Word: koch
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...course, none of this seemed to be bothering Koch when he made his entrance at the GSE Tuesday afternoon. His lecture, held in the Askwith Educational Forum and titled "The Pleasures of Writing and Reading Poetry," was comprised largely of material from his recent book on verse, Making Your Own Days, and showed him from the start to be a delightful figure, his manner relaxed, forthright, a little absent-minded; his delivery earnest but clever; his lanky form animated in a way that made him seem very much younger than his seventy odd years...
Arguing for a return to pleasure as the focal point of the poetic experience, Koch dismissed the postmodern literary theory which has been the center of academic pedagogy for the last three decades: "As a primary approach to a work of art, it doesn't make any more sense than as a primary approach to swimming." He held instead that a simpler, more casual approach was a better way into the poetic experience, claiming that "writing poetry should be a little like being at a party. You dance, you drink, you flirt, and you don't have to come...
Throughout, Koch bantered with himself and entertained the audience with a decidedly quirky wit. "D.H. Lawrence compared puberty to being crucified on a cross of sex," he said at one point. "Well, it's not that bad, but then Lawrence always took things rather hard." Later, when questioned by an audience member about poetry's ability to help students learn to spell, Koch snapped back, "You don't teach ballet to improve someone's posture...
...lecture lasted more than two hours, and dragged toward the end when Koch displayed the Wallace Stevens poem "Anecdote of the Jar" on an overhead projector to demonstrate some keys to reading poetry. Alarmingly, he turned Stevens' very sophisticated poem into a cartoon,delighting in the story of "this magic little jarwhich conquers Tennessee," and, while allowingthat more nuanced readings of the poem werepossible, he seemed so strongly by temperament toresist such readings that he effectively arguedagainst them. The key to enjoying this poem, heheld, lay in the music of its sounds and thesilliness of its story, and there...
Some of the sensibility common to the work ofthe New York School poets was learned from thevisual arts, Abstract Expressionism in particular,and much of the work Koch read at the SignetTuesday evening exhibited what Robert Creeley hascalled "that lovely, usefully uncluttereddirectness of perception" shared between New Yorkpainting and New York poetry. Following a verynice introduction by Signet president ScottRothkopf '99, he took his seat at the front of alovely, ornate old room in the Signet Societybuilding, and, sipping occasionally from a glassof Coke, read for nearly an hour, following thatdirectness of perception through poems fromseveral of his recent works...