In July 1978, Kenneth Koch sent me his new poem “At the Ramp, ovvero Alla Rampa” — or “Alla Rampa” as he referred to it in the letter that accompanied it. After living together for several years in New York and elsewhere, Kenneth and I and my two children (the “babies” mentioned mid-letter) had spent that spring in Rome, where he was teaching Italian schoolchildren to write poetry. In June, I’d returned with the kids to New York for a trial separation which later that summer became permanent. The poem — addressed to me or to the reader through me — is set in Rome and moves between metaphysical questions and the prior night’s post-concert dinner at the Ristorante Alla Rampa.

Kenneth Koch, August 1978. Photo credit: Katherine Koch.

Rediscovering “Alla Rampa” in my files a few years ago, I was struck by what a good poem it was — however unfinished. The Rome-drenched verve and charm of the letter that arrived with it was another surprise, bringing the moment of the poem’s writing to life.

The letter begins with a qualm about the poem, fills in factual details, and ends with a question about wording. The concert, he writes, took place in the Pincio Gardens above the Spanish Steps; the 
restaurant was at the foot of “the ramp” between the steps and the gardens. The pianist Frederic Rzewski, a friend of our friend Francesco Pellizzi, performed in the concert and was at the restaurant afterward, as were Julian Beck and Judith Malina, founders of The Living Theater. Marcello Panni, who with his wife Jeanne planned the evening, is the composer with whom Kenneth later wrote two operas. There’s also a recap of a day of sightseeing with his visiting daughter Katherine, just graduated from Berkeley, and her friend Callie. The rollicking look of the typing in both poem and letter, produced by the faulty shift key of his travel-battered Olivetti, adds to the sense of a Kochian time capsule.

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In the late poem “To the Roman Forum,” about the night his daughter Katherine was born in Rome, Kenneth visits the Forum to ponder the event “at the twenty-five-espresso mark” of excitement. During our stay, the city’s beauty and brio could up the mark even on uneventful days — as could sitting at his desk writing poetry. Our sublet on the Via dei Coronari had a pretty rooftop view and an airy loft where he could write without disturbance. His lines in “Seasons on Earth” — 

                                                        Each midday found me
Ecstatically in the present tense,
Writing.

— weren’t about that time but could have been. At some point during the day, and usually again after dinner, he’d read me what he’d been writing. That spring, it was often “To Marina,” a long love poem that took years to write — note the word endlessness in the remark about it in his letter. Nearly as interesting to me as hearing the various versions were the ancillary philosophical conversations about the themes that wove through it — time, love, loss, poetry — themes “Alla Rampa” takes up more directly. The latter starts off at his writing desk, with musings about the poetic truth he is “always looking for,” before moving to the Ristorante Alla Rampa and wider reflections and ruminations.

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The letter containing “Alla Rampa” was delayed in the mail, and the arrival of the poem just as we were breaking up muted the pleasure of reading it. I filed it away for my upcoming move, and I don’t think we ever discussed it. Luckily our friendship and collaborations continued: I remained his writing assistant for years afterward and we coauthored two books about reading and writing poetry.

Paul Celan’s idea of a poem as “a message in a bottle” seems to me especially apropos of “At the Ramp, ovvero Alla Rampa.” Not just a matter of how it showed up, redolent of another time, but of its letter-like tone, the vivid sense it gives of Kenneth at his Olivetti, the present-tense allegro of the endless search intact.

