Due to technical difficulties, the first 15 to 20 minutes
of Kenneth Koch's poetry reading were not recorded.
...sweetly beguiling selflness.
Doris looked at Andrews and knew now
she could love someone completely.
April, then May came fluttering through the branches of peach
and pear tree all around the neatly landscaped young villa
two miles from the campers.
You, six months pregnant, lost the baby.
It was the saddest thing that ever happened to us.
You almost died.
They tried to give you oxygen in the wrong way,
in the bare beamed municipal hospital.
I helped save you.
They were lax again with blood.
Good God.
All life became peripheral, a mess, a nightmare,
until you were back again.
My poem had not a trace of these things medical.
But it was full of dyings and revivings
and strange events that went past plain connivings.
Such as the thrust of Asia to the East,
and men turned into statues, there
was also my whole past that came fizzing up like yeast.
Joy in the fact that Ko could throw a ball so,
and Pemmistrek a hog.
Good health increased.
I wrote some things for Poetry Chicago.
Alouette went to Asia, doing well,
with an enormous new resort hotel.
Life in the work.
It is as if two orchestras played separately,
and sometimes simultaneously.
One from the inside, deep down, where García Lorca says
duende dwells, which sometimes intravenously gets
fed by that outside.
Thus, metamorphosis.
Lamp into day.
Or else, a drumbeat famously heart-like inside
turns snowflakes on the window sills to sounds like cries,
and then abstracter syllables.
Should one be ignorant?
Did I have knowledge instinctively I don't have now?
Is knowing the kind one gets from every kind of college
the opposite of the ecstatic showing of what
life is in the amazing sandwich of heart?
Is wisdom sun, or is it snowing?
And how much of one's life and where it's going gets
in the work?
How is it filtered, altered?
What paths through clouds rise from the chocolate
malted one drinks on a hot day and feels exalted?
Is that truth truth still, now that all is older?
I, Tuscany, our language, Katherine, tutto?
Truth now that I come to experience colder than ever I
did then, less absoluto, with more good sense,
with decades in my folder of proofs that quite
a lot of things are futile.
What's left?
What lasts?
Does it make sense to bring out old poems again?
Oh, bells that ring ding, ding out there in the air and do not
have this problem.
Give me advice.
Or you, convulsive air, you hill, you field, you tree,
great candelabrum.
New nature still exists.
But what is there?
There, I mean, in the words I wrote
while Katherine was sleeping, and her mother
stitched her bear?
Then some years later when all strong sensations I had,
I hurled into The Duplications?
The Duplications!
Hardly is that word out when a vast image
out of Spiritus Mundi reminds me of what it was all about.
Life as a violent wild event packed Sunday
that makes the people scream, and makes them shout,
and ply the sky as if in search of funding.
Venice and Samos, Stockholm and Peru, London and Athens,
gardens in the blue.
There was no Florence anymore, however, and no sweet feeling
of a quattrocento harmonious mix of you, me, and the weather.
No Poliziano and Io mi rammento.
No tutte cose coming all together.
And intimacy, spring like as Sorrento.
The street was gray and modern, and our marriage
was more than I could mend with my then courage.
My writing now is more investigation.
Or better yet, a sort of archaeology,
set out to find the great civilization that
once existed maybe.
An apology also for what I couldn't do.
Sensation was what it rode on, action, its theology.
A way of writing well that may deceive us.
But I felt paradiso redivivas, that Ko like bliss.
I had grown so attached to it.
Could use it writing.
It was even practical.
Made me think bliss could be mine with no catch to it,
no fear, no fret, no nothing but sabbatical.
As if it were mine, not I its constituent.
Anxiety, any pain, seemed unethical.
Not now, I felt, I thought.
Don't pain, don't tire me.
I'm in a state, and that may dis-inspire me.
Now, 15 more years later looking at them,
these poems of different times and different systems,
of using life as if one had a patent on its effect,
without regard to wisdom, I feel sometimes delight,
and sometimes flattened.
What that is as I am at 60 in them?
How can I ever hope to get in sync with what they're about?
What do I have to think with?
What's here, if I'm not that same sensual Kenneth of years
ago, nuts for exhilaration, and always
willing to convene the Senate of nudes and nights
and nerve ends of the nation, for one great further push
through the impenetrable Castello del
Realization, to its high hall, where, on the gods' advice,
is painted the true face of paradise.
What is, I want to know, the truth,
if there is truth in the view of things
I had, and what is the source, if it's mistaken,
of its errors?
Do we come into life with minds and bodies
ready to live in some ecstatic Paris?
Or is the limit of our lives more modest?
Is there a seed in us?
Are we the pod?
Is the blossom pleasure and the fruit the goddess?
Did you too have this burning in your bodice for what might
be a perfect lifetime, Janice?
I don't know.
Don't know any of this.
My decades, six now, with the beginning of a seventh,
counsel me, sure, to dance to slower records.
