So we're running out of time.
Can I talk about the Koch poem, just really quickly?
And then-- this always happens the first time
I give a lecture.
I totally prepare too much stuff.
So this poem is actually-- which is called A Momentary Longing
to Hear Sad Advice From One Long Dead, is not from the 1950s.
It is a poem that was actually written probably
around the year 2000, maybe 1999.
Koch died, I think, in 2001 or 2002.
And he's talking about--
the person who he's referring to in the poem
is Delmore Schwartz, who apparently he
had as a teacher at Harvard really briefly.
He's a poet very much unlike Koch
and who one could imagine Koch just kind
of rolling his eyes at, because Schwartz could be
quite a melodramatic character.
He's a wonderful, wonderful poet, but certainly
the kind of poet that the new critics would have loved.
So I'll read this myself, and the title
moves into the first line of the poem.
The other important thing you should know about this
is that Coke was actually dying at this point, and knew it,
and that never comes into the poem in a direct way,
but it's there.
A momentary longing to hear sad advice
from one long dead, who was my teacher at Harvard.
Did not wear overcoat, saying to me
as we walked across the yard.
Cold, brittle autumn is.
You should be wearing overcoat.
I said, you are not wearing overcoat.
He said, you should do as I say, not do as I do.
Just how American it was and how late 40s it was.
Delmore, but not I, was probably aware.
He quoted Finnegans Wake to me in his New York apartment,
sitting on chair.
Table directly in front of him.
There did he write?
I am wondering.
Look at this photograph, said of his mother and father.
Coney Island.
Do they look happy?
He couldn't figure it out.
Believed Pogo to be at the limits of our culture.
Pogo.
Walt Kelly must have read Joyce, Delmore said.
Why don't you ask him?
Why don't you ask Walt Kelly if he read Finnegans Wake or not?
Your parents don't look happy, but it is just a photograph.
Maybe they felt awkward posing for photographs.
Maybe it is just a bad photograph.
Delmore is not listening.
I want to hear him tell me something sad, but however,
true.
Delmore, in his tomb, is sitting.
People say yes, everyone is dying.
But here, read this happy book on the subject.
Not Delmore.
Not that rueful man.
So I have no idea what this strange syntactical weirdness
is at certain moments in the poem and why he's using it.
Pogo was-- for those of you who are not of a certain age,
shall we say--
Pogo was an amazing comic strip that
played in most American newspapers over probably
a 20 or 30 year period.
It was written by this guy Walt Kelly.
It had an amazing cast of characters.
It all took place in a swamp.
It oftentimes was quite allegorical
and commented in allegorical ways
on what was going on in American politics.
It was incredibly smart.
It could be read by completely ordinary people in one way
and it could be read by another set of people and another way.
It had layers to it that were really, really quite wonderful.
If you read graphic novels, if you know the graphic novel
Bone, that is--
the guy who did that, whose name I'm blanking out on,
it was very influenced by Walt Kelly, and some of the drawing
comes out of the Walt Kelly style.
So there's this weird Yoda speak in the poem at times,
and it's weird, sort of disruptive syntax.
It's very funny, and yet the subtext of the poem,
you never find--
I told you that Koch is dying at this point.
You don't know that from the poem
but you feel, totally, the tugging.
And the comedy-- and Koch was a master of this at times.
The comedy has a kind of madcap quality to it
and yet beneath it is-- just beneath it
is this vulnerability-- deep vulnerability--
and it's wonderful.
The photograph that he's referring to in the poem
is a very famous photograph that appears in a story
that Delmore Schwartz wrote called, In Dreams Begin
Responsibilities, which is largely
a meditation on the failed marriage of his parents.
So there's a kind of--
the project-- the spiritual project in this particular poem
and I think, throughout the New York School,
is how to be heroic without being melodramatic.
Because when you think about it, that's everyday life.
We do not-- whatever sort of heroism or courage we possess,
however we approach death, with whatever courage we have--
it is oftentimes not dramatic, and we are barely aware of it
as courage, and probably that's a good thing.
And there's a wonderful modesty, almost, about this--
a spiritual modesty that I really
dig in the New York School.
They can be really playful and completely over the top
at times, but I also think there was this sense of them being
completely attached to ordinary life and wanting to not only
celebrate it, but also to recognize these flashes
of difficulty in them, and not to make them something that
they weren't.
So there's a silence that occurs at the end of this poem.
There's-- he wants this advice.
You don't know why he wants it, but it's clear
that there's some hunger for it, and he gets it,
and the advice is not happy.
It's basically, there isn't anything
other than this silence, and you have to accept it.
Delmore, there's a certain--
Delmore is not somebody who is a kind of prophet
of the self-help age.
He's not one of these people who's going
to tell you to read this book.
There's no good advice anybody can give you about dying.
You come to your own death by yourself.
With others, but you face it yourself.
And he gets the advice that he wished for,
and he's put in a place where he has to accept it,
and I think he does.
Nothing special is made out of it,
so there's something profoundly moving about that.
Creeley wrote after Koch died, he said--
in a poem-- but your classic humor of the edge,
of being about to, and hanging on even for one last look,
that was truly heroic.
And it's a kind of beautiful homage.