In Making Your Own Days, celebrated poet Kenneth Koch writes about poetry as no one has written about it before -- and as if no one had written about it before. Full of fresh and exciting insights and experiences, this book makes the somewhat mysterious subject of poetry clear for those who read it and for those who write it -- and for those who would like to read and write it better. Treating poetry not as a special use of language but, in fact, as a separate language -- unlike the one used in prose and conversation -- Koch is able to clarify the nature of poetic inspiration, how poems are written and revised, and what happens in a reader's mind and feelings while reading a poem.

Koch also provides a rich anthology of more than ninety works: lyric poems, excerpts from long poems and poetic plays, poems in English, and poems in translation -- by poets past and present from Homer and Sappho to Lorca, Snyder, and Ashbery. Each selection is accompanied by an illuminating explanatory note designed to complement and clarify the text.

In this book, Kenneth Koch's genius for making poetry clear and for bringing out its real pleasures is everywhere apparent.

"Theater such as Kenneth Koch cannot be simply paraphrased, and presents to the audience the classic Mennipean challenge: to ponder, to mull it over, to "think.""--Mac Wellman

"The Banquet" brings together 144 plays, ten screenplays, and five operas spanning more than five decades of experimental work from a writer John Ashbery has called "simply the best we have." Witty, provocative, and playful, Kenneth Koch's work draws on poetry, musicals, improvisational comedy, satire, and other forms for their inspiration and touches on subjects ranging from the silly to the sublime.

Kenneth Koch (1925-2002), known for his association with the New York School of poetry, wrote many collections of poetry, fiction, plays, and nonfiction. His books include "Seasons on Earth," "On the Edge," "Thank You and Other Poems," "The Art of Love," "One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays," "Hotel Lambosa," and "The Collected Fiction," and several books on teaching children how to write poetry. Koch was awarded numerous honors, including 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.

Poetry. "No one writes like Ceravolo: his magical combinations of fragmentation and lyric - sometimes heartbreaking - immediacy. He is one of those pure poets who make you want to sit down and write a thousand poems and who simultaneously make you feel nothing you've done or will ever do is good enough. His importance to American poetry over the past 30 years is still largely a secret"-Charles North.

The classic, inspiring account of a poet's experience teaching school children to write poetry

When Kenneth Koch entered the Manhattan classrooms of P.S. 61, the children, excited by the opportunity to work with an instructor able to inspire their talent and energy, would clap and shout with pleasure. In this vivid account, Koch describes his inventive methods for teaching these children how to create poems and gives numerous examples of their work. Wishes, Lies, and Dreams is a valuable text for all those who care about freeing the creative imagination and educating the young.

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If you are a business student, you'll find tips and strategies to bring about positive change for your future employer. There is also plenty of information to help new and veteran managers avoid serious career pitfalls. You'll discover ways to pick the right individuals to be on your team; identify your weaknesses as a manager and fix them; improve listening skills and apply what you learn; tell the difference between good and bad advice.

With employees getting older, it's also important to acknowledge that generational differences play a role in how managers approach important topics such as incentives, authority, and compensation. Take action to make the most of your leadership position and get the most out of all your employees with "Bastards: Management Advice You Should Have Been Given Long Ago."

Kenneth Koch has been called "one of our greatest poets" by John Ashbery, and "a national treasure" in the 2000 National Book Award Finalist Citation.
Now, for the first time, all of the poems in his ten collections-from "Sun Out," poems of the 1950s, to "Thank You," published in 1962, to "A Possible World," published in 2002, the year of the poet's death-are gathered in one volume.
Celebrating the pleasures of friendship, art, and love, the poetry of Kenneth Koch has been dazzling readers for fifty years. Charter member-along with Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and James Schuyler-of the New York School of poets, avant-garde playwright and fiction writer, pioneer teacher of writing to children, Koch gave us some of the most exciting and aesthetically daring poems of his generation.
These poems take sensuous delight in the life of the mind and the heart, often at the same time: "O what a physical effect it has on me / To dive forever into the light blue sea / Of your acquaintance!" ("In Love with You").
Here is Koch's early work: love poems like "The Circus" and "To Marina" and such well-remembered comic masterpieces as "Fresh Air," "Some General Instructions," and "The Boiling Water" ("A serious moment for the water is when it boils"). And here are the brilliant later poems-"One Train May Hide Another," the deliciously autobiographical address in "New Addresses," and the stately elegy "Bel Canto"-poems that, beneath a surface of lightness and wit, speak with passion, depth, and seriousness to all the most important moments in one's existence.
Charles Simic wrote in "The New York Review of Books" that, for Koch, poetry "has to be constantly saved from itself. The idea is to do something with language that has never been done before." In the ten exuberant, hilarious, and heartbreaking books of poems collected here, Kenneth Koch does exactly that.

"From the Hardcover edition."

Mr. Koch’s poems have a natural voice, they are quick, alert, instinctive . . . He has vivacity and go, originality of perception and intoxication with life. Most important of all, he is not dull.” --Frank O’Hara, Poetry, 1955

Gathered together for the first time, the exciting, startling early work of one of our finest poets. Writing as a young man in the 1950s, Koch, a member of the now famed New York School along with John Ashbery, Larry Rivers, Frank O’Hara, and others, experimented with the delicate balance between sound and sense to offer a series of poems resembling music or abstract painting. For example, he opens the title poem with: “Bananas, piers, limericks / I am postures / Over there, I, are / The lakes of delectation / Sea, sea you!”
Also included are a selection of short plays in verse and Koch’s innovative masterpiece, “When the Sun Tries to Go On,” a poem that “produces a radical reworking of the life-poem myth predominant in American poetics since ‘Song of Myself’” (William Watkins, In the Process of Poetry).

About “When the Sun Tries to Go On,” David Lehman wrote, “Koch takes a great deal of delight in the sounds of words and his consciousness of them; he splashes them like paint on a page with enthusiastic puns, internal rhymes, titles of books, names of friends, and seems surprised as we are at the often witty outcome” (Poetry, 1968).

When the poems in Sun Out were originally published, they set a standard for the freshness and surprise of language used in extraordinary ways. For almost five decades they have delighted readers lucky enough to find them. It is our pleasure to make them once again available in this new and provocative collection.


From the Hardcover edition.

This classic guide by the trail-blazer of teaching poetry offers ideas and techniques that are useful at all age levels, as well as wonderful poems by his students. .,." Koch] has taken his thoughtful, giving, resourceful, and patient spirit to quite elderly and often infirm men and women, in obvious hopes of finding among them a similar responsiveness of mind and heart. If anything, the result is a more poignant and dramatic victory." -New York Times Book Review

Kenneth Koch, who has already considerably "stretched our ideas of what it is possible to do in poetry" (David Lehman), here takes on the classic poetic device of apostrophe, or direct address. His use of it gives him yet another chance to say things never said before in prose or in verse and, as well, to bring new life to a form in which Donne talked to Death, Shelley to the West Wind, Whitman to the Earth, Pound to his Songs, O'Hara to the Sun at Fire Island.  

Koch, in this new book, talks to things important in his life -- to Breath, to World War Two, to Orgasms, to the French Language, to Jewishness, to Psychoanalysis, to Sleep, to his Heart, to Friendship, to High Spirits, to his Twenties, to the Unknown. He makes of all these "new addresses" an exhilarating autobiography of a most surprising and unforeseeable kind.


From the Hardcover edition.

In 'Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?' the celebrated poet Kenneth Koch conveys the imaginative splendor of great poetry--by Blake, Donne, Stevens, Lorca, and others--and then shows how it may be taught so as to help children write poetry of their own.