Poem: Kenneth Koch

I'm not sure why I'm obsessed with this poem, which I did not know before I heard Kenneth Koch (1925-2002) read it as part of the Poetry Foundation's Essential American Poets podcast, but I have listened to it repeatedly, and it's begun to sediment in my head. I very well may write something based on it. As for Koch, he's a writer I have read quite a bit, especially when I was younger. I believe he was the only one of the four major male New York School poets who appeared in the non-Norton middle-school anthologies I had to read, and I think it was one of his parodies, perhaps "Mending Sump," which sends up Robert Frost's iconic "Mending Wall," that I read and laughed at. It was and is quite a funny poem. At that point, and for many years after--until I met Thomas Sayers Ellis, I think--I was under the impression that while poems could be witty, ironic, sly, as cutting as a stropped razor, they ought not be outright silly and funny. Such poems were basically jokes, and politically suspect. Encounters with the Language school and Black Arts poets didn't help (wit, irony, etc., yes, goofiness, no sirree.)

That did not mean I wasn't reading Koch, however, but I found that I was more drawn to his three dear, queer friends, each of whom shot through my consciousness like a rocket: John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler. (I didn't read Barbara Guest or the subsequent generations of this school till somewhat after.) Ashbery was the poet on people's tongues in college; O'Hara I happened upon one day in the library, and could not put down; Schuyler, I was told, I had to read, because he'd co-written a novel with Ashbery and had won the Pulitzer Prize. I'm glad I made my way through his work, and still adore it. But what about Koch? I dutifully went back and tried to get through all those long poems of the 1960s, which are insistently playful and often quite lyrical but also a bit of a slog, I'm sad to say, lacking as they did something--the campy lightness mixed with gravity that O'Hara's long poems often possess, or the sort of dizzying quality Ashbery's do, or the groundedness in the real and nature that Schuyler's have. From Koch I drifted away.

Until I was teaching the youngsters, and realized that he'd written a number of marvelous, effective books about teaching poetry to children that really did reach children and adolescents. And that took me to his poetry, and plays, and little stories inspired by Yasunari Kawabata's Palm of the Hand stories, and his very late, delightful poems, funny and profound in equal measure, New Addresses (Knopf, 2000), which comprises a series of addresses or apostrophes, to various entities. Open it and you'll see. I even heard him read in the late 1990s. But somehow, though I'd read Koch's earlier poem entitled "The Circus," from 1961, I had never come across the later one, which I think is superb. (I also worked with his late wife Janice Elwood Koch's brother briefly, but didn't put two-and-two together until a friend pointed out the link. By then, though, that Mrs. Koch was no longer with us.) So here it is, and I think you'll see why. (You can hear him read it here.)

(PS: An incident involving Kenneth Koch--once in 1968, the anti-art affinity group Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers showed up at his reading at St. Mark's Poetry Project and, incredibly, a member of the group pointed a gun at Koch, screamed out "Koch!," and fired--a blank! Koch, from what I heard on the Poetry Foundation's Avant-Garde All the Time podcasts, didn't cry out with fear or duck or faint or have a heart attack. I don't even think he pissed or shat his pants. Instead, after regaining his composure, quickly, he retorted to the hooligan revolutionary the one thing he probably needed to hear: "Grow up!")

THE CIRCUS

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.

Kenneth Koch, “The Circus” from The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 2006 by Kenneth Koch. All rights reserved.

Poem: Kenneth Fearing

Two summers ago, I came across a contemporary poet writing a praisesong to Kenneth Fearing's (1902-1961) poetry, and I was intrigued. I knew Fearing as the author of the 1946 novel The Big Clock and had heard of his poetry, but had never read it. I also didn't know that he was the founding editor of The Partisan Review, As a result of that essay, and because I was carrelling at the New York Public Library, I went and found his New and Selected Poems (Indiana, 1956), and read through them, stopping on ones that particularly caught my eye.

Many did, in no small part because Fearing is a forgotten experimentalist of a very American sort, a predecessor in the best way to numerous writers of today in his interests in popular culture, different social languages and discourses, the political and critical as poetry, and a certain urbanity that finds in city life what the mass media regularly obscures. I found myself picking up the language of comic books (see below), advertising jingles, newspaper headlines, and popular songs, bringing into light with complexity, humor, sadness, and irony the rich river of life and culture from the Depression era up to the moment of his death in the Kennedy years.  "Dirge," printed below, first appeared in book form in Fearing's 1935 volume Poems, and was excerpted in the Library of America's Kenneth Fearing: Selected Poems, edited by poet Robert Polito. As I read it I felt like it was appropriate to today; it could easily have been written in and about 2008 or 2009, or 2011.  I wish someone would volunteer to read it aloud on the floor of Congress, or to the President in the Oval Office; it's the kind of truth they need to hear, because people are dying every day from "lack of what is found there." Truly.

