Along with poets like Ashbery, James Schuyler, Frank O'Hara, and Barbara Guest , Koch was a member of a group known as the New York School . These poets were influenced by the visual artists of the day, about whom they often wrote. It's not that they wanted to describe pleasing images. On the contrary, they explored the properties of language apart from its conventional functions.
They objected to the seriousness of their immediate predecessors, chief among whom was Robert Lowell. As a result, they cultivated lighter tones. Imagine a cheerier Holden Caulfield, one who's read the French Surrealists, and you'll get a sense of the insouciant tenor of the New York School poets.
Koch's poetry thrives on instability. The thrill of reading him comes from following his vertiginous swoops and hairpin turns. The poet's talents improved over time. Many of the early lyrics feel like absurdist exercises, attempts to see what structures remained once logic had been abandoned. These methods probably helped to loosen up the young poet. But the poems themselves have the cramped feeling of academic cubism. The refusal to make sense constricts them.
The turning point came in the late 1960s, with the collection ``The Pleasures of Peace." In the decade that followed Koch wrote many of his best poems, among them ``Sleeping With Women," ``The Circus," ``The Art of Love," and ``Our Hearts." In this new work, Koch often wrote in the seemingly ordinary idioms of instruction manual directions, or of matter-of-fact anecdotes. Certainly, the improvisatory surprises kept coming, and Koch quickened the poems with his technical virtuosity; he was always able to inhabit forms as varied as the stanzas of Byron's ``Don Juan," Elizabethan ``fourteeners," or Whitmanian catalogs. But his style loosened. Reading his poems from the late '60s and '70s, you get a sense that there's a human inside the gorilla.
