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KENNETH KOCHTHE COLLECTED POEMSOF KENNETH KOCHKnopf / 2005Some poets have difficulty putting pen topaper. Kenneth Koch, on the contrary,could simply not stop producing poetry.Writing and living were all but synonymousfor him. The results are broughttogether in his almost 800-page CollectedPoems, which doesn’t even include longpoems like the Byronic epic about aJapanese baseball player, “Ko, or a Seasonon Earth.” (Koch’s Collected Longer Poemsare scheduled to come out next fall.)Koch and I became friends at Harvard inthe late 1940s. We renewed our friendshipwhen I moved to New York in 1949;Frank O’Hara arrived there two yearslater, and we all met up with JamesSchuyler and Barbara Guest shortly afterward.Caught up in the effervescent artworld of that time, along with our painterfriends Jane Freilicher, Nell Blaine andLarry Rivers, to name but a few, webegan to be looked at as a school – theNew York School, of which Kenneth, bythen a professor of poetry at Columbia,was headmaster and ringmaster. Teachingpoetry was a close second to writing it ashis occupation of choice; in time hewould collaborate on books like Rose,Where Did You Get That Red? which hasbecome a standard text for teaching poetryin secondary schools.His missionary zeal also led him to writehis ars poetica, a poem called “Fresh Air,”about a Zorro-like alter ego called theStrangler whose task it is to suppress poeticdullness, violently if necessary: “OhGOODBYE, castrati of poetry! farewell,stale pale skunky pentameters (the onlyhonest English meter, gloop, gloop!),”and replace it with, well, fresh air.Trashing lines like “This Connecticutlandscape would have pleased Vermeer,”the Strangler summons the spirits ofMallarmé, Shelley, Byron, Whitman,Pasternak and Mayakovsky to help himcleanse the Augean stables of poetry.But Koch loved poetry of all shapes andsizes, even “skunky pentameters.” One of26 APRIL/MAY 2006the many delightful surprises in this richcollection is “The Seasons,” an homage tothe epic poem of that title by the bland18th-century poet James Thomson.Koch’s rollickingly pentametric versionbegins: “Now pizza units open up, andfroth / Streams forth on beers in many afrolic bar / New-opened-up by April.” Hispoetic prodigality began, as Koch explainsin “Days and Nights,” when “It came tome that all this time / There had been noreal poetry and that it needed to be invented.”The products of a lifetime of continualinventing are beautifully on display inthis awe-inspiring banquet of a book.John Ashbery has published more than 20 collectionsof poetry, including, most recently,Where Shall I Wander (Ecco/HarperCollins[US] and Carcanet [UK], 2005). This reviewpreviously appeared in Publisher’s Weekly.KAMAU BRATHWAITEBORN TO SLOW HORSESWesleyan / 2005.At the end of Born to Slow Horses, in a notethat somewhat resembles a biographicalnote, Kamau Brathwaite calls this bookpart of his “postSalt poetry” phase. The“Time of Salt,” as he puts it, were theyears 1986-1990, years in which his wifedied, his home and archives weredestroyed in a hurricane, and he wasattacked in Kingston, Jamaica. The “Timeof Salt” produced recent books such asThe Zea Mexican Diary and Trench TownRock. PostSalt are Born to Slow Horses andother recent collections such as WordsNeed Love Too. And, as he writes in thethird person, these postSalt books surveyor make “natural reference to the entiretidalectics, but at the same time marking,even with the most remarkable of his‘Caribbean’ poems here, a significanttransboundary development.”It is this attention to the “transboundary”that I find so distinctive aboutBrathwaite’s work. Brathwaite’s work isdistinctive for how it charts the connectionsbetween the global and the local.His stunning Middle Passages zig zags backand forth across the Atlantic in a series ofpoems about political resistance and politicalart. Even his highly personal works,such as Trench Town Rock, which is abouthis attack in Jamaica, often manage to getin a colonial history lesson. I always wantto resort to some oxymoronic term or jargon,perhaps a term like transboundariclocalism, to describe his work because thewords currently in circulation aroundpoetry never feel adequate. His work isalways rooted in the Caribbean yet it isnever naively isolated, never nostalgic,always interestingly attentive to the difficultiesof its colonial histories and migrations.Part of the intense pleasure of readinghis work is how it swoops back andforth between detail and big picture.Because so much of Brathwaite’s book isabout the difficulties of colonial historiesand migrations, he is the master of thelament. He uses the form frequently andhe uses it persuasively. And it is just onemore example of how Brathwaite isalways challenging genre expectationsthat he turns so often to a form that is usuallygendered female and is also oftenabout an inability to speak for so much ofhis historical, political poetry.Born to Slow Horses, Brathwaite’s mostrecent book and among his strongest, hasat least two laments in it although it couldprobably be argued that