Kenneth Koch (1925) felt he was never taken seriously because his poetry was so comical; yet he won the Bollingen and numerous other major prizes. He had been diagnosed with leukemia last summer, battled it into submission, and appeared for a brilliant, final reading in May, just weeks before his death. His Intro to Poetry class at Columbia, which he taught for some 35 years, was one of the most popular on campus and put generations of students on a first-name basis with US greats: Walt, and Wallace, and (of course) Frank. Along with O’Hara, James Schuyler, and John Ashbery, Kenneth was a member of the satirically-coined New York School of Poetry -- he lived the freshness and offhandedness, the gentility and sophisticated faux naiveté. His most recent book, Addresses, is brilliant (“To the Second World War”: You were large); his plays single-handedly keep the surrealist tradition of the one page, unproducible, play alive today.

BOOKS BY KENNETH KOCH:

• A Possible World: Poems (Knopf, 2002)
  
  
  
• Sun Out: Selected Poems from 1952 - 1954 (Knopf, 2002)
  
  
  
• New Addresses (Knopf, 2002)
  
  
  
• Straits: Poems by Kenneth Koch (Knopf, 2000)
  
  
  
• Wishes, Lies and Dreams: Teaching Children To Write Poetry (Harper Perennial reprint, 2000)
  
  
  
• Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry (Simon & Schuster, 1998)
  
  
  
• I Never Told Anybody: Teaching Poetry Writing to Old People (Teachers & Writers, 1998)
  
  
  
• The Art of Poetry: Poems, Parodies, Interviews, Essays, and Other Work (Poets on Poetry series, University of Michigan Press, 1997)
  
  
  
• Hotel Lambosa and Other Stories (Coffee House Press, 1993)
  
  
  
• Rose Where Did You Get That Red? Teaching Great Poetry To Children (Vintage Books reissue, 1990)
  
  
  
• One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays (Knopf, 1988)
  
  
  

Philip Whalen (1923) died from a spinal infection that came from a heart valve infection that could not be treated without spinal surgery which he would not have survived (beating the doctor’s predictions by many years -- he went blind in 1995). A Zen master, a roly-poly holy, Whalen’s sharp poems and drawings melted art and life. Was he talking? Or quoting a poem? Or writing a new one? became the theme of his last years on earth. While the Beat tradition is generally thought of as one of bombast and political salvos, Whalen’s poetry is the opposite, “barely written.” He doesn’t scratch down an observation of the snail darter, a la Snyder -- instead, he is the snail darter, and it’s a funny life, too. His recent publications include the totally thrilling Goof Book, a tome that skitters definition, a sort of conversation/letter to Kerouac full of the personal well, soul-deep, love, Philip. He was a leader at the Tassajara Zen Center for many many years. Oh Master.

BOOKS BY PHILIP WHALEN:

• Overtime: Selected Poems (Penguin USA, 1999)
  
  
  
• Canoeing Up Cabaga Creek: Buddhist Poems 1955-1986 (Parallax Press, 1996)
  
  
  
• Two Novels: You Didn’t Even Try and Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head (Zephyr Press, 1984)
  
  
  

And, dear God who does not exist maybe, to add the recent deaths of two Black Mountaineers: John Wieners (1934), whose poems sit at the cerebral edge of radio wave transmissions and high art. The Hotel Wentley Poems will redefine poetry for you (many in Collected and Selected).… And dear Fielding Dawson (1930) whose writing was always the way you talk if you just talk, and who devoted so much of his life to working with inmates, who knew what it took to make it outside… he himself always an outsider! Go, read Krazy Kat. That’s what I’m going to do.

Bob Holman

BOOKS BY JOHN WIENERS:

• The Journal of John Wieners Is to Be Called 707 Scott Street for Billie Holiday, 1959 (Sun & Moon Classics, 1996)
  
  
  
• Cultural Affairs in Boston: Poetry and Prose 1956-1985 (Black Sparrow Press, 1988)
  
  
  
• Selected Poems: 1958-1984 (Black Sparrow Press, 1986)
  
  
  
• Superficial Estimation (Hanuman Books, 1986)
  
  
  

BOOKS BY FIELDING DAWSON:

• The Land of Milk and Honey (XOXOX Press, 2001)
  
  
  
• The Orange in the Orange: A Novella & Two Stories (Black Sparrow Press, 1995)
  
  
  
• Will She Understand?: New Short Stories (Black Sparrow Press, 1988)
  
  
  
• Virginia Dare, Stories 1976-1981 (Black Sparrow Press, 1985)
  
  
  
• Krazy Kat and Seventy-Six More: Collected Stories, 1950-1976 (Black Sparrow Press, 1982)
  
  
  
• Three Penny Lane (Black Sparrow Press, 1981)
  
  
  

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