Paradiso

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Paradiso

Kenneth Koch
2002

"Paradiso" appears in Kenneth Koch's final collection of new poems, A Possible World (New York, 2002), published a few months after his death. This poem examines an individual who initially revels in an illusion of happiness and then chastises himself for not grasping the opportunity for the real happiness that lies before him. While one may read this poem apart from the book that includes it, the best possible understanding comes from knowing something about the entire collection, as well as knowing something about Koch's personal life. Koch's time spent in various countries—including Italy, where he married his first wife—plays an important role in A Possible World. It may even be the impetus for the title of this poem, which shares its name with an older work of the same name, written in the fourteenth century by Italian classical poet Dante Alighieri. It is also likely that Koch's personal life—especially the love he felt for each of his wives—is what helps his speaker make the leap from disillusionment to possible happiness once he understands the true meaning of paradise.

Author Biography

Kenneth Koch (pronounced "coke") was born February 27, 1925, in Cincinnati, Ohio. His father Stuart Koch owned a furniture store, and his mother Lillian wrote amateur literary reviews. As an adult, Koch admitted that, though his upbringing was
pleasant enough, he longed to get away from his cozy, provincial Midwestern town, and writing poetry and stories was one way to escape it as a youngster. He has noted that he remembers writing his first poem at age five and that as a child he was quite enamored of nursery rhymes and children's stories.

After high school, Koch was drafted into the Army and served in the Philippines during World War II. He did not write about his harrowing war experiences until near the end of his life, by which time he had found a poetic voice to describe them. Koch enrolled at Harvard University when the war ended and there studied writing with renowned poet Delmore Schwartz. He also developed what would become a lifelong friendship with poet and art critic John Ashbery.

In 1948 Koch graduated with honors from Harvard. He then studied briefly at the University of California, Berkeley—where he met Mary Janice Elwood (Janice), his first wife—before transferring to Columbia University to complete his master's and doctoral degrees. He published his first volume of poetry, titled simply Poems, in 1953. In 1959 Koch became a member of the Columbia writing faculty and remained a teacher there for virtually the rest of his life. During his lifetime he was as renowned for his teaching as for his writing.

Koch is considered one of the founders of the New York School of Poetry, which emphasizes playfulness and absurdity as well as a nihilistic point of view on society and a snubbing of traditional "serious" poetry. His literary career spanned more than forty years and included some thirty volumes of poetry and plays, numerous articles of literary criticism, and three instructional books on how to write poetry. His writing garnered numerous awards, including the 1973 Frank O'Hara Prize for poetry; the 1986 Award of Merit for poetry from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; the Bollingen Prize in 1995; and a 1996 Library of Congress award for One Train: Poems (1994). Koch's New Addresses was National Book Award finalist in 2000. Two of his works were published posthumously in autumn 2002: Sun Out, which included work written between 1952 and 1954, and A Possible World, including the poem "Paradiso."

Koch's first wife, with whom he had one child, died in 1981. In 1994 Koch married Karen Culler, the woman to whom he dedicated his final volume of poetry. His love for his wives, as well as his undying sense of humor, his thirst for world travel, and a never-ending personal exuberance, fill his work with a vitality not often seen in modern and contemporary poetry. Koch died of leukemia July 6, 2002 at his home in Manhattan.

Poem Text

There is no way not to be excited
When what you have been disillusioned by raises its head
From its arms and seems to want to talk to you again.
You forget home and family
And set off on foot or in your automobile          5
And go to where you believe this form of reality
May dwell. Not finding it there, you refuse
Any further contact
Until you are back again trying to forget
The only thing that moved you (it seems) and gave what you forever will have          10
But in the form of a disillusion.
Yet often, looking toward the horizon
There—inimical to you?—is that something you have never found
And that, without those who came before you, you could never have imagined.
How could you have thought there was one person who could make you          15
Happy and that happiness was not the uneven
Phenomenon you have known it to be? Why do you keep believing in this
Reality so dependent on the time allowed it

That it has less to do with your exile from the age you are
Than from everything else life promised that you could do?          20

Poem Summary

Line 1

Koch's "Paradiso" begins with a statement that may be called an absolute positive negative: "There is no way not to be excited" (italics inserted). From the outset, the speaker takes away all but one option on how to respond to what he is about to say. Whoever hears him, whoever reads his words must be as excited as he is about the coming scenario.

Line 2

What follows is seemingly a statement of direct address—a speaker talking pointedly to "you" the reader, but later in the poem the second person turns into the first, and the reader realizes the speaker is actually talking to himself. In line 2 the topic is disillusionment, but it is coupled with the enlightened notion of something "rais[ing] its head," implying a rebirth or reprieve from what has been keeping the head down. The idea of human disillusionment is central to the poem's meaning, as is the will to overcome it, and the first two lines of "Paradiso" establish this central theme.

Line 3

Koch relies on personification (a figure of speech in which inanimate objects or abstract ideas are represented with human qualities or form) in the beginning of the poem to describe the "form of reality"—noted later in line 6—by which the speaker has been "disillusioned." In line 3 the image implied is a human being sitting perhaps at a table, with arms folded atop it and his or her head buried within the arms. One can picture the head slowly rising "From [the] arms" and a facial expression that indicates the person "seems to want to talk to you again." Visually personifying reality and disillusionment reflects the speaker's eagerness to connect with what has been eluding him.

Lines 4–5

These lines suggest how intense emotions can be when one is on the brink of making a connection to a longed-for reality. The mind becomes so tunneled to one goal that "You forget home and family" and head out on some wild goose chase "on foot or in your automobile" in a desperate, if not blind, search for something that may not even exist.

Lines 6–8

In these lines, the speaker reveals what he is seeking—the place where "this form of reality / May dwell." The reality he seeks is the one that "raises its head" and "seems to want to talk" in lines 2 and 3, but the hope and excitement within those previous lines are quickly dashed in lines 7 and 8: "Not finding it there, you refuse / Any further contact." The irony is that there has been no contact in the first place, and yet the speaker must console himself by believing he is in control of the situation and can therefore be the one to "refuse" contact.

