One Train: Poems

Intensely serious beneath a surface of lightness and wit, Kenneth Koch's poems "maintain power," Denis Donoghue wrote, "by rarely choosing to exert it." Koch's virtuosity -- he has written many plays, an extravagant novel (The Red Robins), and short stories (Hotel Lambosa), and has done numerous collaborations with painters -- seems part of a continuing and energetic attempt to write (in the words of Ariosto) "things never said in prose before or in verse." Almost every poem is a new kind of poem, a new flight -- in this volume, for example, the theme and variations of "One Train May Hide Another," the "poems by ships at sea," the post-Apollinairean couplets of "A Time Zone," the Chinese poetry-influenced quatrains of "The First Step," and the hundred or so brief poems that together make up the poem "On Aesthetics."

"Kenneth Koch, a unique poet, has continued to explain his 'own idea of what made sense,' writing poems for forty years, without ceasing to be human and funny, without ever forgetting what poetry is. The result, for the reader, is an unusual delight... He is above all a love poet, therefore a serious one. His idea 'to do something with language / That has never been done before' (Days and Nights), expressed with an immodesty that is only apparent, is made good throughout." Frank Kermode

Kenneth Koch lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University. His books of poetry include On the Edge, Seasons on Earth, Days and Nights, The Burning Mystery of Anna in 1951, The Art of Love, The Pleasures of Peace, When the Sun Tries to Go On, and Thank You. His short plays, many of them produced off- and off-off-Broadway, are collected in A Change of Hearts and One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays. He has also published fiction -- The Red Robins (a novel) and Hotel Lambosa (short stories) -- and several books on teaching children to write poetry, including Wishes, Lies and Dreams and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?

A book of selected poems, On the Great Atlantic Rainway, is being published at the same time as this volume.