gargoyle drumming

On Kenneth Koch and our world

I enjoyed listening to this podcast (MP3) from the Poetry Foundation this morning -- it's titled "The Poetry Assassination of Kenneth Koch" and tells the story of a idelogically motivated mock shooting of the great carnivalistic surrealistic American poet -- one of my favorites -- at St. Mark's in New York. Featuring some of my favorite people: Koch (of course), Ron Padgett and Andrei Codrescu. I love to think that people once cared so much about poetry to pull such pranks. Maybe they still do. I would like to be a poetic prankster.

Let's learn about Native Americans while we're at it. I was reading some of Gary Snyder's Turtle Island tonight, which I bought yesterday at the bookstore, along with Amadou & Mariam's Dimanche a Bamako and the new Walkmen disc. And Snyder was inspiring me to think about Native people. I am such a dumb modern American, living in my suburb, driving my car to work and back, in a constructed environment that exists mainly to serve the exigencies of human lives as they have manifested in just the past 50 years or so. Much of it is shit. No, shit is too good a word for it. At least shit is real, stinky and animal. These buildings that lack character, these ugly roads, this language debased into commerce, I don't know what to call it that can communicate my distaste for it.

Yet, in the middle of it all, we can still live authentic lives, touch each other. In "Some General Instructions," one of my favorite Koch poems, he writes: "Enjoy the new people you see. Put your hand out / And touch that girl's arm." Yes, this is what we must do!

One thing I love about Koch is that he seems to tap into that adolescent sense of wonder and novelty, the feeling that the world each morning has been scrubbed new (I fear that I have ripped that phrase off from an author). I wish I could have met him before he died.