Kenneth Koch

Home > People > Literature and the Arts > American Literature: Biographies

Koch, Kenneth [Jay] (1925–2002), Cincinnati born author, educated at Harvard (A.B., 1948) and Columbia (Ph.D., 1959), was a professor of English at Columbia from 1959. He is associated with the so‐called New York school of poetry of John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, and his early Poems (1953) are marked by a surrealistic use of language. Ko, or A Season on Earth (1960) is a long comic poem of complex plots written in Byronic ottava rima. Later collections of poems, including Thank You (1962), The Pleasures of Peace (1969), and The Art of Love (1975), all marked by an exuberant wit, were followed by The Duplications (1977), another capricious Byronic epic, and The Burning Mystery of Anna in 1951 (1979), combining poetry and prose. All of these books formed the source of Selected Poems (1985) and were followed by On the Edge (1986), two long poems. Straits (1998) and New Addresses (2000) collected later poems, and A Possible World (2002) and Sun Out: Selected Poems 1952–1954 (2002) appeared posthumously. Bertha and Other Plays (1966) and A Change of Hearts (1973) collect his very short plays. The Red Robins is a fantasy that he dramatized (1980). His successful teaching of poetry to children is treated in Wishes, Lies, and Dreams (1970) and Rose Where Did You Get That Red? (1973). Similar teaching to sick, aged people in a nursing home is the subject of I Never Told Anybody (1977). In all, he published nearly 40 volumes of poetry, prose, and drama. He was awarded the 1995 Bollingen Prize and was honored in 1996 with the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry.

Kenneth Koch (Kenneth Jay Koch) , 1925–2002, American poet, novelist, and playwright, b. Cincinnati. After studying at Harvard and Columbia he was associated with the Artist's Theatre, Locus Solus magazine, and, along with friends John Ashbery , Frank O'Hara , and James Schuyler, the so-called New York school of poets. Combining modernism, lyricism, and humor, Koch's "antisymbolic" poetic style is characterized by witty juxtapositions and dislocations of words. His roughly 30 volumes of verse include Poems (1953), Days and Nights (1982), New Addresses (2000), and two posthumously published books released in 2002, Sun Out, poems from the early 1950s, and A Possible World, his final collection. A volume of his Collected Poems was published in 2005. Among Koch's other works are the plays Bertha (1966), The Burning Mystery of Anna in 1951 (1979), The Red Robins (1980), and The Gold Standard (1996). A professor at Columbia for nearly 40 years, he also wrote several books about teaching the writing and appreciation of poetry, particularly to children and the elderly. These works include Wishes, Lies, and Dreams (1970), Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? (1973), I Never Told Anybody (1977), and Making Your Own Days (1998).

Bibliography: See D. Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (1999); G. Ward, Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets (2d ed. 2001).