The Banquet: Collected Plays, Films, and Opera Librettos

The complete plays, including never before published work, from one of the major writers of the twentieth century.

Kenneth Koch was a prominent American poet of the New York School and one of America’s most diversely talented writers. The Banquet celebrates his work as an avant-garde playwright, gathering 144 plays, ten screenplays, and five librettos spanning more than five decades of experimental work. Koch’s dramatic work was produced in New York—both Off Broadway and Off, Off Broadway—and in opera houses in the United States and Europe. Witty and provocative, and drawing on poetry, improvisational comedy, satire, Japanese Noh and Kabuki theater, Renaissance drama, and miracle plays, Koch’s work has a deft, humane touch, ranging from the playful to the sublime.

Kenneth Koch (1925 – 2002), known for his association with the New York School of poetry, wrote many collections of poetry, fictions, plays, and nonfiction. His books include Seasons on Earth, On the Edge, Thank You and Other Poems, The Art of Love, One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays, Hotel Lambosa, and Collected Fiction, as well as several books on teaching children to write poetry. Koch was awarded numerous honors, including the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Library of Congress in 1996, as well as awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Ingram-Merrill foundations. In 1996 he was inducted as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.