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On the Edge: Collected Long Poems

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Called the "headmaster and ringmaster" of the New York School by his friend John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch's On the Edge: Collected Long Poems follows on the heals of the 2005 release of The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch and The Collected Fiction of Kenneth Koch, which along with a few volumes of plays, some anthologies, and several successful books on the teaching of poetry, rounds out the oeuvre of this important, irreverent, innovative, madcap genius of a poet. Although widely read and appreciated, Koch never quite achieved the critical acclaim and immense popularity of his closest New York School compadres, a conundrum well illustrated by the work in this volume; not because it is lacking anything, but rather because its excesses--its exuberant embrace of "[t]he excitement/ [a]nd the illusion of living at the beginning of thought"--are wholly outside of the waxing and waning modes of popular verse in both conservative and experimental circles. The first of the six poems reprinted here, "When the Sun Tries to Go On," is Koch at his zaniest; written in the early 1950s, its 2,400 lines of pseudo-sense brought the spirit of Dada into American poetry and prefigured some of the innovative techniques often attributed to Language writing. It is also the volume's most polarizing work, praised by the avant-garde and panned by just about everyone else. It is followed by two epic poems, "Ko, or A Season on Earth" and "The Duplications," which were written in the Italian form of ottava rima. Using rhyme and meter in a contemporary epic poem would be enough to guarantee a relegation to the sidelines of popularity; throw in a wholly comedic narrative about a Japanese baseball player with an explosive pitch, as Koch did, and you're pretty much out of the game for good. These are wonderful poems, made all the more fresh because they lack an attendant army of imitators taking up their concerns. The last three poems included here, "Impressions of Africa," "On the Edge," and "Seasons on Earth," show Koch's gradual movement from a poetry "ecstatically in the present tense" toward the often nostalgically tinged pathos of much of his later work.