Kenneth Koch ( KOHK; February 27, 1925 – July 6, 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. Comical, narrative, punning and exuberant are adjectives that have been associated with his work.
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.
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). In 1959, he joined the faculty in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia where he would teach for over forty years.
His first wife died in 1981; Koch married his second wife, Karen Culler, in 1994. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996. Koch died from a year-long battle with leukemia in 2002.
While a student at Harvard, Koch won the prestigious Glascock Prize in 1948. In 1962, Koch was writer in residence at the New York City Writer's Conference at Wagner College.
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. 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).
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 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. 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.
His poems were translated into German by the poet Nicolas Born in 1973 for the renowned "red-frame-series" of the Rowohlt Verlag.
Koch had a brush with the anarchist affinity group Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers 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 several blank rounds. The poet quickly regained his composure, commenting "That was a benefit shooting," and dismissing the shooter with "Grow up."
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.
The Waste Land gave the time's most accurate data,
It seemed, and Eliot was the Great Dictator
Of literature. One hardly dared to wink
Or fool around in any way in poems,
And critics poured out awful jereboams
To irony, ambiguity, and tension –