Lines 9–10

Line 9 is a continuation of the thought expressed in the previous two lines, but it also contrasts with that sentiment. The speaker vows to refuse contact, then tempers his declaration with "Until you are back again trying to forget." In essence, he finds himself right back where he started, longing to connect with a reality that keeps eluding him. It is that reality which the speaker thinks is the "only thing that moved you," but readers should notice the parenthetical qualifier "(it seems)." This qualifier is the first indication in the poem that the speaker may be wavering in his steadfast beliefs. Perhaps the "only thing" that can move him and bring him happiness is not the only thing after all. These lines mark the point in the poem where the second-person "you" begins to sound more like a first-person "me"—that is, the speaker now appears to address his own situation and his own desperate need to find a happy reality. Readers may assume that from here to the end of the poem, the speaker is talking to himself, and his tone seems to soften as he admits that the elusive reality "gave" him "what [he] forever will / have."

Line 11

In this line, the speaker resigns himself to the fact that what he has been chasing (arguably, the first love of his life who is now gone from him) will remain "in the form of a disillusion," taking him full circle back to the personified image of his ambiguous reality before it "raises its head," tempting him to go after it again.

Lines 12–13

Line 12 is the main turning point in "Paradiso," as it is the first time that a forward-looking attitude is described. Now the speaker is "looking toward the horizon," which he apparently does "often." In line 13 he declares that what he has been seeking is within sight, but he questions whether it is in fact "inimical" (harmful) to him. Why would this phrase—"inimical to you?"—be offset in an otherwise positive statement and what does it reveal about the speaker's ultimate concerns? Perhaps it is evidence he is still unsure of his feelings and is so afraid to admit the possibility of finding what he has "never found" that he wonders if it may hurt him in some way. Regardless of the reason, these lines are pivotal in that the speaker finally acknowledges that his obsession with what he has "been disillusioned by" (line 2) may be useless, considering the real thing may be right there on the horizon.

Line 14

Here the speaker further emphasizes his belief that the reality he seeks is unattainable because he "could never have / imagined" it is possible to find it. Yet "those who came before him"—perhaps those who were living proof that one can have more than one path to happiness—have left such an impression on him that he now too believes he can achieve it.

Lines 15–17

In these lines Koch unravels the mystery of his speaker's metaphorical allusions from the first three-quarters of the poem. The speaker berates himself for having "thought there was one person who could make [him] / Happy," and for thinking that "happiness was not the uneven / Phenomenon" he had always known it to be. Emphasis should be placed on the word "one" in line 15 because the happiness the speaker has been chasing is based on his belief that it can come from only one person, and when that one person is gone, the hope of real happiness is gone with him or her. The speaker has finally realized that happiness is indeed an "uneven / Phenomenon" and that someone else can come along and bring about the same feeling of euphoria.

Line 18

Line 18 is a continuation of the question the speaker asks himself in line 17—essentially, why believe in a "Reality" that exists only in the past and is now just a memory "dependent on the time allowed it" by his mind?

Lines 19–20

Turn these two final lines of the poem around from a negative perspective to a positive one, and they read something like this: "Your false reality has more to do with an inability to accept all the things 'life promised that you could do' than with an older man trying to believe he is still young by 'exil[ing]' himself from his real age." In other words, the speaker is trying to convince himself that his disillusionment is not just a result of nostalgic longing to be young again, but more a product of his unwillingness to move beyond what he has lost and toward all other possibilities that life holds. In spite of seeming otherwise, Koch's poem actually ends on a good note, for the implication is that the speaker may finally realize he has found his paradise—or "paradiso"—after years of believing it was gone forever.

Themes

Human Longing and Self-Delusion

The two central themes of "Paradiso," human longing and self-delusion, are closely interwoven, and both examine human understanding of what is real and what is not. Perhaps the dividing line is simply between their general parameters: one theme has more to do with the individual and illusion, and the other more to do with humankind as a whole and illusion. The speaker in the poem is portrayed as a pathetic person, especially in the beginning when he is seen at a very vulnerable moment of elation that turns out to be in vain. He is like a scolded puppy that suddenly becomes excited and overjoyed when it appears his master is no longer angry with him. But the speaker is mastered by something more intangible and enigmatic, a concept difficult for him to grasp: his own self-deluded mind. From the outset, there is no doubt that something is missing from his life and that he is desperate to get it back. He admits his excitement at the prospect of regaining what has been lost, but it is only a prospect that he dreams up out of desire and need. In reality, the thing that "raises its head / From its arms and seems to want to talk to [him] again" is only a figment of his very vivid imagination.

Not until line 17 of this twenty-two-line poem does the speaker refer to a human being as the source of his longing. Until then, he mentions an "it," a "thing," and a "something." These impersonal, detached references suggest he is aware of the lack of a real connection—that his elusive catch is as distant from him as it is from anybody else. He acknowledges that "this form of reality" he seeks will always be with him, but "in the form of a disillusion." When an individual is so desperate to find the "only thing" that may bring happiness that he or she is willing to live a life of delusion in order to gain it, then the pathos of the situation is even greater. The speaker in "Paradiso" has been forcing himself to believe that only "one person" can make him happy and that he is condemned to endless searching for the same happiness from the same person, even though intellectually he knows that is impossible. By the end of the poem, he calls this self-delusion into question by asking himself why he "keep[s] believing" in the memory of happiness instead of accepting that his life holds other promises to pursue. In this examination of human longing and self-delusion, the individual appears to bring the desired illusion into check before it is too late.

Humankind and the Power of Illusion

A related second theme in the poem is the power of illusion over human beings in general. In the grand scheme of human desire and emotion, probably happiness is the most basic, prevalent desire, regardless of a person's age, nationality, ethnicity, religion, or any other category. But happiness comes in different forms for different people. For some, it may mean good health and a solid marriage; for others it may mean great wealth and expensive possessions; and for still others it may mean a hot meal each day and shelter from cold and rain. While these examples are obviously disparate, there is one common thread that runs through them: susceptibility to illusion. When a goal appears unreachable, many people find solace and pseudo-happiness in a good imagination. The problem with creating an illusory world in which to live is that sooner or later the real world is bound to intrude and turn the comfort of make-believe into the frustration of disillusionment.

