Poem: Frank O'Hara

Alex Katz, "Frank O'Hara," cutout:
oil on wood (double-sided),
1959, Robert Miller Gallery
(via Artsy.net)

One of my favorite poets is the late Frank O'Hara (1926-1966), who nowadays needs no introduction but who, I would assert from the vantage point of my own middle age, has deservedly ascended into the upper stratosphere of American poetry in a way that might not have seemed likely at the time of his early death, or even in the 1980s, when I was in college and first encountered his work. O'Hara's influence not just in American poetry--and among LGBTQ poets in particular--but in poetry across the globe is considerable, and akin to that of his friend and compatriot John Ashbery (1927-2017), who is now widely acknowledged as one of the major poets in the English language, controversies about his poetry itself aside. When I was still teaching at Northwestern I had the pleasure of meeting the Slovenian poet Ales Debeljak (1961-2016) and his wife Erica Johnson Debeljak, and when we began discussing poets who'd influenced his generation (he's roughly my contemporary) of Slovenian writers, one of the first he mentioned was O'Hara. In fact, he pointed out to me, O'Hara's influence was apparent in the poetry of poets not just in Slovenia, but in Poland and a number of other countries.

But whereas Ashbery had a long and varied career that stretched for over half a century, O'Hara's ended after a roughly two decade stretch; in barely 20 years (1948-1966), beginning during his undergraduate career at Harvard and continuing through his time at the University of Michigan and his years in New York City working as a museum curator, he published nearly all the poetry that made his name. He also served as an artistic, social and cultural avatar, linking poets ranging from Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) to James Merrill to Allen Ginsberg to Gregory Corso to Diane DiPrima, though O'Hara's closest connections were with the poets and Abstract Expressionist and pre-Pop visual artists clustered around what Donald Allen named the New York School of poetry Ashbery (who wrote a number of major ekphrastic poems, including the sublime "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror)," Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, Jane Freilicher, Grace Hartigan, Mike Bluhm, Joan Mitchell, Fairfield Porter, and others. A gifted pianist and raconteur, O'Hara not only worked in the art world at the Museum of Modern Art, but wrote regularly about and to artists and art, in his poetry, while also collaborating on a number of projects with figures who would become famous in their own right, including Larry Rivers and Bill Berkson.

Despite its relatively small quantity and the fact that it ceased in 1966, O'Hara's poetry possesses a vitality and vibrancy that often makes it sounds as if it could have been written yesterday. Part of this is its everyday language, not unlike that of one of his poetic forebears, William Carlos Williams; his often casual, jaunty tone, laced with irony and wit; a gift for zany juxtapositions, learned from reading French and Russian Modernist poets; and a queer, sometimes campy exuberance that conveys a delight with being alive and, I recognized early on, a negotiation with the many and difficult challenges of being an out gay (white, upper-middle-class) man in mid-century America. (He is not without his occasional blind spots on race, sex and class.) One excellent example is O'Hara's "Poem ["The eager note on my door said, 'Call Me,']," written decades before Grindr or similar apps, but which details an absurd and tragic urban sexual assignation that would not be out of place even in hypergentrified contemporary New York. He wrote and published this poem in 1957, twelve years before Stonewall, and one thing I often wonder is what kind of poet might have become in the wake of gay liberation, the push for LGBTQ equality, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic, let alone the Civil Rights and Women's Liberation movements, to name just two. Ginsberg, Ashbery, Schuyler, and Merrill all lived through these waves of social, political and cultural change and approached them (or not) in various ways, so what might O'Hara have had to say?

The focus of this blog post is writing about art, though, so here is one of O'Hara's most famous poems, "Why I Am Not a Painter," which he wrote in conversation with his friend, Abstract Expressionist painter Mike Goldberg's (1924-2007) painting "Sardines," which is as much a poem about writing poetry, as the second stanza makes clear, as it is about creating visual art, inspiration, process, and how life and time shape whatever we do. As I noted above, O'Hara doesn't shy away from those darker notes in life and we see it here when he writes, "There should be / so much more, not of orange, of / words, of how terrible orange is and life." Which is to say that amidst the beauty of the color orange--it is a striking color--there is all the rest of life as well, and orange becomes the pivot through which O'Hara, a poet, delves into the world. I also love the ironic note "It is even in / prose, I am a real poet," underlining his assertion in the opening line, provocatively assessing his prosy, painterly verse here, with its seemingly pedestrian strokes that together create a work of art, and avowing his practice as an experimental poet--he was--working in and against genre conventions, queering them. So much in a three-stanza poem!

