Chase 1

Colton Chase

Mr. Damaso

Honors English 2, Period 7

25 March 2010

SRP Literary Thread and Poem Selection

Poet: Kenneth Koch

Thread: Koch wrote using comedy and bizarre imagery to subvert the poetic norms of his day.

“One Train May Hide Another”

“To World War II”

“On the great Atlantic Rainway”

“Poem for my Twentieth Birthday”

“In Bed”

“Sleeping with Women”

“The Circus”

“to you”

Poem: One Train May Hide Another

Koch, Kenneth. The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch. New York: Knopf, 2005. [Link].

Web. 28 Mar. 2010. <[Link]

In a poem, one line may hide another line,

As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.

That is, if you are waiting to cross

The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at

Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read
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Wait until you have read the next line--

Then it is safe to go on reading.

In a family one sister may conceal another,

So, when you are courting, it's best to have them all in view

Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another.

One father or one brother may hide the man,

If you are a woman, whom you have been waiting to love.

So always standing in front of something the other

As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas.

One wish may hide another. And one person's reputation may hide

The reputation of another. One dog may conceal another

On a lawn, so if you escape the first one you're not necessarily safe;

One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs and on the Appia

Antica one tomb

May hide a number of other tombs. In love, one reproach may hide another,

One small complaint may hide a great one.

One injustice may hide another--one colonial may hide another,

One blaring red uniform another, and another, a whole column. One bath

may hide another bath

As when, after bathing, one walks out into the rain.

One idea may hide another: Life is simple

Hide Life is incredibly complex, as in the prose of Gertrude Stein

One sentence hides another and is another as well. And in the laboratory
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One invention may hide another invention,

One evening may hide another, one shadow, a nest of shadows.

One dark red, or one blue, or one purple--this is a painting

By someone after Matisse. One waits at the tracks until they pass,

These hidden doubles or, sometimes, likenesses. One identical twin

May hide the other. And there may be even more in there! The obstetrician

Gazes at the Valley of the Var. We used to live there, my wife and I, but

One life hid another life. And now she is gone and I am here.

A vivacious mother hides a gawky daughter. The daughter hides

Her own vivacious daughter in turn. They are in

A railway station and the daughter is holding a bag

Bigger than her mother's bag and successfully hides it.

In offering to pick up the daughter's bag one finds oneself confronted by

the mother's

And has to carry that one, too. So one hitchhiker

May deliberately hide another and one cup of coffee

Another, too, until one is over-excited. One love may hide another love

or the same love

As when "I love you" suddenly rings false and one discovers

The better love lingering behind, as when "I'm full of doubts"

Hides "I'm certain about something and it is that"

And one dream may hide another as is well known, always, too. In the

Garden of Eden
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Adam and Eve may hide the real Adam and Eve.

Jerusalem may hide another Jerusalem.

When you come to something, stop to let it pass

So you can see what else is there. At home, no matter where,

Internal tracks pose dangers, too: one memory

Certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about,

The eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities. Reading

A Sentimental Journey look around

When you have finished, for Tristram Shandy, to see

If it is standing there, it should be, stronger

And more profound and theretofore hidden as Santa Maria Maggiore

May be hidden by similar churches inside Rome. One sidewalk

May hide another, as when you're asleep there, and

One song hide another song; a pounding upstairs

Hide the beating of drums. One friend may hide another, you sit at the

foot of a tree

With one and when you get up to leave there is another

Whom you'd have preferred to talk to all along. One teacher,

One doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man

May hide another. Pause to let the first one pass.

You think, Now it is safe to cross and you are hit by the next one. It

can be important

To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.

Rehak, Melanie. "Dr. Fun." Nation 282.3 (23 Jan. 2006): 28-30. Rpt. in Poetry Criticism.

Ed. Michelle Lee. Vol. 80. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Literature Resource Center. Web. 29

Mar. 2010. <[Link]

Poem 2: On the Great Atlantic Rainway

Koch, Kenneth. The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch. New York: Knopf, 2005. [Link].