—Kate Farrell

 

 

Monday, July 10

Dear Kate,

Here’s the poem, announced in my last letter. I decided to type it up and send it more or less as is. I am not sure it’s all as good as it should be nor as clear as it should be. It certainly is less harrowing to read my poems to you out loud. To pass from poem to letter, Frederic is Frederic Rzewski, Francesco’s friend, and what happened was that Jeanne and Marcello suggested I meet them at a concert of contemporary music in the gardens of the Villa Medici in the Pincio Gardenspart near the top of the Spanish Steps, and this concert included Frederic playing the piano, very beautifully, I thought. The restaurant Alla Rampa is one I’d never seen before, very pleasant, right at the bottom of a stairway or ramp that leads down from the top of the Sp. Steps. Though I hadn’t seen them at the concert, Julian Beck and Judith Malina must have been there, since they appeared with Frederic at the restaurant afterwards. I did manage at last to buy dinner for the Pannis. I did some work on the Marina poem (endlessness!) and I think I actually now have the kind of tone I want at the end. I will send it as soon as I can. Katherine and Callie went to Florence today. Their presence gave me the pleasant obligation to do some touring — we did a rather thorough trip through the Forum and the Palatine, and saw many churches (including Santa Maria in Trastevere, Romanesque, with nice mosaics over the altar) and palaces (including Palazzo Farnese courtyard only, 11–12 am Sundays). Today I received an envelope full of mail you sent me on July 5. Did you write to me between your second letter (June 30) and then? If so, I haven’t gotten the letter yet. The July 5 one got here very fast. How was babies’ departure? Long Island? Thanks for the mail. It had some odd contents, including my being selected as writer of the year by St. Edward High School in Lakewood, Ohio, and they want me to answer the question “What do you believe is the greatest challenge facing any young person today aspiring to become a writer?” Since it is a Catholic school, maybe you will know what they mean by “challenge” (?) I have a feeling it’s not the same thing as a difficulty. 
I guess it would be a challenge to try to express God’s word using avant-garde techniques, but that would only face some, not all, young persons. There was also a letter from a young poet who sent me a Variations of his own on my Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams, which (his) includes these lines: “Yesterday we took a walk through the park / and I murdered you.” Thank you for depositing my checks. In the poem (Alla Rampa) would it be better (forgive me, I can’t help it) if in the last line pass were change? And in the second-to-last line is it clear that what’s meant is “present awareness”? I mean, it’s not supposed to mean that “he” knows that awareness of the feeling will be permanently blotted out but that it may come and go in his consciousness. This is what I’m not sure is clear, and I’m not sure changing pass to change makes it clear, either. I’ve been reading the poem over, somewhat bug-eyed, and can no longer make very clear distinctions. As I said, well, as I said, it’s better to have you here to read my poems to et pour mille autres raisons.

Love, 
Kenneth

At the Ramp, ovvero Alla Rampa

To Kate

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.
Yes, now that this exists in time, I thought,
It is no longer the truth I am always looking for,
Since it has all those familiar characteristics —
Eyes, mouth and ears — of something that has individual existence,
Not something totally penetrated and found and lost,
So I’ll have to go on writing though I’m aware that it’s hopeless.

Last night Frederic at the piano, or Federico as Jeanne calls him,
Was very, very good, very strong and effective,
Playing some new pieces which Marcello didn’t especially like.
I remember each moment of the evening in a separated way
And I remember them all together in a massed kind of way.
I remember thinking of the present and the past and the future
Last night during dinner after the concert and speaking
To Marcello about the future and to Julian Beck about the future and the past.
I remember slightly wondering if I was at the center
And when life’s principal events were going to happen —

I mean when I would have the sense that they were happening,
For many of them have happened for me long ago,
And at least a part of one, or two, must have been happening last night.
I was flickeringly, intermittently aware of my having been
Quite happy while Frederic played the piano, at least at certain 
moments,
And I was quite happy at dinner, though that may have been mainly a relief
From not feeling nervous and lonely as I had earlier,
Although I suppose, all the same, that kind of happiness counts.
But, being aware of this problem, I was wondering when there’d be some real happiness
And what that happiness would be. The life cycle makes it all rather peculiar.