WHY I AM NOT A PAINTER

by Frank O'Hara 
 

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
 
Why? I think I would rather be 
a painter, but I am not. Well, 

for instance, Mike Goldberg
 
is starting a painting. I drop in.
 
"Sit down and have a drink" he 
says. I drink; we drink. I look
 
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
 
"Yes, it needed something there." 
"Oh." I go and the days go by 
and I drop in again. The painting
 
is going on, and I go, and the days 
go by. I drop in. The painting is 
finished. "Where's SARDINES?" 
All that's left is just
 
letters, "It was too much," Mike says. 

But me? One day I am thinking of 
a color: orange. I write a line 
about orange. Pretty soon it is a 
whole page of words, not lines.
 
Then another page. There should be 
so much more, not of orange, of
 
words, of how terrible orange is 
and life. Days go by. It is even in 
prose, I am a real poet. My poem 
is finished and I haven't mentioned 
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call 
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery 
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

Here is Mike Goldberg's "SARDINES." You can see "EXIT" and other letters, but "SARDINES"....

Michael Goldberg, Sardines, 1955, oil and adhesive tape on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David K. Anderson, Martha Jackson Memorial Collection.
 

Poems: John Ashbery (RIP)

John Ashbery
(from KCRW Bookworm.com)

One of the greatest poets in contemporary American literature, John Ashbery, passed away this past week (1927-2017). Ashbery's work has been one of my enduring inspirations, and I have blogged about him numerous times, including on his 90th birthday this past July, when I reviewed Karen Roffman's biography of his youth and early career.

As a memorial tribute, I am posting two of my (many) favorite poems by him, "My Erotic Double," from his 1979 collection As We Know (I had previously posted it on this blog some years ago), and "Street Musicians," from Houseboat Days, which he published 1977.

MY EROTIC DOUBLE

He says he doesn’t feel like working today.
It’s just as well. Here in the shade
Behind the house, protected from street noises,   
One can go over all kinds of old feeling,
Throw some away, keep others.
                                     The wordplay
Between us gets very intense when there are   
Fewer feelings around to confuse things.
Another go-round? No, but the last things
You always find to say are charming, and rescue me   
Before the night does. We are afloat
On our dreams as on a barge made of ice,
Shot through with questions and fissures of starlight   
That keep us awake, thinking about the dreams
As they are happening. Some occurrence. You said it.

I said it but I can hide it. But I choose not to.   
Thank you. You are a very pleasant person.   
Thank you. You are too.

John Ashbery, “My Erotic Double” from As We Know. Copyright © 1979 by John Ashbery. Reprinted with the permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. for the author. Source: As We Know (Viking Press, 1979)

STREET MUSICIANS

One died, and the soul was wrenched out   
Of the other in life, who, walking the streets   
Wrapped in an identity like a coat, sees on and on   
The same corners, volumetrics, shadows   
Under trees. Farther than anyone was ever   
Called, through increasingly suburban airs   
And ways, with autumn falling over everything:   
The plush leaves the chattels in barrels   
Of an obscure family being evicted
Into the way it was, and is. The other beached   
Glimpses of what the other was up to:
Revelations at last. So they grew to hate

                         and forget each other.

So I cradle this average violin that knows   
Only forgotten showtunes, but argues
The possibility of free declamation anchored
To a dull refrain, the year turning over on itself   
In November, with the spaces among the days   
More literal, the meat more visible on the bone.   
Our question of a place of origin hangs
Like smoke: how we picnicked in pine forests,
In coves with the water always seeping up, and left   
Our trash, sperm and excrement everywhere, smeared   
On the landscape, to make of us what we could.

John Ashbery, “Street Musicians” from Houseboat Days. Copyright © 1987, 1979 by John Ashbery. Reprinted with the permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. on behalf of the author. Source: Houseboat Days (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1977)

Kenward Elmslie's *The Orchid Stories* Book Launch

In 1973, Doubleday published Kenward Elmslie's (1929-) experimental, poetic prose collection The Orchid Stories. It is almost impossible to imagine Doubleday, or any of the large international or New York publishers, issuing such a work today. Exuberant as the hothouse orchid from which its title derives, complex, unspooling according to a logic all its own, and decidedly anti-commercial, it's no wonder that the collection, which might also be read as novel or novel-in-stories, went out of print, depriving readers of the opportunity to experience this series of provocations by Elmslie, one of most talented but also lesser known of the  New York School-affiliated writers.    

