Kenneth Koch

"The Art of the Possible: Comics Mainly without Pictures is a collection of poetry comics written, illustrated, and lettered by Kenneth Koch. The Art of the Possible includes puzzle pages, guides to different kinds of guys, gals, onions, and Easter, not to mention observations on eating snails in Wales or looking for a locker in Cuernavaca. Anton Chekov, Willem de Kooning, a Russian Socrates, Gabonese leader Omar Bongo, and the Dead White Man all make appearances. Both fulfillment of a childhood wish and the product of fifty years' experience in the worlds of literature and art, The Art of the Possible is a unique book by one of America's best-loved poets."--BOOK JACKET.

"Kenneth Koch here takes on the classic poetic device of apostrophe, or direct address. His use of it gives him yet another chance to say things never said before in prose or in verse and, as well, to bring new life to a form in which Donne talked to Death, Shelley to the West Wind, Whitman to the Earth, Pound to his Songs, O'Hara to the Sun at Fire Island."--BOOK JACKET.

This book makes the somewhat mysterious subject of poetry clear for those who read it and for those who write it and for those who would like to read it and write it better. Koch accomplishes this revelation of poetry by presenting the idea that poetry is a separate language, a language in which music and sound are as important as syntax or meaning. Thus he is able to clarify the many aspects of poetry: the nature of poetic inspiration, what happens when a poet is writing a poem, revision, and what actually goes on while one is reading a poem - how confusion or only partial understanding eventually leads to truly experiencing a poem. Among the poets whose work is included are Homer, Ovid, Sappho, Shakespeare, Byron, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Li Bei, Stevens, Williams, Lorea, Ashbery, and Snyder.

In this new selection of the poetry of Kenneth Koch - "one of our greatest poets" (John Ashbery) - Koch's brilliance, aesthetic daring, and virtuosity are everywhere apparent. Included here are selections from his book-length narrative poems, Ko and The Duplications, and from his dazzlingly incomprehensible (by ordinary means), fractured epic When the Sun Tries to Go On; poetic plays such as Pericles, Guinivere, Bertha, and six of his One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays; "instructional" poems - from The Art of Love - in which an old genre is splendidly revived; lyric, satiric, and sympathetic poems on the state of the arts - "Fresh Air" and "The Artist"; radically inventive love poems - "West Wind," "To Marina," "With Janice"; and the memorable autobiographical poems "On the Edge" and "Seasons of the Earth."

"Intensely serious beneath a surface of lightness and wit, Kenneth Koch's poems "maintain power," Denis Donoghue wrote, "by rarely choosing to exert it." Koch's virtuosity - he has written many plays, an extravagant novel (The Red Robins), and short stories (Hotel Lambosa), and has done numerous collaborations with painters - seems part of a continuing and energetic attempt to write (in the words of Ariosto) "things never said in prose before or in verse." Almost every poem is a new kind of poem, a new flight - in this volume, for example, the theme and variations of "One Train May Hide Another," the "Poems by Ships at Sea," the post-Apollinairean couplets of "A Time Zone," the Chinese poetry-influenced quatrains of "The First Step," and the hundred or so brief poems that together make up the poem "On Aesthetics.""--BOOK JACKET.

Selections from the work of twenty-three modern poets, from Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins to Gary Snyder and Leroi Jones, including translations of poems by five European poets.

Kenneth Koch was like a 20th century Walt Whitman with a goofy sense of humor. The poems in this volume -- only eight of them! -- have rambling, expansive poems with titles like "The Art of Poetry" and "The Art of Love," and seem to contain every thought that flitted through Koch's head over the course of a long night of conviviality. His advice is comical but sincerely felt, as when he says "To learn of cunnilingus at age fifty speaks to a life ill-spent." He's uninhibited and wild to entertain you, though when he advises you to tie up your girlfriend and fold her into an airplane, perhaps you might think this a bit much (as I do). -- from (March 10, 2014).

Handbook on how to teach children to read great poetry as a meaningful experience in their lives.

"When Kenneth Koch entered the Manhattan classrooms of P.S. 61, the children, excited by the opportunity to work with an instructor able to inspire their talent and energy, would clap and shout with pleasure. In this vivid account, Koch describes his inventive methods for teaching these children how to create poems and gives numerous examples of their work. Wishes, Lies, and Dreams is a valuable text for all those who care about freeing the creative imagination and educating the young."--BOOK JACKET.

This book includes essays on teaching poetry writing, on collaborating with painters, and on critical considerations of the work of James Schuyler, Joseph Ceravolo, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Michel Deguy, a conversation with Allen Ginsberg, and an interview with Jordan Davis about poetry, theater, education, the comic, and the New York School, among other things.