Fans Salute Former Professor and Poet Kenneth Koch
in a Literary, Musical Extravaganza
by Caroline Ladhani

In the late 1940s and 50s, a small group calling themselves the New York School of Poets began to raise eyebrows in the city's arts and literary circles. Known for their humorous, experimental verse and collaborations with musicians and painters, these avant-garde poets included John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler and Columbia professor of English Kenneth Koch, who died in July 2002. On October 10 of this year, literary fans, performers, and composers gathered to celebrate Koch's life, his works and his forty-plus years of teaching poetry at the University.

The remarkable evening of whimsical short plays, songs, films, and opera featured a vast array of Koch's text set to music, staged and/or filmed by his many collaborators. Held before a packed house at Miller Theatre, it was one of Columbia's featured events marking the University's 250th birthday. Writer, actor, and Paris Review editor George Plimpton had been slated to emcee the event before his unexpected death on September 26.
In Plimpton's place, Koch's widow Karen introduced the program. Several of her husband's musical cohorts also took the stage throughout the evening to comment on their collaborations with Koch and to introduce the pieces presented that night.

According to Karen Koch, "Collaborations with musicians always excited Kenneth."

Many of the night's selections were drawn from collections of short works by Koch, such as One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays (Knopf 1987) and The Gold Standard, A Book of Plays. Scenes from two longer plays, The New Diana and The Red Robins, were performed as staged readings. The readings were particularly poignant as they featured several actors reading parts they had performed as members of the original 1970s casts.
Also on the program was Koch's Popeye Alone from Popeye Among the Polar Bears (1986), a play in which Popeye speaks of the delights and freedom of being on his own, then digresses into cries of anguished longing for Olive Oyl. The light verse with melancholy undertones is typical of Koch's approach. Consider the first stanza of "Your Genius Made Me Shiver" from "Songs from the Plays", included in Straits (Knopf 1998) and performed by a solo tenor voice:

Your genius made me shiver
It seemed to me
That you were greater than I
Could ever be
Your genius made me shiver

Several other selections celebrated Koch's genius as an opera librettist. These included pieces from the opera Bertha, set to music by Ned Rorem as well as scenes from two shorter plays set as operas: The Gold Standard, with music by Scott Wheeler, and Depart Malgache, with music by Roger Tréfousse. Like many of Koch's other plays, the latter is a page or less in length:

AFRICA
Madagascar, why are you leaving?
MADAGASCAR
I don't know.
But I do know this is two hundred fifty MILLION years ago,
And I have to go.
AFRICA
Lemur-filled and enormous island,
where will you go?
MADAGASCAR
I don't know—I think just out there in
the sea—to save my lemurs I have to go . . .
AFRICA
Good-bye! (MADAGASCAR floats out into the Indian Ocean.)
O addio, dolce Madagascar!
(Malagasy music.)

The page-length play is a Koch trademark. According to author, poet and former Columbia professor David Shapiro, who was seated in the audience, Koch "often remarked that 'the stage is like a page, you can put anything that you want on it.'" Shapiro composed the music for a film version of Koch's play, The Scotty Dog."

Aptly summing up the essence of a Koch masterpiece, Shapiro went on to say, "Kenneth's humor often veils the endless search for a Utopian happiness. 'The pursuit of happiness' could be his anthem."