When the Sun Tries to Go On

by Kenneth Koch

Genres: Poetry

113 pages

First published January 1, 1969

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

[Nico · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’d like to write more about this epic poem of language one day, but for just a short write up: Koch here creates an epic poem of the joy and ecstasy of language. When the Sun Tries to Go On is akin to (I know this is used in comparison to poetry too often!) free jazz improvisation, akin to Cecil Taylor’s hammering on 88 keyed drums; Koch’s language bursts at the seams with the hectic speed of modern life and he attempts to capture the blur of life through a maximalist epic poem of language. Dare I even say he is more akin to a sort of Euro Free Jazz, a Derek Bailey of language where he mangles colloquial speech so far as to make it so decontextualised, so strange and foreign even to the native English speaker, these words that are so common to their everyday vernacular here taking on an expansive life in the poem where there is no longer a hierarchy of language; every word is it’s own event, every word is a haecceity, a new special event of language. And it truly is just a beautiful poem that opened up entirely new spaces and avenues of what an epic book length poem cld look like.

Clark Coolidge certainly took Ashbery’s new formal invention in The Tennis Court Oath (particularly, of course, Europe) and ran with it. But, I think Coolidge’s geologic free jazz poetics cld be even more in the same modality as Koch’s When the Sun Tries to Go On, truly one of the most unsung masterpieces of poetry.

And I see this as also being a sort of precursor to LANGUAGE poetries, Koch is focused on a materiality of language that is more focused on sound than meaning necessarily. Koch, I think, gets pushed too often to the corner for allowing humour and joy into his poetry but again, I’m just seeing so much of Coolidge’s Beckettsian humour right at home with Koch’s joys in the use and sonic musicality of language as language. Even the most basic units of language in this poem matter to its overall sense; and make no doubt about it (just as in the Derek Bailey and Cecil Taylor comparisons) this is not so much simply non-sense, as it is the creation of a new sense, a new language to create poetry in.

[Rodney Phillips · Rating 5 out of 5]

Woweee Zowee ! What a trip Kenneth Koch. Wallace Stevens on fun drugs