In The Orchid Stories Elmslie weaves together many strands of his long career, as a poet, fiction writer, librettist and song-writer, editor, and performance artist, creating a tapestry of compelling strangeness. It is a coming-of-age story narrated by a figure whose exact name eludes the reader the entire way through. Certain characters possess more than one name, and The exuberance, unflagging playfulness, and musical currents swirling within the prose make the text one to read and re-read--or rather, it may require rereading--aloud. And that is what several writers, I included, did on Wednesday night at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, to launch the reprint, by New York publisher The Song Cave, of The Orchid Stories. (BOMB features a selection here.)

This new edition features an introduction by radio interviewer and critic Michael Silverblatt, who served as the evening's master of ceremonies, and introducing him was another member of the New York School's second generation, poet, fiction writer, essayist and critic Ron Padgett. The lineup included a number of luminaries who'd long known and even performed with Elmslie, including Ann Lauterbach, who read with breathless brio a section of prose set in Arkansas; Anne Waldman, performing another section as chant and song with Devin Waldman on saxophone and Ambrose Bye on piano, before she shared a song she'd performed more than once with Elmslie himself; and songwriter and longtime Fugs member Steven Taylor, who sang one of Elmslie's songs.

Not only had I never met Elmslie or heard him present his work live, but before I received a copy of The Orchid Stories, I'd only read several dozen of his poems. The collection has intrigued me and led me to read more of Elmslie's work. Although I did know that he had been described as the fifth--or sixth, if Barbara Guest were placed before him--I also had not realized that he was in the same cohort with John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara at Harvard, graduating in 1950, or that he'd been the partner of John LaTouche for a period of time, a fact that Silverblatt recounted in his introductory remarks. (You can read a shorter version of his introduction to The Orchid Stories at the Paris Review's site.) Lastly, as Silverblatt also shared, the great Nat King Cole recorded one of Elmslie's songs, "Love-wise," which appeared on Cole's 1959 album To Whom It May Concern. (I did learn on Wikipedia that Elmslie is the grandson of Joseph Pulitzer.) In additional to copies of the book the publishers also brought a number of Elmslie's LPs. I read a brief selection from the short section or chapter entitled "Waking Up"; it required attention to various kinds of formal and stylistic shifts but thankfully, given my inability to hold a note, no singing. Unfortunately Elmslie was unable to attend the event, but I imagine someone told him how well-attended it was and how enthusiastically the audience responded.

Here a few photos from the event, all borrowed courtesy of the Poetry Project's Facebook page. Please check out Elmslie's work, consider supporting the Poetry Project and enjoy the photos.

Steven Taylor

Devin Waldman, Anne Waldman, and Ambrose Bye

Ann Lauterbach

Michael Silverblatt

Ron Padgett

Yours truly

Poem: James Schuyler

James Schuyler, by Fairfield Porter

I don't think I've ever posted a poem by James Schuyler (1923-1991), a poet I was quite fond of when I was younger, and whose name and work are probably as well known as those of his great peers in what came to be known as the New York School of poetry: Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, and of course, the still-living, extraordinary John Ashbery. Schuyler probably was the least well-known during much of his writing life. He gave few public readings, never taught for any extended period of time, and did not receive acclaim until late in life (he received the Pulitzer Prize for the long, chatty, sometimes hilarious, often profound long poem The Morning of the Poem in 1981). But his work has a way of drawing almost any reader in, seducing you with its insistent, intimately colloquial tone and seemingly casual construction, until you pay attention and begin to notice what a skillful maker he is. He had a gift for giving heft to life's va et vient.

In thinking of poems having to do with the night there are a number in Schuyler's Selected Poems that might qualify, but I like the one below quite a bit, even beginning with the title, which places the reader in medias res, on a tip of something unfolding, while also placing her immediately within that first-person lyric consciousness: "I". But as with the poetry of O'Hara and Ashbery, to a different degree, there's so much that's still unclear. Who is "Darragh"? Why is the poetic speaker there? Why should we care? By the end of the poem, much as time has shifted from night to day, our understanding has grown, and this speaker whose memories, musings about nature and his interior world, reels us in.

AT DARRAGH'S I

lie in bed and watch the night
rise slowly, implacably, out of
evening, darkening
the lance-shaped leaves of that
nut tree whose name I never
can remember: only, those leaves
are too wide to be called
lanceolate: why, they're oval!
(A childhood memory, the
cookies that were called "fruited
ovals," molasses with a
white icing, that came from the
grocer, not made at home, and
oval
oval
oval.) When a firefly dances
into my view (a black window):
another childhood memory:
in Maryland we used to catch
them and put them in jars
and watch their silent, sexy
signal. We also used to tear
their phosphor off: children
can be real fun people!

