enneth Koch, one of the principal members of what has come to be known as the New York School, passed away at age 77 this past summer (2002). It would be a challenge to persuade anyone that he had not lived a full life in every respect, particularly as a writer. He published many more books than most authors, enjoyed a contented (and eminent) teaching career, collaborated with now famous composers and painters, and remained a striking, handsome, normally likeable figure to the end of his days. Alfred A. Knopf has for many years published his books, and it now has the distinction of publishing his final two, Sun Out and A Possible World . The two represent an unplanned, though conclusive, bookending of Koch's career (they were both scheduled for publication before Koch's final illness).

Sun Out is a book of previously uncollected poems from the period 1952-1954, when Koch, then a young poet, earned his wings in downtown New York City, after leaving Harvard. These early poems are very much those of a youthful man in love with feats of experimental audacity, with the "new", the loft party mingling of modern arts, poets, musicians, and painters. He spent much time around the likes of Larry Rivers, the painter, and Frank O'Hara, the curator, muse, and fellow poet in these years. Koch also read aloud from the New York phone book over jazz at the Five Spot and attended John Cage's first concerts. His poems are mischievous, exciting and excitable, though not so fully formed or confident as they would later become. They are flashy, perhaps a bit too much so for their own good. They are not, however, ornate, as one will experience in earlier poems by James Merrill, or merely ecstatic, as one will find with Allen Ginsberg. They are nowhere and certainly never in a confessional tone, which—though popular with the likes of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and their Captain, Robert Lowell—was inimical to the New York School. Though they rummaged through the ephemera of daily experience for stimulation, the New York School poets did not sound the depths of private-made-public grief and discomfiture. The poems in Sun Out have to do with invention and discovery, and are themselves best viewed as inventions and discoveries. Koch was unavoidably influenced by Clement Greenberg's ideas about Abstract Expressionism. The poem becomes an object that describes itself, becomes its own subject, much as a Jackson Pollock painting concerns only itself, not, for instance, a cow or a landscape. This is not completely new. Stéphane Mallarmé informed Edgar Degas that poems are made of words, not ideas, and one is also reminded of Frank O'Hara's poem 'Why I Am Not a Painter': "I write a line / about orange . . . . My poem / is finished and I haven't mentioned / orange yet." The young Koch is omnivorous, but he is also indiscriminate: "Of course everything, once it is written about, even if it's a wild chaos, is bound eventually to become itself a sort of subject." Greenberg (whom Koch referred to in conversation with this critic as "old Clem pontificating darkly in a corner somewhere") was their miniature John Ruskin, just as De Kooning might be seen as their diminutive William Mallord Turner. One will encounter the disconcerting (and on occasion exasperating) avant-garde style that came to define the New York School (the critic John Simon, notoriously hard-nosed, has written that the New York Poets failed to write "a single poem of any importance, although some of them have written plausible light verse"). In Koch's case this style comes across as largely improvisational. While a liberal share of the poems consist of little more than eyewash and moonshine, memorable lines surface to buoy them through: "A dash of fishes / Summers him" or "See / Iron coming late. He's not afraid of overturning the tundra." The collection also includes the long giddy poem 'When The Sun Tries to Go On', whose tangled exterior is impenetrable and wears on the patience after a few pages. The Koch of Sun Out seems to be confused about what he's trying to achieve, which is not unusual for a writer on the edge of an emerging school. He is, after all, one of the central four New York School poets (the group that also includes James Schuyler, Frank O'Hara, and John Ashbery, the last living member); they embraced spontaneity, extemporization. The modern French poets comprising Koch's beau ideal at that age are in evidence— Henri Michaux, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos, Pierre Emmanuel. Sun Out is best read for its youthful energy rather than the qualities of individual pieces, though ingenuous (not ingenious) word-play and brooding surrealism tug at every line of these early poems, and the result can be intoxicating: "And we / Come in the buckle, a / Vanquished distinguished / Secret festival, relieving flights / Of the black brave ocean."

The second book, A Possible World , his last written, is, as one might expect, a considerable departure from the exuberant offhand poems of his twenties. The poems resemble, in their way, W.H. Auden's longer poems, such as 'New Year Letter', even the William Wordsworth of The Prelude. A Possible World follows very naturally in the style of Koch's most recent books, Straights and New Addresses (with the exclusion of the peculiar title poem, a longish, scattered piece falling somewhere between the unaccountable spasms of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and the atomized spatter of the Concrete poets). This aside, the poems are more composed (in both senses of the term); peppered with good-humored (if not particularly understated) references to greats, such as W.B. Yeats ("The blood-dimmed tide recedes and then comes in again"); and refer the reader to earlier poems in a related mood, such as 'Roma non basta una vita', which points back to one of Koch's most popular poems, 'Talking to Patrizia', from One Train. Though the collection starts off with a poem in form (iambic pentameter, stanzas of ABABABCC rhyme, ottava rima, which appropriately brings to mind Byronic satire and semi-autobiographical drama), most poems in the collection are in more relaxed, conversational forms. The topics are comfortable (unlike the Abstract Expressionism of the earlier volume, these poems have identifiable subjects), traveling through Asia and the Mediterranean, reminiscences of youth, odes to such tranquil old friends as Buddhism, recollections of a teacher (Delmore Schwartz, at Harvard). The surrealism of his earlier years is softened here, and he displays again his exceptional flair for the disarming and humorous: "I had a dream about a polar bear / He seemed to want to inform me about something." Others are sad, reflective, the poems of a man nearing his seventh age (think William Shakespeare's "Last scene / of all, That ends this strange eventful history, / Is second childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." As You Like It, 2.7.139-167), poems almost, but never entirely, regretful of days and prospects passed by: "How long ago I saw the misted pine trees / And hoped, no matter how, to get them into poetry." Still, the overall mood of the book is surprisingly boyish (or perhaps not so surprisingly, given its author).

These two books, coming as they do upon his death, have closed Koch's life's work. One may be certain that a Collected Poems will be published within the next few years, and these, his seventeenth and eighteenth books of poetry, will be the last single books his readers will place on their shelves, one at the start, the other at the close of day.