Special Addition Second Post Saturday Special

Since I've been slacking a bit lately due to school work and life in general, I thought I'd grace you all with a second addition post. Don't count on this all the time, but I felt bad that I haven't posted anything since Wednesday. Kenneth Koch died in 2002. One of my favorite lines of his poetry is taken from his his poem "Permanently" and goes like this:

As the adjective is lost in the sentence,
So am I lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat --
You have enchanted me with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language.

I love to read and write! It doesn't matter if it's poetry or not, but in Koch's case it is poetry. I quite appreciate his poetry, if only for that poem "Permanently" which I was appalled we didn't go over in class since it's in our Post Modern Poetry book, after all. Ah well, I guess the professor and I must have differing taste.

A brief biography on Kenneth Koch:
Kenneth Koch was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on February 27, 1925. He studied at Harvard University, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree, and attended Columbia University for his Ph.D.

Many critics found Koch's early work obscure, such as Poems (1953), and the epic Ko, or A Season on Earth (1959), yet remarked upon his subsequent writing for its clarity, lyricism, and humor, such as in The Art of Love (1975), which was praised as a graceful, humorous book. His other collections of poetry include New Addresses (Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), winner of the Phi Beta Kappa Poetry Award and a finalist for the National Book Award; Straits (1998); One Train and On the Great Atlantic Rainway, Selected Poems 1950-1988 (both published in 1994), which together earned him the Bollingen Prize in 1995; Seasons of the Earth (1987); On the Edge (1986); Days and Nights (1982); The Burning Mystery of Anna in 1951 (1979); The Duplications (1977); The Pleasures of Peace (1969); When the Sun Tries to Go On (1969); Thank You (1962); and Seasons on Earth (1960).

Koch's short plays, many of them produced off- and off-off-Broadway, are collected in The Gold Standard: A Book of Plays. He has also published Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry (Scribners, 1998); The Red Robins (1975), a novel; Hotel Lambosa and Other Stories(1993). Koch wrote the libretto for composer Marcello Panni's The Banquet, which premiered in Bremen in June 1998, and his collaborations with painters have been the subject of exhibitions at the Ipswich Museum in England and the De Nagy Gallery in New York. His numerous honors include the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Library of Congress in 1996, as well as awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Ingram-Merrill foundations. In 1996 he was inducted as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Kenneth Koch lived in New York City, where he was professor of English at Columbia University. Koch died on July 6, 2002 from leukemia. ..

This information was gleaned from: http://www.poemhunter.com/kenneth-koch/biography/. All the biographies I found on the man were extremely brief. Ah well, I guess you get the gist of him from that. On a side note, what kind of name is poem hunter? Poems aren't exactly hard to find nor are poets. How queer! Ah well, R.I.P. Kenneth Koch.