But I'm still trumped and bumped by glimpsed up heavens,
and think they may be true.
But just for seconds.
Two words, one word.
It used to be a sentence.
Nothing has come of this except my wonder
what it's about before I'm shoveled under.
Is its being vaguer harder to put trust
in at 60 odd proof that it's false?
Or that I, its register, am wearing down or rusting?
Is it not activist, my question batty, to dote
upon this carnival combustion amid so many things
that really matter?
And what about the threat to all this fluxion and fragrant life,
the goddamn bomb's destruction.
They're right.
You're right.
I'm right.
I'm wrong.
I have no answer, except the one that poets often
sport occupationally like an Afro, that what we give
is what we have been given, and hope we are of use that way,
as Svevo has helped me live since I was 37.
I am concerned with many things and active,
but this one makes me radiantly reflective.
The question stays for me, and in my reading
these poems again, and stays outside such study.
If I'm a house, I feel that house is leaning,
and soon may fall.
I want to ask somebody what it's all been about,
but not believing I'll find the answer my young years made
ready.
With things another way, might one
come stumbling to the sweet sill of truth, and get to something?
Is there a city?
Was there?
And a woman, to go through death with, even, like Tutankhamun?
Oh, sun.
Exhilaration and regret.
Am I advance, or am I cataclysm?
Do I believe this anymore?
Has it gone down away, or have I lost my vision?
It may be here, where I'm still hit, hit,
hit by what seem its surprises more than wisdom.
But what here is mine?
If I'm no more that wit to whom the academic world was
poisoned, and every modern critic full of shit,
and all their works as spilled out shaving kit,
and wished most poets would by dogs get bit,
and was content with one good friend to sit,
or with another in the fading glint of twilight,
happy as a catcher's mitt, and full of futuration.
In such status, how could we, I, dream of time's splintering
lattice, which would take Frank away, and Janice later,
turned John into an eminence, though now we
get along all right.
Our verbal seder reconstitutes.
But not those times, oh cow, O Holy Hathor,
Egypt's cultivator, not those delicious moments
on the brow of Tuscan hill, when happy as gardenias
we gave our souls up to the evening's genius.
It's 1986 or '87, depending if you're reading this
in holograph or in the book.
The past that seems quite often to be false or fantastic
like a hippogriff, or to be a huge book we have been given,
of which we've hardly time to read a paragraph,
is in these poems, I hope, some way at random, story and past,
as if they were in tandem.
All in these stanzas that remind to clumsiness, by needing
rhymes that interrupt one's quietly attending
to one's intellectual business, demanding,
make one feel one can entirely say what one wants,
and profit from this funniness, by mixing things that in states
of sobriety one would not mix, and give
the proper airiness to what is neither chance nor
arbitrariness.
Stanzas still here.
How strange, it is, your present.
Stanzas I wrote upon the via Susini
where Ottavino, saying I'm a peasant, Io sono contadino,
pressed the greeny latch of the gateway, smiling as he entered.
That was 15 years after Mussolini, a long time past.
Now, as I read you over, there's something new
I'm trying to discover.
Here it is May again, and the wisteria smells sweet,
and there's still tape splat on my window from last year's
storm.
I've planted a huge area of wildflowers, perennials,
with no end to their coming back it says.
What fond hysteria our writing, our remembering!
Where to send to find out what's the truth, when living tramples
down everything it gives us as examples.
It's gone, but in the head it stays and sizzles.
It's gone, but in the heart it stays and sings.
It's gone sometimes, like boomeranging missiles.
And it comes back and makes and breaks up things.
It's past.
You cannot find it.
Yells and whistles help not at all.
But when the spray first springs, watch out.
You've got it in your pectoral muscles.
And in those colors first eye closing brings.
Is this the past, or life's sure force in purity,
without the mask of memory or futurity?
Some years ago, when I went back to Florence,
up past the Ortopedico to where we've been,
I found it cluttered with deterrence.
New buildings, not quite a suburban smear,
and filled with smiling children and their parents.
Sad, I let all my sadness disappear.
Going back over where we'd walked,
then driving to a new town, while thinking of arriving.
Oh, bed and base and breakfast of these times, to work,
love, and good actions the cadenzas.
Oh, possibility, sweet chance that there is a wholeness
only hinted by the stanzas, struggling into existence
like raspberries.
Or, in the Caribbean mold, garbanzos.
Do you remember, Janice, the sweet Jerez
we drank 10,000 years ago in Spain, when we picnicked
far from Barcelona's pavement?
And you were pregnant, wearing your pink raincoat, which
Spanish men found puzzling or hilarious, your being so
big and garbed in such a color.
And we walked uphill talking to each other.
I want to dedicate to you these rhymes.
I know it now.
It's not made of sensations, happiness,
though they are among its treasures.
Can there be something greater than all pleasures, and true?
Oh, was it ever yours and mine?
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you for listening to such a long poem.