Early in the poem, Koch suggests the power illusion holds, when just the hint of possible happiness causes the speaker to "forget home and family" and blindly "set off on foot or in [his] automobile" to track down his elusive goal. Anything that can cause a human being to "forget" his loved ones and the place where he lives must be an incredibly strong force indeed. The human tendency to fixate on one solution to a problem, denying the potential for other answers, is implied at least twice in "Paradiso"—once when the speaker claims there is an "only thing" that has "moved" him, and again when he asks himself, "How could you have thought there was one person who could make you / Happy?"

Despite tunnel vision, the speaker (and humankind in general) leaves a tiny window open for new possibility. If people are bound to share a quest for happiness, as well as an exposure to disillusionment, perhaps that quest can eventually diverge into new paths. The "Reality so dependent on the time allowed it" is not necessarily restricted to the past; instead it may "dwell" in the present or the future.

Topics for Further Study

What does research in the field of psychology say about the power of illusion in the human mind? Are its effects generally considered negative or positive? What are some examples of each?
What is the overall mindset of the speaker in "Paradiso"? Is he happy, sad, angry, indifferent, excited, or something else? Defend your answer with examples from the poem.
Choose a current event and explain why it is a source of great disillusionment in contemporary American society. Bolster your argument with historical facts from your research.
Choose a historical event that occurred before 1960 and explain how its impact brought about disillusionment in any society anywhere in the world.

Style

Contemporary Free Verse

A broad classification such as "contemporary free verse" is apt for "Paradiso," but it does little to define the full range of Koch's style. There is hardly a catchall category for a poet who "offers a smorgasbord of styles," as critic Ben Howard points out in Poetry. Howard notes that Koch's "varied fare" may include "prose" poems, a "fugue," a "parody," a "sequence of songs," "minimalist vignettes," "lyric and reflective poems," and even something Howard calls a "four-line squib." These and other forms of poetic construction make up the body of Koch's work, including the poems that accompany "Paradiso" in A Possible World. But "Paradiso" is one of Koch's more straightforward, conversational works—so much so that it reads more like a paragraph from a novel (or self-help manual) than poetic verse. Stretch the lines into complete sentences and the sound remains the same. No rhythm or rhyme is lost because it is not there in the first place. The tone is somewhat dry and ineffectual, most likely so that it does not get in the way of the overall message. What is being said is more important than how it is said.

Enjambment

Koch relies heavily on enjambment throughout the poem. This poetic device is the continuation of a syntactic unit from one line to the next, without pausing for an end-line full stop. Nearly every thought at the end of each line continues into the beginning of the following line, serving to give the poem its prosy tone and to minimize the distractions of obvious meters, rhythms, and rhyme schemes. The result is a piece that reads as though the speaker is simply talking to himself.

Historical Context

"Paradiso," Koch's poem about human longing and disillusionment, was published the year following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States. While the poem may primarily disclose a personal agenda to overcome the frustration of individual loss and the struggle to find contentment afterwards, it also reflects a general societal disillusionment found in the United States following these attacks.

Although it seems artificial to concentrate blame for an entire nation's despair and pessimism on one individual or one event, it is clear that the devastating and unprecedented occurrences of September 11 sent a chilling message to Americans regardless of where they lived on the planet: your world is not as secure as you think it is. In 2002, one of the prevalent American concerns was the location and desired capture of Osama bin Laden, thought to be the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, and the United States waged war against the Taliban, the ruling party in Afghanistan, which was thought to be harboring bin Laden and many other terrorists. Though there was some initial speculation following U.S. attacks in Afghanistan that bin Laden had been killed, he continued to evade capture, evidenced by audiotapes broadcast in the Middle East which were confirmed by U.S. officials and others to contain the voice of this al Qaeda leader.

In other news in 2002, inspectors from the United Nations searched for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and world leaders chose sides on whether the results of these searches should lead to U.S. military action there. Elsewhere in the Middle East, tensions between Israelis and Palestinians worsened as Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat failed to reach an agreement on the peace process and violence continued to mount between the two groups. World tensions were further stressed when North Korea admitted in late 2002 that it had a secret nuclear weapons program, in defiance of an agreement the country signed in 1994, agreeing to freeze all nuclear-related activities.

In the United States in 2002, scandal rocked the Catholic Church as hundreds of Catholics came forward to point fingers at former priests, accusing them of sexual abuse, and many bishops and cardinals were blamed for covering up the actions of church officials through the decades. Big business saw its share of scandal as well when giant corporations Enron and WorldCom were each accused of illegal accounting practices that cheated investors and employees alike out of their life savings. The negative fallout on the stock market from the terrorist attacks and corporate scandals was felt worldwide. Perhaps one bright spot in a year of much dark disillusionment for Americans was the recognition of the world-peace-seeking efforts of former president Jimmy Carter, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2002.

Critical Overview

There is not an abundance of criticism available for A Possible World; however, the small amount accumulated so far has been positive. In an article for Booklist, critic Donna Seaman describes Koch's final effort as "a beautiful new collection" from "a key figure in American poetry." Seaman singles out one of the lengthier poems, "A Memoir," for particular praise that could be applied to Koch's work as a whole: "Wryly and affectionately reflective, teasingly subversive, and still vitally curious and joyfully creative." In a review of A Possible World for Publishers Weekly, one critic observes that the various writings in the book "display Koch's verve and light touch, but are unmistakably colored by requiem."

Throughout Koch's career, critics have applauded the poet's sense of humor and his willingness to write "unpoetic" poetry. Critic Ben Howard writes in a review of Koch's Straits for Poetry, "in his poems Koch rarely plays the ponderous theorist or the sober observer. His stance is that of the passionate participant, the guest at life's feast." Howard nods to the poet's lighter side in saying, "Koch ignites sparklers and fireworks rather than an edifying light. But humor is rare in contemporary American poetry, and one is grateful for the show." Even Koch's books on how to teach poetry writing to children and adults are widely acclaimed for their intriguing insights and Koch's whimsy and wit.

In his book The Art of Poetry: Poems, Parodies, Interviews, Essays, and Other Work, Koch himself provides insight into his approach to poetry: "when I started teaching at the New School . . . there were still a number of students whose idea of poetry was something like 'O wingéd being soaring through the azure,' and [William Carlos] Williams can show you quickly the pleasure of saying 'Bird there in the blue,' or something like that." Koch, as Williams, showed his readers the pleasure of simple words—classically poetic or not—in over four decades of writing, and his final work reveals no signs of his having let up.

