I think this is a little lesson.
A poet is very important to me-- and very important to Matt,
too--
Kenneth Koch died on--
it's been ten and a half years now.
And his complete poems are coming out in November.
It's always a weird thing, a complete poems, somehow.
Because it's a little bit like that's it.
It's done.
There's no more.
And so it's strange to have had a poet who was very--
his work was very important to me,
and you always look forward to more work by Kenneth Koch.
And then there not to be anymore.
So this poem is about that.
It's called "Complete Poems."
You should get that book when it comes out even though it's
really hard to deal with.
He's a great poet.
Here's the work of Kenneth Koch.
Even the somewhat melancholy poems are happy.
He must have been absolutely nuts.
No, he wasn't.
Nor was he an aluminum snore like Robert Lowell.
[LAUGHTER]
Gladiolas arrived at the door.
Yip, yip said the puppy, and yuff, yuff the puppy grown up.
About 12 hours hardly total I spent with him before he died.
"Daddy," I almost cry.
"Oh, get over it," he said the first time
in coming down the hall.
He was tall and covered envelopes
entirely with the address.
There was no fractioning Kenneth Koch, no parts,
you always got it all.
Terra del Fuego got it all, off off off Broadway.
The cab driver from the Ivory Coast, hurry,
the museum's about to close and must be hustled through,
whizzing past the urinal, dizzy with dots.
Oh, great splash the size of a dump truck.
I can barely talk when I'm interviewing.
What's he saying now that the tape's off about his mother
in a white nightgown and Wallace Stevens?
Impossible to imagine him eating a tofu burger
or waiting very long in a car.
He had a letter from Jean Tinguely on his wall
that Tinguelyesque 'twould apart fall.
Even with everything there is a point
at which there is no more.