Or I sit on the porch as
a light rain slants down
onto the pond Darragh made,
the wind riffling the water
and the rain making rain rings
on it. Oriane, the lurcher,
wants in, wants out, full
of the va et vient of life
(speaking of French, did
you know that in Paris bi-
sexuality is known as
voile et vapeur? I
like that).

Then we all pile into
the Toyota and rive off
into the
World of Roses.

Copyright © James Schuyler, from Selected Poems, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988. All rights reserved.

Excerpt: Frank O'Hara

Kenneth Koch, Patsy Southgate, Frank O'Hara

Here is a snippet from one of the Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative chapbooks I picked up last weekend, a letter circa Spring 1955, from Frank O'Hara (1926-1966) to Kenneth Koch (1925-2002), during the years when they were consolidating their friendship, and just beginning to publish the poetry that subsequent generations of readers now know as the earliest examples of New York School writing. I like this letter because it gives a clear sense of O'Hara's jaunty and campy sensibility and style, as well as little hints of what he (then toiling at the front desk at the Museum of Modern Art) and Koch (then traveling in Europe with his wife, Janice Elwood Koch) were up to. It mentions one of the famous episodes in American mid-century poetry history, the initial rejection of both O'Hara's and John Ashbery's (1927-) [called "John Ash" and "J A" below] first collections of poetry by the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize in 1955, a situation that the judge, W. H. Auden (1907-1973), later rectified when he asked that O'Hara and Ashbery send their collections to him directly, and he chose--though not enthusiastically, according both to his then assistant and eventual close friend and associate of O'Hara, Koch and Ashbery, James Schuyler (1923-1991), and to his somewhat disaffected introduction--Ashbery's volume, which was published the next year, in 1956, as Some Trees. The CUNY chapbook includes notes to all the references, but here are some clues if you're not familiar with these names: Larry [Rivers] (1923-2002), Grace [Hartigan] (1922-2008), and [Jean-Paul] Riopelle (1923-2002) were visual and plastic artists; Joe [Brainerd] (1941-1994) was an author, collagist, cartoonist and painter; Wystan is W. H. Auden; and Koch's two versions of "The Circus," the first one praised here, are among his best and most famous single poems). I highly recommend them.

***

May 9, 1955
New York

Dear Kenny,

Not knowing where you are, I'm writing you back in Paris. Doubtless you two have gone to Labrador or Aden, there's no way of guessing.

Have you see the art show we sent to the Orangerie?  and have you seen the Musée d'Art Moderne show, which has a Hartigan in it? Write me your impressions.

I'm sending you my first poem in French. If you find any mistakes please let me know. Otherwise, I hope you'll be able to get it printed in the French Vogue with a suitable decoration by Riopelle. Does it sound French, I wonder?

How is Janice? Would she like to sell me her painting of Joe by Larry I have grown passionately fond of it and would buy it at whatever price (but I know she only paid $25, honey, and ten years have not yet passed), but couldn't afford anything over $50, I don't think unless it were long-range. The money might come in handy, however, as your stay continues so let me know.

John Ash has writen a miraculous new 3 act play which takes place in the Canadian Northwest and is full of Mounties and Indians. It is more or less of an homage à Rin Tin Tin, with Pirandelloesque touches. It is full of something like fresh mountain air and has a simplicity like quicksand. You'll adore it.

We both sent books to Yale with disastrous results. Mine was returned because it arrived too late and then John's was returned because they are so stupid. And now Wystan will not see either of them. That preliminary screening gimmick is a crime--there can't be so many each year. You'd think he'd realize that no lesser person than himself should be allowed to make even the first rejections--what's the sense of his being editor if his choice is limited to the final 15 manuscripts and they are weeded out by a perfectly ordinary commercial publishing system? He was complaining before he left that there were so few interesting ones, and this certainly explains that. Oh well, who cares? But he might have liked John's enough to do it...

Are you too busy traveling to write? or writing to travel? Send me another delicious postcard, a note, some poems (I loved the ones you sent J A, especially Geography and the Circus). As you always do, give me the feeling about your works that "Alps on Alps arise" or whatever that line is.

Love to both,
Frank

From "this pertains to me which mean to you": The Correspondence of Kenneth Koch & Frank O'Hara 1955-1956 PART 1. Josh Schneiderman, editor. New York: Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, Series 1, Number 2, Winter 2009.