Criticism

Pamela Steed Hill

Hill is the author of a poetry collection, has published widely in literary journals, and is an editor for a university publications department. In the following essay, Hill examines the link between Koch's poem and Dante's much older work of the same title, suggesting their connection is much stronger than a shared name.

Little is gained by calling a poem the same name as an easily recognizable, virtual icon of literary history if there is no connection whatsoever between the two. Dante Alighieri's fourteenth-century masterpiece The Divine Comedy, the third part of which is titled "Paradiso," has undoubtedly inspired countless poets, writers, playwrights, painters—artists of all kinds, for hundreds of years. Koch is likely no exception. But the twentieth-century poet's "Paradiso" does not overtly mention an inferno or a purgatory to go along with paradise, nor does it describe someone making a treacherous journey from hell to heaven, encountering both gruesome and beautiful sights along the way. Or does it? In spite of its obvious contemporary feel and contemporary language, perhaps Koch's poem actually contains several allusions to Dante's epic. Perhaps its title is only a rather large hint that this work, too, is about a man's journey through hell—his own kind, that is. The progression in the poem certainly implies the speaker's movement from one place to another, and the trip is just as real even though the "places" he visits are actually states of his own mind.

In the first two parts of The Divine Comedy, "Inferno" and "Purgatorio" respectively, Dante has a guide—the spirit of the great classical poet Vergil—who leads him through both hell and purgatory. Dante must journey through the depths of the inferno in order to be freed of the temptation to sin and then travel up the mountain of purgatory where his soul is cleansed of even the capacity for doing wrong. But that is as far as Vergil can take him, for man alone, with only a human intellect, cannot enter the higher realm of paradise. Instead, Dante is met by Beatrice, who represents divine grace and revelation, and it is she who leads him along the final ascent to "paradiso." In real life, Dante only met Beatrice twice but he idealized her as the perfect woman, if not the perfect human being altogether. While it is unclear on what Dante based his intense feelings—considering the two were virtually strangers—it is certain that his unrequited devotion to her is unparalleled in the history of courtly love. And this is why "Beatrice" is the star of Dante's "Paradiso"—only she is divine enough to enter into heaven with him.

The speaker in Koch's "Paradiso" does not have an outside party who guides him on his journey; instead, he has himself. That is, his own mind acts as an escort through a series of emotions, from initial disillusionment to excitement, hope, determination, bliss, disappointment, despair, and, finally, disillusionment again. Note the circularity of his emotional sojourn, all of which takes place in the first half of the poem. In Dante's "Inferno," the nine levels of hell form a conical shape, ensuring that the inhabitants of each circle continue in an endless ring of torment. Koch's speaker is tormented by his constant "trying to forget" what his mind will not let him forget. He finds himself "back again" where he started after heading out on his feverish attempt to "go to where . . . this form of reality / May dwell." Not finding it, he is forced to resign himself to a dream world—a hellish world, in fact, in which his desired reality exists only "in the form of a disillusion."

The first half of the poem may be seen as the speaker's experience in the inferno and purgatory all rolled into one. There is no obvious distinction between the horrible sights and events of hell and the more amiable, hopeful displays of the region in between the inferno and paradise. Instead, the contemporary speaker is caught up in the excitement of happiness and the devastation of letdown at the same time. His movement from down to up to down again is quick and does not allow for a significant stay on either side, although the division is not completely concealed either. He admits that there is "no way not to be excited" when his elusive reality seems to be within talking distance again, and he is so enthralled with that prospect that he can even "forget home and family" in order to chase after it. Just as rapidly, his hopes are dashed by one fast, undeniable declaration: he does not find it, and the chase is over. Koch's speaker both enjoys and suffers a medley of responses in his quest to achieve happiness, but the search comes to an end at line 12. Line 13 denotes a turnaround—for Dante, a literal turn from hell and purgatory toward heaven; for Koch's speaker, an emotional shift toward the possibility of real happiness.

If the latter half of "Paradiso" does not take place wholly within paradise, it at least has the speaker knocking on the gold city's door. He has decided that "looking toward the horizon" may afford him a chance at a better way of life than he is living by continuing to long for the past. He suddenly understands that out there in the future is that "something" he has "never found" in his dream world and that something he "could never have / imagined" as long as he refuses to see reality for what it is. More importantly, the speaker finally denies his Beatrice. Like Dante, he has been under the impression that "there was one person who could make [him] / Happy" and, since this one person is someone with whom he has no actual contact, the relationship must exist only in the imagination. But unlike Dante, the speaker here has a change of heart. He questions how he could have ever let himself believe that only one woman held the key to his being happy and why he thought happiness was a consistent, homogenous, always balanced phenomenon that one either possesses or does not. In fact, real happiness is "uneven" and may come and go dozens of times throughout one's life, stemming from relationships with countless numbers of people, including romantic partners when the love of one's life is suddenly gone. Insisting on only one source of personal contentment and peace of mind inevitably leads to disillusionment, as Koch's speaker so poignantly demonstrates in the first part of the poem. But he saves himself with a new determination to separate what is illusion from what is real—and to hold fast to the latter.

The greatest connection between Koch's "Paradiso" and Dante's work of the same name is actually marked by the two poems' greatest distinction: the role of each speaker's Beatrice. For Dante, she is the undeniable, one and only perfect being who leads him to the highest realm of personal enlightenment a human can attain. She is no less than an angel to him—and, decidedly, his single source of happiness. Her function as Dante's guide through paradise is further evidence of the poet's exaltation of a mortal woman to heavenly heights, and it is clear that he will never question his blind, tunneled devotion to her. Koch's speaker, on the other hand, is full of questions. His mind has been his guide through hell and purgatory, and it still leads him as he approaches paradise. His "Beatrice" has indeed existed and is the source of his happiness in the past. More recently, she has been a source of pain and disillusionment. The speaker realizes that the "reality" she used to represent is now completely "dependent on the time allowed it," and he has made up his mind not to permit it so much time. In essence, he determines to stop fantasizing and start living in the present reality. Only by freeing himself of illusion can he attain his own kind of ultimate personal enlightenment.