most of the bookis lament. One of the obvious laments,“Kumina,” is about Brathwaite’s wife’sson who is hit by a car while riding a bike.The poem opens with the telling of thedeath and then in a mother’s voice tellsthe story of mourning day by day. Thispoem has all the marks of the classicBrathwaite lament. It begins by tellingabout the death of someone, then turns toan intimate chronicling of the pain ofsomeone close to the dead who is stillalive using classical tropes (the breakingof bread, the tears, the disorientation andinarticulateness), and then there is amoment when the poem turns individualgrief into the larger collective pain of aculture dealing with an impossible history.The other obvious lament is called “9/11Hawk” and it has some of the classicBrathwaite lament moments but movesout of them, perhaps even more into this“transboundary” space. “9/11 Hawk”opens with the narrator listening to musicand begins with a memory of hearingColeman Hawkins play “Body and Soul”and a discussion of how music matters. Itmoves then to an uncle who died in the
Twin Towers when they collapsed and atelling of this event. The voice of lamentin this poem is not so much the narratorand his uncle but Beth Petrone, the pregnantwife of a firefighter who died in thebuildings who is quoted throughout theend of the poem. The images in this poemare productively less sure, more complicatedthan in “Kumina.” There is “thebroken quaver of the water leaking in ourone canoe” and “death in the fission ofindebtedness” and “the unknown animalthat is now yr sibyl sister at the door.”While Brathwaite has been living in NewYork City for some time, it has never heldthe attention of his work the way theCaribbean has. For this reason, it is interestingto see him writing about 9/11. Somuch of his work laments those deadbecause of the world’s powers’ colonialhistories; it is fascinating to see him writingfrom within the center of the empireand to have him mourning with it. Thepoem ends with the narrator wanting toreconnect with his/her beloved. “O letme love you love you love love you” isone among many lines where it is leftambiguous if the beloved is a human orNew York City, whether this love is somethingthat is difficult or easy.The last poem in Born to Slow Horses usesshort, mainly three line stanzas, RobertCreeley-style. It is not really lament butcould easily be read as comment onlament. Here Brathwaite abandons hisclassic trope of expansive listing andswooping historical views and turns totell a story of a dead robin caught on apower line and strangled by a stringaround its neck. Most of the poemdescribes another bird that comes tomourn the dead bird. The poem endswith a boy cutting the dead robin downand burying it. The still living bird in thispoem is clearly lamenting (this bird isgendered male): “the mourn- / ing malebird circle / & sing // at the hope- / less/ song- // less / tighten- / ing string.” Butit seems telling that the boy comes fromoutside this relationship between thedead and the mourning and respectfullyends the song through his actions. Thisending suggests that there might yet beanother, new phase of Brathwaite’s workafter this postSalt one.Juliana Spahr’s most recent book is ThisConnection of Everyone with Lungs.STACY SZYMASZEKEMPTIED OF ALL SHIPSLitmus Press / 2005In Emptied of All Ships, Stacy Szymaszekcrafts from the mercantile frontier a complexpoetry of sign, symbol and self-identity.Seafaring history speaks to poetrythrough both a logistics of cultural cargoand holding environment. Poetry isSzymaszek’s new birth canal. The conceptsof D.W. Winnicott, a figure inobject-relations theory, bring meaning toSzymaszek’s psychologically chargeddevelopment sequence.From the beginning, Szymaszek launchesinto an archetypal sub-sea. An “I AMunit.” Informing the opening poem,“…shift at oars,” is a mother load ofinstinctual events. To advance the transitionalobject flow required for her ownpsycho-poetic development, she stacksand unpacks cosmic images associatedwith Gnostic mysteries, Hellenic knowing,and illusions shaped by the archetypeof Neptune.Szymaszek is a careful and intelligentpoet. The cognitive horizon at “boat/bottom”belongs to “brains.” On syllablesride unconscious rhythms of the sea foldedinto historical records. Soon enough,the space for subjective ontological experienceopens. Thus Szymaszek writes: “noone / knows / the brains / I am now.”Szymaszek’s way of knowing the world isreligious. That is to say, archetype, ethnicity,and myth are categories for understandingher approach to meaning. In cuttingaway to prime syllables, she evokesthe language of ceremonial ritual.treean oaroriginjoints rupturedsoak indeep inkConsequently, elements inscribed acrossthe maritime horizon become focusedthrough a strong archetypal complex.Ontological rupture fills quickly withNeptune’s connective ethers and “deepink.”In “Ballast,” Szymaszek captures cargoassociated with the water mother’s divineoffspring. Registered in “ceramic / Jesus /medallion / with chipped features” is theAPRIL/MAY 2006 27
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