On Koch

The March 2015 Poetry is rich with shifting selves: “Once, I was as large / as any living creature could be,” writes Laura Kasischke. “But once, I swear, I was….” In “Future Biometrics,” Jillian Weise writes: “The body that used to / contain your daughter // we found it / behind the fence”—but in this particular future, “we have other bodies / to put your daughter in.”

A special feature on Kenneth Koch includes a poem and letter by the late New York School poet, in addition to an essay by his longtime collaborator Kate Farrell. In the poem, he ponders his own transformations:

Reading my own work to get some new inspiration

I found someone who resembled me who had gone away.

He had just gone a moment ago, in fact,

Since what I was reading was something I had just written.

These lines emphasize both permanence and evanescence: if Koch can find himself in his old lines, it’s because the poem preserved its writer in a kind of literary amber. Yet he discovers not his current but his former self, one who evaporated the moment he finished composing the lines. A grammatical wobble highlights this distinction: he refers to his former self as “he” as well as “I,” reflecting identification as well as distance. Toward the end of the poem, he acknowledges that ambiguity:

Now, this person — I had better sum up — this one who is always different

Is also, since he is I myself, always the same.

He went last night to the restaurant and he wrote the poem

In which there was someone who was not quite completely himself.

Again, the poet splits into “he” and “I,” as if to underline that he is at once “always different” and “always the same.” Meanwhile, the poem’s protagonist—that “someone”—takes on a complex identity of his own: he is “not quite completely himself.” What might that phrase mean? In the simplest sense, it describes the speaker’s struggle to “be himself” over the course of the evening, a theme in this poem about the puzzle of consciousness. It also reflects the fact that he has changed over time, transforming from “he” to “I” as the poet does. But since “himself” refers to the poet, it reflects a more general literary principle, the distance between speaker and poet—a distance Koch plays with here, since that “someone” is also the person speaking to us now.

Intriguingly, in the letter accompanying this poem, Koch refers to his speaker as “he,” complete with quotation marks. This label opens another set of questions: is “he” meant to emphasize that the speaker is not “I,” not the poet—or is “he” in quotation marks because Koch really means “I”? This uncertainty reflects the either/or relationship to the self that the poem explores.

How else does Koch’s letter affect your reading of the poem? He writes: “I am not sure it’s all as good as it should be nor as clear as it should be,” and later expresses other doubts: “In the poem (Alla Rampa) would it be better (forgive me, I can’t help it) if in the last line pass were change? …. I’ve been reading the poem over, somewhat bug-eyed, and can no longer make very clear distinctions.”

Does learning about Koch’s hesitations prepare you to read the poem more critically—to mentally adopt the position of Farrell, his correspondent, and perceive his work more as draft than finished product? Alternatively, do the questions draw your attention to the poem’s strengths, highlighting its emphasis on “drafting” a self that shifts from moment to moment? Why should a poem about such a subject feel fixed and perfected?

The magazine includes not only the contents of poem and letter but also photocopies of Koch’s originals. Those feature coffee stains, fold marks, yellowing, errors, and wiggly lines of type that complement their offbeat temperament of their writer. How does reading Koch’s copies differ from reading the retyped versions? One distinction is that the originals—with their stamps, dates, and physical links to the details of Koch’s life—insist on the realities of his moment. Like his letter, which places Koch in space and time, the visual details connect the poem with the conditions of its making. They bring the poet close to us—with each new character on the page, we can imagine a flick of his finger on his Olivetti—even as, in a reflection of the poem’s ambiguities, they also carry him further away. For as soon as we spot him, he has already vanished. He is, after all, that person we are “always looking for, who is gone, naturally, because something has changed.”