What Koch may have gained by giving this poem the same title as Dante's famous one may not be clear, nor even necessary to understand. If he had called it simply "Paradise," its meaning would be the same, but any allusions to Dante may never be recognized. Using the Italian word, however, points readers in the direction of the classic predecessor and, if nothing else, adds philosophical depth to Koch's work. It implies that the poem is about a journey—one that is as important to its speaker as the epic sojourn from hell to heaven is for Dante. Just as vital, Koch's speaker's eventual rejection of his old belief in a single source of happiness is made all the more poignant by comparing it to Dante's unshakable devotion to one woman as the human ideal. Giving up on a lost love may not be that remarkable an event; but giving up a Beatrice drives home just how extraordinary the decision is.

Source: Pamela Steed Hill, Critical Essay on "Paradiso," in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2004.

Mary Potter

Potter is a university writing instructor and fiction writer living in San Francisco. In this essay, Potter illustrates how Koch crafts line breaks in his poem to affect both its mood and message.

Koch's work is distinguished by its humor and experimental quality, as Koch was a member of the 1950s avant-garde poetic movement known as the New York School, contemporary to the Abstract Expressionist movement in art. Critic Vernon Shetley, reviewing Koch's poetics for the beginning student, Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry, writes that "formally and stylistically, Koch is the most Protean of our poets . . . from surrealist whimsy . . . to deadpan humor.... Aristotle, perhaps, might have called him a consistently inconsistent character." However, regarding the themes Koch treats in his work, Shetley feels he is consistent: "the themes of Koch's verse have remained constant since his earliest work, as has his characteristic tone; Koch has only ever had two real subjects, love and poetry, and has consistently treated them with the same combination of exuberant celebration and wry irony." To such a tongue-in-cheek poet as Koch, can there be such a place as paradise, as Paradiso suggests? Or is Koch wryly tempering his vision of a heaven on earth in this poem by categorizing it merely as another "possible world?"

The poem consists of four complex sentences followed by two questions. Its vocabulary is formal and abstract, with "automobile" being the most concrete image in the poem. In this poem, Koch is waxing philosophic, discussing "reality," "disillusionment," "happiness" as an "uneven phenomenon," without mentioning love by name, yet this is a love poem. "How could you have thought there was one person who could make you / Happy. . . ?" is the question he ironically asks to answer the predicament he has posed in the first four sentences, that of disillusionment. Unlike Dante's Paradiso, written to Beatrice, the object of the Italian poet's affections and the source of his inspiration, Koch's "Paradiso" is written to the reader who has been disappointed in love. By the poem's end, the scope of his topic has widened to include any reader who has ever been disappointed and to offer an alternate way to view reality. Koch's poem reveals the many "possible worlds" beyond the realm of love, the illusion of happiness, and the limits of human understanding of reality.

The lines of this poem are in the plain style of speech and the verses are non-metrical. One of Koch's early influences was Walt Whitman, who brought the "heightened prose" of the King James Bible, long, rolling lines of preachers and politicians, into nineteenth-century poetry, which Koch examines in Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry. The most salient poetic technique Koch employs in the poem is the interruption caused where he breaks each line. "Line breaks cause stops the way periods and commas do, but, instead of being necessary for sense, draw attention to tone and sound," he explains in Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry, and they do so for various effects. For example, pausing where the poet breaks his line after "head" in the first poetic statement effects disillusionment itself. By separating the word "head" from its natural place on "its arms," the disjoined image breaks not only the poet's train of thought, but also serves as the figure of disillusionment itself. The second sentence creates the momentum of a journey, stopping abruptly with the end of the sentence, "May dwell." In the third sentence, where three short lines break after "refuse," "contact," and "forget," the disappointment felt in disillusionment is created by the use of these verbs. The next line rolls forward the promise of "what forever you will have," only to turn out to be, in the next short line, "in the form of a disillusion." What "you . . . have," by its placement at the end of the line, is countered by "disillusion," as all one is left with when one believes in an illusion is disillusion. The mood of these first sentences is dreamy and nostalgic if appropriate pauses are taken where Koch breaks his lines; it is as if the aged poet is delivering his private musings on love's losses to the reader. The fourth sentence runs in three long lines, each longer than the previous. Pausing eight times in this sentence adds breathlessness to the reading of the line, heightening the mood of the poem with a mixture of confusion and hope.

Not only does Koch craft his line breaks to cast a mood, but he also chooses the words at the end of these lines for their tone and therefore for what their sound will contribute to the overall effect of the poem. Two words, "again" and "disillusion," for example, are the final words in the first two sentences, as Koch is writing about not the first such disappointment in love or life. These words, while they do not rhyme, sound similar and softly resonate with each other. "Family" and "reality" are rhythmically and tonally similar, creating momentum in his lines toward the final words in that statement, "May dwell." Koch meticulously uses the reading of his lines for thematic and musical aims. For, as he writes in "The Language of Poetry," poetic language is "a language in which the sound of the words is raised to an importance equal to that of their meaning, and also to the importance of grammar and syntax."

What Do I Read Next?

Sun Out: Selected Poems, 1952–1954, one of Koch's two final works published posthumously in 2002, collects for the first time his earliest poems and provides a good look at the foundation for all his subsequent material. The poems are wonderfully detailed and give insight into his young relationships with other members of the New York School of Poets.
Koch's lifelong friend and fellow New York School poet, John Ashbery, has published dozens of poetry collections. Ashbery's Chinese Whispers (2002) includes work in typical Ashbery style—highly imaginative, rambling, often fragmented. "Chinese Whispers" refers to the British game in which whispered stories are passed along to the players until the original meaning has entirely disappeared.
Philip Auslander's The New York School Poets as Playwrights: O'Hara, Ashbery, Koch, Schuyler, and the Visual Arts (1989) provides a good look at how the methods and styles of the New York School of Poets is translated into works for the theater. Auslander reveals how these poets-turned-playwrights create strong visual effects on stage just as they create impressive "visual effects" on paper.
A revealing, compassionate tribute to Koch, written by fellow poet David Lehman and titled "Kenneth Koch's Seasons on Earth" appears in Columbia University's online newspaper Columbia College Today. The article is available at http://www.college.columbia.edu. It was originally posted in November 2002, a few months after the poet's death.