Quartet: Chamberlain / Frankenthaler / Rivers / Havel

Last Wednesday, the sculptor and plastic artist John Chamberlain passed away. He was 84. I always think of him as Mr. Crushed Cars, though he worked in media other than, well, crushed scrap metal from cars. But what he could do with car parts! I often perceive a physical lightness (akin to the wittiness of their names) in his sculptures that is quite at odds with the weightiness of their materials and materiality.  Interstellar flowers, often brightly, crazily colored, gracing our world. Here are a few images of his sculptures.

BIG E (© 2001 John Chamberlain / Artists Rights Society (ARS))

Taffeta Coupé (© PaceWildenstein, 1999)

Imagescrimmage, 2007 (image courtesy of: www.anthonymeierfinearts.com)

Untitled, c. 1961 (image courtesy of: www.artnet.com)

Also leaving the world was Helen Frankenthaler, one of the New York School's major figures, an adept of Clement Greenbergian formalism, whose career spanned the entire second half of the 20th century. She was 83, and a pioneer in "stain painting" untreated canvas. I had no  idea that she was conservative in her leanings and even participated, as a friend's email relayed, in helping to shut down the National Endowment of the Arts's grants for visual arts when she went on record criticizing several of the grantees, including Andrés Serrano. Bad politics, to my mind, yet there is, however, the art.  I have seen some of the paintings in person, and find them quite beautiful, lyrical, enchanting.  To reframe a point made by another artist in a forwarded email, does Frankenthaler's formalism provoke thoughts about the politics of form, and if so, what politics (and ideology) does her formalism suggest?  Some images:

The Bay, 1963 (© Detroit Institute of Arts via Detroit Free Press)

Nature Abhors a Vacuum, 1973 (© National Gallery of Art, Washington)

Bacchus, 2002 (© Knoedler and Company, New York)

Driving East, 2002 (© Knoedler and Company, New York)

 Mauve Bag, 1979 (© Helen Frankenthaler, Morgan Library, NY)

Geoffrey J. noted that another figure who passed recently was the saxophonist Sam Rivers, one of the brightest lights in New York's loft jazz scene of the 1970s. His Studio Rivbea, on Bond Street in the East Village, open from 1970 till 1979, was one of the major sites places to catch him and others during this period.  A native of Oklahoma who grew up in Chicago, Rivers was 88, and began playing free improvisations in the late 1950s, eventually working in combos with Miles Davis, Cecil Taylor, Dave Holland, Dizzy Gillespie, and many other greats.  He could turn his tenor saxophone inside out, offering dazzling improvisations that the videos below give hints of, but he also could make music on a range of instruments, and could set the pace in a variety of styles. he In recent years he was living in Florida, and revived his Rivbea Orchestra.  Now, those videos:

Sam Rivers and Dave Holland, Pisa, 1980

Sam Rivers Quartet 1989 - Beatrice

Sam Rivers Trio, 1979 - Germany

Sam Rivers and the Rivbea All-Star Orchestra, rehearsing, 1998

Sam Rivers and the Orlando Rivbea Orchestra, 2010

Jazz at Lincoln Center, JazzStories podcast, 2011

***

Lastly, an artist who put his career on hold in the service of freedom, others' and his own, Václav Havel (1936-2011), the playwright and former president of what was then the new post-Soviet Czechoslovakia, and what is now the Czech Republic, has passed away. He was 75. The scion of a wealthy family that was targeted by the post-World War II Czech Communist regime, Havel was denied the opportunity initially to study the humanities, yet later took a correspondence course and trained in the theater, developing his skills as a playwright in the early 1960s before becoming, after the Prague Spring period in 1968 one of his country's leading dissidents, ending up in jail and continually persecuted until the winter of 1989 and the fall of the old order. With his country's transition to democracy, he became its leader.  His tenure was rocky, through no fault of his ideas or ideals; politics, he knew and relearned, are difficult and often complicated, and with an opponent as dogmatic and deadset as Václav Klaus, he had a battle on his hands.  As a playwright he had often captured this difficulty, this complexity, ad absurdum: now he was living it. His tenure ended finally in 2003; he wrote an autobiography, and returned to dramaturgy as well.

One of Havel's greatest and most enduring works is his 1978 essay, "The power of the powerless," in which he says, in words prefiguring the transformations his own nation witnessed nearly two and a half decades ago, and that we are again seeing across the globe over the last few years:

 For the real question is whether the brighter future is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?

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.