New Addresses

I chose a book of poems by Kenneth Koch. He currently resides in New York City and teaches at Columbia University. I purchased his book from the book store because I was immediately attracted to the cover. The book is titled New Addresses and looks as if the cover is filled with hand sketched drawings and segmented poems which make it look like a private diary. When I opened it up, the titles of the poems that are listed in the contents are captivating and grasped my interest. For example, To My Twenties, To Psychoanalysis, To Testosterone, To Piano Lessons, To Carelessness, To Living In the City, To Insults, To Fame, To My Fifties are just to name a few.

Reading the poems, I learned that the individual poems work together in a cohesive manner by using lines or phrases from earlier works in Koch's book (assuming the reader started with page one and so on and so forth...). Each poem is addressing something, hence the title, New Addresses. As he addresses his topic of choice, the poems speak out to readers such as me, yet he was from an older generation, like my grandparents age (me being 21). Koch makes the reader feel as if his poems could have been a stream of consciousness during his earlier years. His technique is not extremely abstract but made me think of surrealist poetry and the New York School of Poets we had studied earlier in the semester; this observation was funny as I came to find out Kenneth Koch was a poet of the New York School where he knew people like John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara.

Kenneth Koch writes about the addressing topic by using the pronoun "you" a lot; I feel like this technique works because when I use "you" in poems it allows my readers to consider themselves as the "you" or the poem can relate to the reader, making them feel as if they are the speaker and the "you" is someone they know. As I came to see how the "you" makes the writer's poems relate to his readers, I also felt the situations and the way the incidences happened in his poems are techniques which emphasis the poems' uniqueness.

The order he chose for his poems made the book more personal than if he were to lay them out in any other order. I write a lot of personal poems which I am going to put in a particular order for my chapbook in hopes of making my work more personal as a whole, but relatable as individual poems. Koch’s poetry includes a lot of poems in which people can relate to, but personal at the same time. I believe the order in which a poet sets up his or her book is a technique that makes the piece of work very personal. My chapbook will also use a technique which allows my personal issues to relate to my readers just like Koch has. I'd like to think my poems are pretty "straight-forward" and, therefore called prose poetry. Well, the poet and I had something else in common because his poetry was to the point as well! All the similarities I share with this poet made me appreciate his work even more.

When I think of poems that acknowledge the poet’s personal experiences, I can't help but think about Christian Bok. I remember he mentioned how he came about his style of poetry because it was a style that was almost as dead as Latin and he had told his friends that he would never write poems about himself. So, if you are a fan of sound poetry, then maybe this book isn't for you. However, when you can make personal poems as witty, relatable and entertaining as Kenneth Koch, including the snazzy cover, then you must take a glance at New Addresses and other poems about a happy, healthy life!