photo © Larry Rivers

Kenneth Koch

Kenneth Koch was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on February 27, 1925. He studied at Harvard University, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree, and attended Columbia University for his Ph.D. As a young poet, Koch was known for his association with the New York School of poetry. Originating at Harvard, where Koch met fellow students Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, the New York School derived much of its inspiration from the works of action painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Larry Rivers, whom the poets met in the 1950s after settling in New York City. The poetry of the New York School represented a shift away from the Confessional poets, a popular form of soul-baring poetry that the New York School found distasteful (see the Life Studies exhibit on this site for examples). Instead, their poems were cosmopolitan in spirit and displayed not only the influence of action painting, but of French Surrealism and European avant-gardism in general. In 1970 Ron Padgett and David Shapiro edited and published the first major collection of New York School poetry, An Anthology of New York Poets, which included seven poems by Koch.

Koch's association with the New York School worked, in effect, as an apprenticeship. Many critics found Koch's early work obscure, such as Poems (1953), and the epic Ko, or A Season on Earth (1959), yet remarked upon his subsequent writing for its clarity, lyricism, and humor, such as in The Art of Love (1975), which was praised as a graceful, humorous book. His other collections of poetry include New Addresses (Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), winner of the Phi Beta Kappa Poetry Award and a finalist for the National Book Award; Straits (1998); One Train and On the Great Atlantic Rainway, Selected Poems 1950-1988 (both published in 1994), which together earned him the Bollingen Prize in 1995; Seasons of the Earth (1987); On the Edge (1986); Days and Nights (1982); The Burning Mystery of Anna in 1951 (1979); The Duplications (1977); The Pleasures of Peace (1969); When the Sun Tries to Go On (1969); Thank You (1962); and Seasons on Earth (1960).

Koch's short plays, many of them produced off- and off-off-Broadway, are collected in The Gold Standard: A Book of Plays. He has also published Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry (Scribners, 1998); The Red Robins (1975), a novel; Hotel Lambosa and Other Stories(1993); and several books on teaching children to write poetry, including Wishes, Lies and Dreams and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? Koch wrote the libretto for composer Marcello Panni's The Banquet, which premiered in Bremen in June 1998, and his collaborations with painters have been the subject of exhibitions at the Ipswich Museum in England and the De Nagy Gallery in New York. His numerous honors include the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Library of Congress in 1996, as well as awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Ingram-Merrill foundations. In 1996 he was inducted as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Kenneth Koch lived in New York City, where he was professor of English at Columbia University. Koch died on July 6, 2002 from leukemia.

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Days and Nights (1982)
From the Air (1979)
Ko: or, A Season on Earth (1959)
On The Edge (1986)
On the Great Atlantic Railway: Selected Poems 1950-88 (1994)
One Train (1994)
Permanently (1961)
Poems (1953)
Poems from 1952 and 1953 (1968)
Seasons on Earth (1987)
Selected Poems 1950-82 (1985)
Sleeping with Women (1969)
Straits (1998)
Thank You and Other Poems (1962)
The Art of Love (1975)
The Burning Mystery of Anna in 1951 (1979)
The Duplications (1977)
The Pleasures of Peace and Other Poems (1969)
When the Sun Tries to Go On (1969)

Prose

Hotel Lambosa and Other Stories (1993)
I Never Told Anybody: Teaching Poetry Writing in a Nursing Home (1977)
Interlocking Lives (1970)
Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry (1998)
Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? (1973)
Sleeping on the Wing: An Anthology of Modern Poetry with Essays on Reading and Writing (1981)
The Red Robins (1975)
Wishes, Lies and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry (1970)

Drama

A Change of Hearts and Other Plays (1973)
Bertha and Other Plays (1966)
One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays (1988)
Thank You and Other Plays (1962)
The Gold Standard (1996)
The Red Robins (1979)

Selected Bibliography

Multimedia

From the Image Archive