The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch

Product Description
Kenneth Koch has been called “one of our greatest poets” by John Ashbery, and “a national treasure” in the 2000 National Book Award Finalist Citation.

Now, for the first time, all of the poems in his ten collections–from Sun Out, poems of the 1950s, to Thank You, published in 1962, to A Possible World, published in 2002, the year of the poet’s death–are gathered in one volume.

Celebrating the pleasures of friendship, art, and love, the poetry of Kenneth Koch has been dazzling readers for fifty years. Charter member–along with Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and James Schuyler–of the New York School of poets, avant-garde playwright and fiction writer, pioneer teacher of writing to children, Koch gave us some of the most exciting and aesthetically daring poems of his generation.

These poems take sensuous delight in the life of the mind and the heart, often at the same time: “O what a physical effect it has on me / To dive forever into the light blue sea / Of your acquaintance!” (“In Love with You”).

Here is Koch’s early work: love poems like “The Circus” and “To Marina” and such well-remembered comic masterpieces as “Fresh Air,” “Some General Instructions,” and “The Boiling Water” (“A serious moment for the water is when it boils”). And here are the brilliant later poems–“One Train May Hide Another,” the deliciously autobiographical address in New Addresses, and the stately elegy “Bel Canto”–poems that, beneath a surface of lightness and wit, speak with passion, depth, and seriousness to all the most important moments in one’s existence.

Charles Simic wrote in The New York Review of Books that, for Koch, poetry “has to be constantly saved from itself. The idea is to do something with language that has never been done before.” In the ten exuberant, hilarious, and heartbreaking books of poems collected here, Kenneth Koch does exactly that.


From the Hardcover edition.

A Powerhouse
It's hard to believe there has only been one other review of this book, which has been out for months now. Granted it is a collection of works that (may) have already been published. And it is awfully big, especially in an already overcrowded apartment. But still, this is a work of great magnitude and an extraordinary collection by this extraordinary poet. Some of his poems are so immediate, I feel I can hear his voice as he is spontaneously creating them. And yet, only someone with great skill and insight can make poetry seem so effortless and free wheeling. If I were king, and I am still hoping, I would decree a copy of this collection in every house in the realm. That's how good it is.

Hi! May I introduce Kenneth Koch?
Something inside me resists calling Kenneth Koch my favorite poet. His poems are too conversational, too easy-going, too entertaining to be so important. Except the one that made me break out in laughter while I was reading it on a treadmill at Bally's. And the one that made me cry (on that same treadmill, damn it!) And the one that scared me--really scared me--because simply, lightly, even jokingly, it presented a truth I absolutely did not want to hear. . .Now that I think of it, I realize that without any special effort on my part, I formed the kind of relationship with Koch that folks back in the old country had with Yevtushenko, Bloch or Pushkin. (Without any effort on my part, I say--all the effort was Koch's.) Koch is dead now, of course. But open the pages of this book, and he'll become a part of your life as well--as a friend, a teacher, a soulmate.

The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

John Ashbery: Collected Poems, 1956-1987 (Library of America, No. 187)

The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets

The Sonnets (Poets, Penguin)

Selected Poems (FSG Classics)

The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch & More...

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