The poem concludes with two questions phrased in six lines. Koch breaks the first question about love, "one person who could make you / Happy" and "happiness was not the uneven / Phenomenon" to mirror the unevenness of the state of happiness. Then, without breaking the line, he persists with yet another question, breaking before "Reality" to emphasize this idea. His final two lines, completing his question, propose a solution not only for the conundrum of love but for the existential dilemma as well, and Koch ultimately interprets reality for the reader in these lines. As Shetley writes, "Koch is really the most classical of contemporary American poets, the poet who most responds to the ancient themes of the pleasure of having a body and existing in the world of mutable nature, and who most energetically seeks out the variations that will allow the renewal of those themes in our time." His final questions express the mutability of existence, as both being a person and reality are a construct of culture and age, which can either limit humankind from reaching its potential or inspire it onward. That his final lines come in the form of questions shifts the tone of the poem from nostalgia toward directly addressing his reader. His final lines admonish his reader to not be restricted by his or her own society, era, concept of love and happiness, but to pursue instead the "promise" of one's own life.

Reviewers such as Barbara Hoffert in Library Journal hint at strains of elegy or "requiem" in Koch's posthumously published final collection and certainly the tone of "Paradiso" is subdued, reflective, coming from a sagacious voice in American letters. "If 'happy,' positive, excited poetry were the 'scene,' I might have been looking for the nuances of the losses and sorrows in my life for the subjects of poems," Koch remarked in an interview with Jordan Davis in 1996.

Although Koch had read the classics and some of his poetry is influenced by them, this poem is not a journey through paradise, nor is it, like Paradise Lost. While Koch alludes to his poetic predecessors in the title, the realm of his verse is human experience, for if one remains aware of the illusion of "happiness," there is more in life that becomes "possible."

Source: Mary Potter, Critical Essay on "Paradiso," in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2004.

Paul Hoover

In the following essay excerpt, Hoover discusses Koch's lack of critical recognition and calls his poetry "intelligent, amusing, and dear."

New York School poetry is unique in the post-modern period for the range of its expression, from the comparatively direct poetry of O'Hara and Berrigan to the comic sublime of Kenneth Koch and the elusive meditations of Ashbery and Guest. It is an unavoidable influence on many poets born after 1950; it is also the standard with which new generations of the avant-garde have had to contend. This is particularly true of the Ashbery influence, which virtually defines postmodern innovative practice. Language poetry has much to offer, but at the threshold of lyric its adherents are faced with a dilemma which they have not successfully overcome. If you want to "do" beauty in the postmodern period, you inevitably are drawn to the abstract lyric mode of the New York School. The personal lyric has suffered a decline in recent years for several reasons: its oppositional style has faded along with bohemianism; it has been made to seem more conventional than it is by language poetry's attack on subjectivity; and its mode of sardonic wit has long been assimilated by poets like James Tate, Dean Young, and August Kleinzahler whose histories and realm of acceptance largely lie elsewhere. At the same time, the assimilation of New York School practice is a sign of its lingering power.

New York School influence can be felt in the work of David Lehman, whose "First Offense" is a villanelle on the subject of getting a traffic ticket and whose The Daily Mirror joins New York School "dailiness" with Harry Mathews's Oulipo-inspired Twenty Lines a Day; Jorie Graham, who shares Ashbery's sublimity and obliquity but not his sense of humor; Paul Violi, a comic conceptualist in the mode of Kenneth Koch, who wrote the fictional life of a bad artist named Sutej Hudney in the form of an index; David Shapiro, an abstract lyricist who described poetry as "the constant mastering of irony"; Susan Wheeler, whose recent book Smokes moves from the comparative openness of New York School irony toward the packed discontinuity of language poetry; Charles North, whose poem "A Note to Tony Towle" begins "One must have breakfasted often on automobile primer / not to sense an occasional darkening in the weather joining art and life"; Amy Gerstler, who marries the surrealist prose poem to a comically melancholic feminism; Elaine Equi, whose tongue-in-cheek minimalism passes through the New York School on its way to Robert Herrick; Caroline Knox, whose poem "Freudian Shoes" begins, "Freudian shoes, the puddings of orthopedic flight"; Rachel Loden, whose first book, Hotel Imperium, contains a sequence of poems on Richard Nixon with titles like "The Death of Checkers" and "Memories of San Clemente"; Mary Jo Bang, whose new collection The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans has the gravity and linguistic playfulness associated with the New York School; John Koethe, the Ashbery-influenced Wordsworthian; David Trinidad, who joins pop culture topics with traditional forms such as the pantoum; and Tom Disch, an eccentric formalist otherwise identified with the New Formalism movement. The very popular work of Billy Collins takes from Kenneth Koch the use of a whimsical concept as organizing principle. His poem "Philosophy" begins: "I used to sit in the café of existentialism, / lost in a blue cloud of cigarette smoke, / contemplating the suicide a tiny Frenchman / might commit by leaping from the rim of my brandy glass." Unfortunately, Collins's work represents the domestication of New York School wit.

Which brings us to the complex case of Kenneth Koch. His poetry is intelligent, amusing, and dear, and he is one of the originals of his generation, but one senses an enormous hesitation on the part of reviewers and critics: is it, and can comic art ever be, really major? James Breslin's From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945–1965 devotes chapters to Olson, Ginsberg, Lowell, Levertov, James Wright, and Frank O'Hara, as well as a page and a half to John Ashbery, but the index makes no mention of Koch. Even Ashbery's blurb on the back of Koch's Selected Poems (1982) suggests desolation: "This long-awaited collection should at last establish Kenneth Koch for what he is: one of our greatest poets." He has been overlooked and under-reviewed. Yet his humor, like Lord Byron's, creates an "aery charm" that is finally quite sincere. One need only read his elegiac poem "Seasons on Earth," to see his easeful formalism turned to graver purpose. Written in ottava rima, the stanza of Don Juan and his own comic epic The Duplications, the poem is addressed to his deceased wife Janice and relates to their early years together:

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—

—Koch 1987, 10

The eventfulness of these stanzas is of a different order than some of his other work. Its invention is limited to the requirements of ottava rima rather than comic disjunctions of language such as "simplex bumblebees"; the settled tone helps make possible the sublimity of "dyings and revivings." A form as noticeable as ottava rima will always contain a sense of its own "connivings," but here the rhymes are weighted with loss. Koch's comic mode offers a different form of the sublime, one based in invention ("Elmer opened his mouth and let the snow fall in it") and discovery (that "Lorca says" rhymes with "metamorphosis"). But he rarely locates and sustains that cadence within lyric which is near to stillness. Ottava rima is perfect for his sensibility because it is in constant motion, like a noisy perpetuum mobile. We admire its bright clatter and the tease of its thought, but we are not consoled by its absences.

