Seasons on Earth

by Kenneth Koch

Three long poems deal with the creative process, an aspiring baseball player, and the artifice of writing

Genres: Poetry

286 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1987

About the author

Kenneth Koch is most often recognized as one of the four most prominent poets of the 1950s-1960s poetic movement "the New York School of Poetry" along with Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery and James Schuyler. The New York School adopted the avant-garde movement in a style often called the "new" avant-garde, drawing on Abstract Expressionism, French surrealism and stream-of-consciousness writing in the attempt to create a fresh genre free from cliché. In his anthology The New York Poets, Mark Ford writes, "In their reaction against the serious, ironic, ostentatiously well-made lyric that dominated the post-war poetry scene, they turned to the work of an eclectic range of literary iconoclasts, eccentrics and experimenters."

Fiercely anti-academic and anti-establishment, Koch's attitude and aesthetic were dubbed by John Ashbery his "missionary zeal." Ford calls him "the New York School poet most ready to engage in polemic with the poetic establishment, and the one most determined to promote the work of himself and his friends to a wider audience." Koch died of leukemia at age 77, leaving a legacy of numerous anthologies of both short and long poems, avant-garde plays and short stories, in addition to nonfiction works dealing with aesthetics and teaching poetry to children and senior citizens.

Reviews

[David Curry · Rating 5 out of 5]

After Walt Whitman, Is there a more authentic and commanding American poet of joy than Kenneth Koch? I doubt it; but if there is, let me know, because I definitely want to make that poet’s acquaintance.

In 1987, Penquin Books brought out two of Koch’s earliest books — Ko and The Duplications— along with a new-at-the-time book-length poem, Seasons on Earth, in a single edition with a cover by Larry Rivers. (None of those three books appears in The Collected Poems that Knopf published in 2005, nor does When The Sun Tries To Go On, which Black Sparrow Press issued in 1969.)

In Seasons On Earth, we get an older Koch looking back to the happiness of his younger days: “I used to live for it, like cows for clover.” At one point, we get a railway terminal that “gave off toots and whistles / to friends and lovers kissing near its trestles.” After the slant rhyme of “whistles” and “trestles,” a few stanzas later Koch tosses off “elsewhere” and “elixir.” His adroit and mischievous play with rhymes sparks the poem from beginning to end. Here’s a stanza:

It was the time, it was the nineteen fifties,
When Eisenhower was President, I think,
And the Cold War, like Samson Agonistes,
Went roughly on, and we were at the brink.
No time for Whitsuntides or Corpus Christis —
Dread drafted all with its atomic clink.
The Waste Land gave the time’s most accurate data,
It seemed, and Eliot was the Great Dictator
Of literature. One hardly dared to wink
Or fool around in any way in poems,
And critics poured out awful jereboams
To irony, ambiguity, and tension —
And other things I do not want to mention.

I remembered that “wink / or fool around” as I read on. In the second book reprinted in this violume, Ko, you early on encounter “foam on beer” in two different similes, expand your smile when you come to the second one, and bet that Koch will do it again. He doesn’t, but he has plenty of other tricks up his sleeve.

Continuing to read like a bizarre but fortuitous cross-pollenation between “Rocky Raccoon” and Ogden Nash, the fifth “canto” of Ko opens with these two stanzas:

If you have ever driven in Kalamazoo
You’ll know the way the road that leads you in
To the center of town has curbs sometimes of blue,
Sometimes of green or white, and as you spin 
On four good wheels some houses look quite new
And others old, but all of them make you grin
Because they arer so calm — then, there’s the name
Of the city, which is its chiefest claim to fame.

I know you’ll speak to me of overalls
And furniture, as folks in Willimantic
Tell one of threads, and in gray Atlantic
City of hydrostatic telephone calls;
But all of what they say is rather pedantic,
For what is nice in Kalamazoo’s its moniker,
As in Atlantic City Miss America.

Later a reader is treated to “Pelicans who could keep the works of Hobbes ins - /
ide their beaks …” “Hobbes-ins-“ is a ryhme with “robins,” and then we get “hummingbirds who dance like little bobbins / on a loom.” (We could go Miss Grundy and complain that the hyphenation of “inside” is incorrect, but I think our poet would ask us to loosen up, and isn’t the incorrectness part of Koch’s audacious play?)

The Duplications includes a romantic triangle involving Mickey and Minnie Mouse and Donald Duck, with a rollicking digression (Digressions abound in Koch) discussing noses as they vary from species to species.

Suddenly in the middle of all manner of wild goings-on:

Oh, the art
We waste upon ingenious ways of killing!
When we were babies, just to be was thrilling —

To hold a rattle up, to eat our mommies,
To learn to walk. Then came our childhood peasures —
Our baseballs, footballs, rag dolls, origamis.
Next, adolescence, with its sexual treasures —
Who then was thinking about killing Commies?
I just wanted to peek under your feathers
At Aaron’s costumne party, Ellen White,
And think of you and phone you every night

And swim with you sometimes in Karen’s cool
Light blue piscine, and kiss you cold and dripping
And hold you in my arms. Oh, why not pool
The intellect of all to make one gripping,
Inevitable, bright, ecstatic school
Whose aim will be to keep such times from slipping
Away from us, so that we’d keep so much
Of happiness from weather, mood, and touch

That we’d be generous of our condition
And give it freely, not be always fighting
Those we fear may threaten our position —


Shortly after that comes this:

He bought
A ticket for himself to tropical China
And smuggled Beano on the ocean liner

(That was the lion’s name) locked in a trunk.

Tropical China and Beano, both within three lines — that’s Kenneth Koch, who not much later gives us “Rome’s first synagogue, La Mamma Aleph.”

I’m having to hold myself back from quoting more.

I cannot improve on Harry Matthews’ judgment, quoted on the back cover of the book: “The Duplications is an intensely serious undertaking masquerading as preposterous entertainment.”

[Oliver Ho · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating and strange book containing two massive, epic poems as well as a long introductory poem about the author's relationship to the works.

He wrote "Ko" (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...) in his thirties, them returned to the work with a sort-of sequel, "The Duplications" (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9...) about ten or so years later, and then wrote the introductory piece another ten or so years later.

All three are amazing takes on epic poems, in the vein of "Orlando Furioso" and Byron's "Don Juan." They follow the ottava rima structure, and comically digressive and surreal narrative flow.

I read a couple of interviews with Koch where he said he'd intended to to write epics that were 'all incident, no reflection' (or something like that), and also wanted to invoke the tone of Mack Sennett's films.

They are definitely odd poems/narratives, jumping in time and space, with many strange characters and mythic, surreal events. I think the two later pieces tried to bring in more reflection. It's hard to discern a clear-cut, simple point to it all, beyond the wild fun the author seems to have in wordplay and following his imagination wherever it goes--and that's more than enough.