DIRGE

1-2-3 was the number he played but today the number came 3-2-1;
bought his Carbide at 30 and it went to 29; had the favorite at Bowie but the track was slow—

O, executive type, would you like to drive a floating power, knee-action, silk-upholstered six? Wed a Hollywood star? Shoot the course in 58? Draw to the ace, king, jack?
O, fellow with a will who won't take no, watch out for three cigarettes on the same, single match; O democratic voter born in August under Mars, beware of liquidated rails—

Denouement to denouement, he took a personal pride in the certain, certain way he lived his own, private life,

but nevertheless, they shut off his gas; nevertheless, the bank foreclosed; nevertheless, the landlord called; nevertheless, the radio broke,

And twelve o'clock arrived just once too often,
just the same he wore one gray tweed suit, bought one straw hat, drank one straight Scotch, walked one short step, took one long look, drew one deep breath,
just one too many,

And wow he died as wow he lived,
going whop to the office and blooie home to sleep and biff got married and bam had children and oof got fired,
zowie did he live and zowie did he die,

With who the hell are you at the corner of his casket, and where the hell we going on the right-hand silver knob, and who
the hell cares walking second from the end with an American Beauty wreath from why the hell not,

Very much missed by the circulation staff of the New York Evening Post; deeply, deeply mourned by the B.M.T.,

Wham, Mr. Roosevelt; pow, Sears Roebuck; awk, big dipper; bop, summer rain;
Bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong.

Kenneth Fearing, "Dirge" from Kenneth Fearing: Selected Poems. Published by The Library of America, 2004. Reprinted by the permission of Russell and Volkening, Inc., as agents for the author. Copyright © 1994 by Jubal Fearing and Phoebe Fearing.

Santorum Stupidity Over: Poem: Langston Hughes

This weekend brought news of a brouhaha involving the extreme right-wing, homophobic Republican former US Senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum, he whose last name has, through the deft work of columnist and author Dan Savage, become a particularly vivid eponym. But our concern here isn't with the eponym and its figurative associations, apt as they are for Santorum, but with a bit of foolishness on his part. (C can probably already hear me pronouncing this word in the Deep South-fashion as "foolnish.") For Santorum selected a phrase that to him sounded just right for his potential Presidential campaign, Quixotic though we all know it will be--or Quayline, since he lacks even an iota of Don Quixote's sense and all of Dan Quayle's limitations; a phrase that, to his, or his campaign staff's ears, sounded just right: "Let America Be America Again."

As it turns out, the progressive website Think Progress saw this slogan and grasped that it came from Langston Hughes's (1902-1967) "Let America Be America Again," a pro-union, pro-immigrant, pro-equality--progressive!--poem he published in 1935, during the era of the Great Depression.  Hughes, as I need not tell anyone, was black, and gay, and a committed leftist. He was a cosmpolitan and an internationalist, a strong advocate of black consciousness and of Diasporism. He was the grandson of the abolitionist Charles Langston and a nephew of abolitionist and educator John Mercer Langston. He was even a correspondent for and member of Communist organizations, etc. All of this is searchable on Google, as is the slogan Santorum selected, which was, for those of us with even the slightest memory, already in the political air as Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry had not just sampled, but recited a selection of it in 2004. (How could anyone forget a Presidential candidate being able to quote a poem, especially one by Hughes?)

Nevertheless, Santorum went with the slogan. Until a Think Progress reporter, Lee Fang, asked him about the words and their background. This is how Gawker reported it:

"No I had nothing to do with that," he said. "I didn't know that. And the folks who worked on that slogan for me didn't inform me that it came from that, if it in fact came from that."

When he was later asked what it means to him, Santorum replied: "Well, I'm not too sure that's my campaign slogan, I think it's on a web site."

But he also used it in the official press release announcing his exploratory committee earlier this week....

Et cetera. Santorum isn't getting anywhere the White House, the Senate, or the Pennsylvania State House for that matter, but the flap did provoke the following question: can he read? Because if or his minions did even pass a cursory eye over the following poem, it would be evident what Hughes was arguing here. Some poems are admittedly difficult to grasp. I have written a few of those myself. Hughes has as well. But some do not, as Wallace Stevens wrote in his poem "Man Carrying Thing," "resist the intelligence / Almost successfully." Some are quite straightforward and evident even to the dullest of minds. A category that, as his past record would attest, includes Santorum.

Here is Hughes's poem in full, easy to grasp, and quite beautiful and moving, in my humble opinion. It shakes me up a bit every time I read it. More of our politicians need to read it, and recite it to themselves as they cut deals with plutocrats and carve what remains of our government and society up, what remains of our threadbare social safety net, for their friends and patrons.

LET AMERICA BE AMERICA AGAIN

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!


O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1994 the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used with permission.