The forces of movement and stillness are evident in a stanza from "Seasons on Earth" in which he grieves to Janice about his errors in marriage:

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 seed in us? are we the pod? Is

The blossom pleasure, and the fruit the goddess?

Did you too ever feel it, like a promise,

That there could be a perfect lifetime, Janice?

—Koch 1987, 14

The passage breaks with ottava rima by adding two lines to the octave and by sustaining virtually the same rhyme (modest / pod? Is / goddess / promise / Janice) throughout. Despite the formal inventiveness of such rhyme, Koch creates sublimity of tone and intensity of address.

Like all comic poets, Koch is moralistic and didactic at heart, but he is not essentially a satirist. He stings mildly with parody, and his targets are usually works of art, not political situations or public figures. "Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams" uses Williams's famous poem about the plums as a basis for further invention rather than to demean Williams. The inherent sophistication of his project—and the pretension that might go with it—is deflated by the openness of his wit. Even in "Fresh Air," the comic manifesto in which The Strangler kills several bad academic poets, Koch is too funny to be sanctimonious or mean. Koch is Horatian and romantic at the same time. His whimsical common sense is in contrast to Robert Bly's hyperthyroidal embracing of spiritual presences; it embraces the actuality of the world rather than lament its losses.

When Koch is meditative, a major mode for Ashbery, he becomes Vergilian. The finest work of his middle period can be found in The Art of Love (1975), especially in "The Art of Poetry" and "Some General Instructions," poems which "make it new" by ignoring Pound's anti-Vergilian dictum. Masterpieces of sustained tone in a relaxed idiom, they maintain tension by balancing wit and didacticism. With such a broad range of reference, anything might be essayed in and seem to fit. When the poem has achieved its panoramic stature, it can simply end, as "The Art of Poetry" does, with the line, "Now I have said enough." Eliot had convinced the generation of the 1940s to be dramatic and metaphysical; along comes Kenneth Koch with rhetoric and generalization, as if he wanted to write the Ars Poetica of our time. In so doing, he makes Eliot's impersonal theory of poetry seem fussy and irrelevant. The self, too, is an object and actor in the world. Even one's own poems can present themselves as topics. Koch's poem "The Circus" in The Art of Love begins with a reference to the poem "The Circus" in his first full-length book, Thank You (1962).

Koch is often at his best in the catalogue form, a structure that allows for one-liners—for example, "Alive for an Instant" with its wonderful ending: "I have a baby in my landscape and I have a wild rat in my secrets from you." His love poem, "To You," which begins "I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut," is both a comic catalogue and a parody of E. B. Browning's "How Do I Love Thee." In narrative mode, Koch's occasion is often a journey, a strategy reminiscent of A. O. Barnabooth (Valery Larbaud) and Raymond Roussel, acknowledged masters for Koch as one of the editors of the French-influenced journal Locus Solus. Likewise, Koch's authorial stance is that of the eccentric amateur.

Like all the New York poets, Koch sees art as part of life, so there is little self-consciousness in referring to it. The criticism of Shklovsky, Bakhtin, and other formalists makes such artifice almost obligatory, yet as a romantic formalist Koch never poses as the ardent technician. He is first a poet of excitable content and tends to use forms that allow for his charm and quiet asides. Like Ginsberg, he often employs a long line, though his work is hardly "bardic and Melvillean" in breath. His intentionally "light" poetry sits in opposition to the seriousness and muthologos of Charles Olson. Koch's only dictum seems to be liveliness. His work is therefore consistent with Sartre's statement: "Whatever the subject a sort of essential lightness must appear everywhere and remind us that the work is never a natural datum, but an exigence and a gift."

In "The Study of Poetry," Matthew Arnold wrote of the "power of liquidness and fluidity in Chaucer's verse . . . dependent upon a free, a licentious dealing with language, such as is now impossible." He goes on to characterize Chaucer as a less than classic author, in contrast with Dante: "The substance of Chaucer's poetry, his view of things and his criticism of life, has largeness, freedom, shrewdness, benignity; but it has not this high seriousness." Arnold is writing, of course, as an enemy of French poetry, an influence that arrives in Koch's work not by way of Christian de Troyes and Chaucer, but through Apollinaire and the Dada and Surrealist poets. Seriousness in poetry can easily become forced gravity, a poetic tone established by convention even before the "criticism of life" begins. Those who extend the standard of high seriousness, such as John Gardner in On Moral Fiction, continue to mistake earnestness for true seriousness. Thus Gardner prefers the poetry of Linda Pastan, Dave Smith, Galway Kinnell, Howard Nemerov, Anthony Hecht, and William Meredith to that of Ginsberg, Koch, and Ashbery. There is an almost grandiose mediocrity to Gardner's choices, as if the only standard were the avoidance of "largeness, freedom, and shrewdness" in favor of moralism, rationalism, and Christianity. It is enough for Gardner simply not to be creepy. "Bad art is always basically creepy; that is its first and most obvious identifying sign," he writes in On Moral Fiction—Poe, Baudelaire, Kafka, Goya, Beckett, Eliot of The Waste Land, and his own novel Grendel notwithstanding. Ironically, it is Kenneth Koch who defines the slimy and the creepy in "Fresh Air," the bad poets "bathing the library steps with their spit" or "gargling out innocuous (to whom?) poems about maple trees and their children." Certainly the poetry of Kenneth Koch isn't "the godless terror of John Hawkes's The Beetleleg" (Gardner), but neither is the sentimental reminiscence of one's father singing "The Old Rugged Cross," Gardner's personal emblem of truth in life and art. Mainstream critics like Matthew Arnold argue for the values of a dominant social group, and Koch is marginal to that experience in his French influences, Jewishness, and urbanity. It is thus quite true that he doesn't speak to the central experience of American life, but neither did Eliot, Pound, Crane, Stevens, Hughes, and Moore. Their work was also "creepy" and idiosyncratic, as much great writing is on first examination.