I intermittently was aware of that, too, of the life cycle,
I mean of my getting constantly older, yet always filled with expectation.
Death, I never think about death — just that I have less time
To be nervous and thinking about nervousness
And happy and thinking about happiness as I was last night.
And when will I pierce this veil that lies shining above the restaurant
Alla Rampa, where we all ate dinner? and when will some rhetoric like this work
And really accomplish something and let me be the person in the poem
Whom I found, just earlier, fleeting away? Um, I don’t think you want to be that person — 
He’s less conscious than the one who is speaking now. Oh, then what have we lost

By our existence in time? There’s a grand question —
I should have asked Julian and Marcello. E difficile rispondere,
Marcello would have said, and Julian might have said, Well
We lost our theatre, the one at Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue,
And I would have said, viciously, Ah, you both know what I mean —
What have we lost, really? And the restaurant Alla Rampa would have exploded,
And from far above in the sky I’d have seen Federico playing
A last sonata about this fact. I did think while I heard him playing
I’d like him to play the story of my life, and I knew this remark
Was intended for no one but you, and I felt bad (not just for this reason) that you weren’t there.

There’s a theme for you, something that is happening, I’m 
Absent from you, you are absent, thinking about what should be happening
In your life. I, you say, live in the moment, and you don’t mind,
But you can’t do that yourself. I would say I am always thinking
About the moment, not that I live in it — or else everyone does.
I think about it for god knows what para-neurotic reason
But it’s true that I think the answer is always there,
Although it never turns out to be. Che passa? What are you feeling in that unimaginable
Place which is not with me? It’s true if you had been at the concert
I’d have been wondering about how you were feeling instead of how I was feeling myself.

I return to my theme: the discrepancy between thought and 
experience
And this big plant, the body, in the middle of it all
Which has to get a lot of water and a lot of sun.
Perhaps it is the only thing that matters. But the other part keeps intruding
Just as the body is reputed to do. I think I am often trying
To “include” the future so it won’t bother me, and this is exhausting.
I wrote letters today to Bologna Stockholm and Hamburg
Marcello said, about possible concerts in nineteen eighty and nineteen seventy-nine. And Julian said
It’s the first time we’ve actually had a place of our own to live in
In seventeen years. I said, My God, how did you stand it? He said, 
I don’t know

And meanwhile the stars above Ristorante Alla Rampa had not come out
Though the night was light-blue and pleasant, a little bit cool,
And we started to walk home but Frederic was interrupted by an admirer
Who wanted to tell him something about his playing
And I thought it will take us a long time to get home — then,
This thought is idiotically egocentric, I am characteristically always thinking
And telling other people about how I feel, about my slightest anxieties
And my slightest interests. Ah, it is probably too late to change that completely. 
In a way it seems good in my poetry and may help to explain that character
I am always looking for, who is gone, naturally, always, because something has changed.

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.
He is writing this poem, and thinking, Oh, you’re not going to like me
Because I talk about changing so much and don’t stay on the subject
Of how much I love you and how I care so much more about this
Than about everything in the restaurant magnified to infinity, and the whole sky
And all the music, and he knows that the awareness of this feeling
Will pass, but the feeling — well, I don’t think that ever will, unless I die.

K.K.

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Kenneth Koch and Katherine Koch on Palatine Hill, taken by Caroline “Callie” Hancock, 1978.

Acknowledgments

Poetry magazine and the Poetry Foundation would like to thank the Kenneth Koch Literary Estate for permission to publish Kenneth Koch’s unfinished poem “At the Ramp, ovvero Alla Rampa” and his letter to Kate Farrell. We appreciate the time and thought Kenneth Koch’s literary executors Karen Koch, Jordan Davis, and Ron Padgett gave to this project. We also thank Katherine Koch and David Shapiro for their generous help and advice.

The poems cited by Kate Farrell in her introductory note are “To the Roman Forum” and “To Marina” from The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch (2005) and “Seasons on Earth” from On the Edge: Collected Long Poems by Kenneth Koch (2007), both published by Alfred A. Knopf.