The Art of Poetry

By Kenneth Koch

A charter member of the legendary New York School of poets that includes John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch has become one of America's best known and best loved poets. His apt parodies and zany poetic conceits have earned him the distinction of being the funniest poet in America, and his extravagant imagination and knack for high hilarity have pleased generations of readers.
Here, in The Art of Poetry, Koch offers amusing and thought-provoking essays on the nature of the poetic moment, from its heartfelt emergence in an elementary school classroom to its raucous display in a set of satirical cartoons drawn by the author. Also included are interviews with Allen Ginsberg and Jordan Davis in which Koch discusses a range of diverse topics, including literary criticism, French poetry, and Santa Claus. The Art of Poetry provides Koch's audience with not only the musings and mischievous thoughts of the poetic mind, but also the reflections of the most respected poetry teacher in America.
Kenneth Koch's other books include On the Great Atlantic Rainway: Selected Poems 1950-1988; Seasons on Earth, Days and Nights, The Art of Love, One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays, and One Train, for which he won the Bollingen Prize in American Poetry. He is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0472066056
• ISBN13: 9780472066056
• Release Date: December 1996
• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

The Poetics of Joy

There are those who speak of the "anxiety" of poetry, but there is a case to be made for poetry that results not from agony or a confessional impulse but out of pleasure, the desire to communicate pleasure to an audience hungry for it. Koch generates as much pleasure as any poet, and it is not only the comic value of his poetry that recommends it but the spirit of creativity itself. In "The Art of Poetry" you get a kind of guide to poetics, an "ars poetica" in the Horatian manner with an American accent. You also get "Fresh Air," his memorable 1950s diatribe against academic poetry, still pertinent today. A necessary antidote to the New York Times.