In a talk given at the Naropa Institute in Colorado, Ted Berrigan noted that the root of the word amusement is muse. Art is that which "stirs the muses," and does so most effectively in resistance to the accepted standard of the time. The new is moral in its freshening of perception and defiance of institutionalized definitions of art. But "largeness, freedom, and shrewdness" will appear at first to be "creepy" to those who desire only the familiar. The irony with W. C. Williams and Kenneth Koch is that the strangeness of their art—and its revolutionary implications—begins with a delight in the ordinary. What is all the more remarkable about Koch's poetry is that what begins in the ridiculous ("I have a bird in my head and a pig in my stomach / And a flower in my genitals and a tiger in my genitals" in "Alive for an Instant") readily asserts itself as the sublime ("summer in my brainwater"). Undoubtedly this bridging of the comical and the sublime is Koch's major gift to the New York School.

Source: Paul Hoover, "Fables of Representation: Poetry of the New York School," in American Poetry Review, Vol. 31, No. 4, July/August 2002, pp. 20–30.

Kenneth Koch and Jordan Davis

In the following excerpt from an interview conducted in the summer of 1995, Koch comments on his poetic form.

Poetic Form

It's true that sometimes I write in standard poetic forms and sometimes I don't. I like doing both. The worst is not feeling any music coming with the words one is writing, enough music to make it convincing. There were a year or two when I couldn't feel any of this music. That was awful. The music has to be there. I can look for sense afterward, or along the way. But the pull of a phrase or a line is the only true sign that something worthwhile may be beginning. Whether it's in quatrains, couplets, blank verse, ottava rima, or free verse doesn't matter at all in that respect. It's like the difference between being attracted to someone at court or in a bowling alley. Along the way one may say something memorable. That is not the object of writing a poem but it's very nice.

if we make a desert

of ourselves,we make a desert

(Williams)

Humanity goes around with this in its head, one of the many delightful products of being attentive and inattentive, loose and tense at the same time as my tennis teacher used to confusingly tell me to be. When I'm revising, the outlines of what's possible are much stricter and more evident—I'm only "inspired" so far then I bump into the side of the pool. Free verse, one doesn't really write free verse nowadays any more than one practices free love. Anyway, unrhymed unmetrical verse is wonderful for getting feelings and sensations just as they occur and getting into them with your regular voice. Rhyme and meter give orchestral and otherwise festive accompaniment. Rhyme in stanzas I like for narrative poems of more than a few pages. The first poem I remember writing was a rhymed quatrain. Then when I was nine my chief work was a rhymed poem about a comic criminal named Randy Moore—

Randy Moore was a dirty crook

Everything valuable Randy took

(I guess he is something like my later heroes Dog Boss, Papend, and Bertha, for example.) Reading (much later) Byron and Ariosto helped me refine my rhymes beyond these. When I was about twenty I discovered (in Saintsbury really) blank verse and wrote an intensely serious poem (of about 5 pages) in it, of which I've lost track. It begins

Peter you bastard, you know stammering

Has implications as profound as love—

How happy I was to make stammering last for three syllables, two of them stressed; and the mysteriously lifted-up you bastard and the equally mysteriously poeticized implications. Soon I gave such pleasures up—the verse seemed grandiose—

I read Auden a little late. At first I found his intellectuality and also his masterful use of all kinds of forms not to my taste. Then one day I caught on to his poetry and found it irresistible. It gave the sheer pleasure of form on its own—ballads, sestinas, canzones, even Chanson de Roland stanzas, consonant-rhyme couplets, all those fascinating things. In a little apartment on West Tenth Street (in N.Y.) in 1948 I remember dedicating weeks to a canzone, a form which I had seen only in Auden, though Dante had written one, his poem beginning

Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna

La tua virtù non cura in alcum tempo,

Che suol dell' altre belle farsi donna . . .

It has twelve-line stanzas with only five end words in each stanza, a sort of compounded ses-tina. My canzone was about Persephone, her picking flowers, her kidnapping by Dis, etc. I was happy with the repetitions, at the ends of lines, of my key words: Flowers, Hell, I forget the rest. Auden's Selected Poems was for me a great poetic amusement park, a park of poetic forms to try out.

Source: Kenneth Koch and Jordan Davis, "An Interview with Jordan Davis," in The Art of Poetry: Poems, Parodies, Interviews, Essays, and Other Work, University of Michigan Press, 1996, pp. 187–214.

Sources

Davis, Jordan, "Kenneth Koch: An Interview," in the American Poetry Review, Nov.–Dec. 1996, Vol. 25, No. 6, pp. 45–49.

Hoffert, Barbara, Review of A Possible World, in Library Journal, Oct. 15, 2002, Vol. 127, Issue 17, p. 77.

Howard, Ben, "Secular and Sacred," in Poetry, Vol. 176, No. 1, April 2000, pp. 29–39.

Koch, Kenneth, Making Your Own Days: The Pleasure of Reading and Writing Poetry, Scribner, 1998.

—, A Possible World, Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

—, "Educating the Imagination," in The Art of Poetry: Poems, Parodies, Interviews, Essays, and Other Work, University of Michigan Press, 1996, pp. 153–67.

Review of A Possible World & Sun Out: Selected Poems 1952–54, in Publishers Weekly, Sept. 23, 2002, Vol. 249, Issue 38, p. 68.

Seaman, Donna, "A Poet's Fond Farewell," in Booklist, Vol. 99, No. 3, October 1, 2002, p. 296.

Shetley, Vernon, Review of The Last Avant-Garde, Making Your Own Days: The Pleasure of Reading and Writing Poetry, Straits, and Wakefulness in Raritan, Spring 1999, Vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 130–44.