[New-Poetry] Aluminum snore

[David Graham]

Easily the most entertaining book on my recent arrivals shelf is Dean  
Young's new one.  Here's his take on Kenneth Koch, who like Young  
himself was never an aluminum snore. . . .

Anyone know what happened with DY and UPittsburgh?  I wonder why the  
switch of presses for this new volume.

Complete Poems


Here's the work of Kenneth Koch.
Even the somewhat melancholy poems
are happy. He must have been absolutely
nuts. No, he wasn't. Nor was he
an aluminum snore like Robert Lowell.
Gladiolas arrived at the door. Yip
yip, said the puppy and Yuff yuff
the puppy grown up. About 12 hours
hardly total I spent with him
before he died, Daddy I almost cry,
Oh get over it, he said the first time
coming down the hall, he was tall
and covered envelopes entirely with the address.
There was no fractioning Kenneth
Koch, no parts, you always got
it all, Terra del Fuego got it all,
off-off-off Broadway, the cab driver
from the Ivory Coast, hurry, the museum's
about to close and must be hustled through,
whizzing past the urinal, dizzy with dots,
oh great splash the size of a dump truck,
I can barely talk when I'm interviewing,
what's he saying now that the tape's off
about his mother in a white nightgown
and Wallace Stevens? Impossible
to imagine his eating a tofu burger
or waiting very long in a car.
He had a letter from Jean Tinguely on his wall
that Tinguelyesque apart t'would fall.
Even with everything there is a point
at which there is no more.

--Dean Young. Embryoyo. Believer Books, 2007.



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David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu

Home Page:
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Poetry Library:
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