Web. 28 Mar. 2010. <[Link]

I set forth one misted white day of June

Beneath the great Atlantic rainway, and heard:

“Honestly you smite worlds of truth, but

Lose your own trains of thought, like a pigeon.

Did you once ride in Kenneth‟s machine?”

“Yes, I rode there, an old man in shorts, blind,

Who had lost his way in the filling station; Kenneth was kind.”

“Did he fill your motionless ears with resonance and stain?”

“No, he spoke not as a critic, but as a man.”

“Tell me, what did he say?” “He said,

„My eyes are the white sky, the gravel on the groundway my sad lament.‟”

“And yet he drives between the two. . . .” “Exactly, Jane,

And that is the modern idea of fittingness,

To, always in motion, lose nothing, although beneath the

Rainway they move in threes and twos completely

Ruined for themselves, like moving pictures.”

“But how other?” “Formulalessness, to go from the sun

Into love‟s sweet disrepair. He would fondly express

„Rain trees‟—which is not a poem, „rain trees. . . .‟”

“Still, it is mysterious to have an engine

That floats bouquets! and one day in the rear-vision

Mirror of his car we vowed delight,

The insufficiency of the silverware in the sunlight,

The dreams he steals from and smiles, losing gain.”

“Yet always beneath the rainway unsyntactical

Beauty might leap up!” “That we might sing

From smiles‟ ravines, „Rose, the reverse of everything,

May be profaned or talked at like a hat.‟”

“Oh that was sweet and short, like the minuet

Of stars, which would permit us to seem our best friends

By silver‟s eminent lights! For nature is so small, ends

Falsely reign, distending the time we did

Behind our hope for body-work, riding with Kenneth.”

Their voicing ceased, then started again, to complain

That we are offered nothing when it starts to rain

In the same way, though we are dying for the truth.

Pettingell, Phoebe. "The Power of Laughter." New Leader 83.2 (May-June 2000): 39-41. Rpt. in

Poetry Criticism. Ed. Michelle Lee. Vol. 80. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Literature Resource Center.

Web. 29 Mar. 2010. <[Link]

Poem 3: To You

Koch, Kenneth. The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch. New York: Knopf, 2005. [Link].

Web. 28 Mar. 2010. <[Link]

To You

by Kenneth Koch

I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut

That will solve a murder case unsolved for years

Because the murderer left it in the snow beside a window

Through which he saw her head, connecting with

Her shoulders by a neck, and laid a red

Roof in her heart. For this we lived a thousand years;

For this we love, and we live because we love, we are not

Inside a bottle, thank goodness! I love you as a

Kid searches for a goat; I am crazier than shirttails

In the wind, when you‟re near, a wind that blows from

The big blue sea, so shiny so deep and so unlike us;

I think I am bicycling across an Africa of green and white fields

Always, to be near you, even in my heart

When I‟m awake, which swims, and also I believe that you
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Are trustworthy as the sidewalk which leads me to

The place where I again think of you, a new

Harmony of thoughts! I love you as the sunlight leads the prow

Of a ship which sails

From Hartford to Miami, and I love you

Best at dawn, when even before I am awake the sun

Receives me in the questions which you always pose.

Merrin, Jeredith. "The Poetry Man." Southern Review 35.2 (Spring 1999): 403-409. Rpt. in

Poetry Criticism. Ed. Michelle Lee. Vol. 80. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Literature Resource

Center. Web. 29 Mar. 2010. <[Link]

Poem 4: The Circus

Koch, Kenneth. The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch. New York: Knopf, 2005. [Link].

Web. 28 Mar. 2010. <[Link]

The Circus

by Kenneth Koch

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
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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”
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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
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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.

Hoover, Paul. "Fables of Representation: Poetry of the New York School." American Poetry Review

31.4 (2002): 20-30. Rpt. in Poetry for Students. Ed. Anne Marie Hacht. Vol. 20. Detroit: Gale,

2004. Literature Resource Center. Web. 29 Mar. 2010. <[Link]