama collections like 1000 Avant-Garde Plays (1988), which only contains 116 plays, many of them only one scene or a few minutes in length.

His poems were translated into German by the poet Nicolas Born in 1973 for the renowned "red-frame-series" of the Rowohlt Verlag.

His prose work is highlighted by The Red Robins (1975), a sprawling novel about a group of fighter pilots flying for personal freedom under the leadership of Santa Claus.

His first wife died in 1981; Koch married his second wife, Karen Culler, in 1994.

He also published a book of short stories, Hotel Lambosa (1988), loosely based on and inspired by his world travels.

He also produced at least one libretto, and several of his poems have been set to music by composers.

Koch taught poetry at Columbia University, where his classes were popular.

His wild humor and intense teaching style, often punctuated by unusual physicality (standing on a table to shout lines by Walt Whitman) and outbursts of vocal performance often drawn from Italian opera, drew non-English majors and alumni.

Koch won the Bollingen Prize for One Train (1994) and On The Great Atlantic Rainway: Selected Poems 1950-1988 (1994), followed closely by the Phi Beta Kappa Poetry Award winner New Addresses (2000).

He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996.

Some of the spirit of these lectures is contained in his final book on poetry education, Making Your Own Days (1998).

His students included poets Ron Padgett, David Shapiro, Frank Lima, Alan Feldman, David Lehman, Jordan Davis, Jessy Randall, David Baratier, Loren Goodman, Carson Cistulli, and filmmaker Jim Jarmusch.

Koch died from a year-long battle with leukemia in 2002.