On the Great Atlantic Rainway: Selected Poems 1950-1988

by Kenneth Koch

Overview

On the Great Atlantic Railway is Kenneth's Koch's inspired collection of 32 years of work. Koch, David Lehman said in The American Poetry Review, is "a masterly innovator . . . who has used his extravagant powers of wit and invention to enlarge the sphere of the poetic . . . he has stretched our ideas of what it is possible to do in poetry."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307804389
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/25/2012
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

KENNETH KOCH has published many volumes of poetry, including New Addresses, Straits and One Train. He was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1995, in 1996 he received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry awarded by the Library of Congress, and he received the first Phi Beta Kappa Poetry award in November of 2001. 

His short plays, many of them produced off- and off-off-Broadway, are collected in The Gold Standard: A Book of Plays. He has also written several books about poetry, including Wishes, Lies, and Dreams; Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?; and, most recently, Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry. He taught undergraduates at Columbia University for many years. He passed away in 2002.

Editorial Reviews

This selection of poems by Koch (Seasons on Earth) is a thoroughly enjoyable assortment of work (including a few unpublished poems from the '50s). Koch's imagination is at once philosophical and fiercely whimsical; his digressions are always clever. Lines from ``Fresh Air'' capture the frustrations felt by his generation of writers in the '50s and '60s: ``Where are young poets in America, they are trembling in publishing houses and universities,/ Above all they are/ trembling in universities, they are bathing the library steps with their spit/ They are gargling out innocuous (to whom?) poems about maple trees and their children... Oh what worms they are! They wish to perfect their form.'' Also featured are excerpts from longer poetical works, most notably ``The Art of Poetry,'' detailing 10 rules to be observed before a poet ``releases'' a poem into ``the purview of others'' (the seventh: ``Is there any unwanted awkwardness, cheap effects... or other literary, `kiss-me-I'm-poetic' junk?"). At times, one could read Koch's playfulness as a ``cheap effect,'' yet that would be unfair. For another Koch poetic directive is to be ``young in one's heart.'' Whether writing with virtuoso skill in ottava rima, blank verse or free verse, Koch practices what he preaches. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly