Lifesaving Poems: Kenneth Koch's 'To My Heart at the Close of Day'

I saw the sign above on a wall during a visit I recently made to a school to talk to their sixth form about poetry. During the visit I was asked which poets I liked reading the best and my mind went blank, as it always does. The specific purpose of the morning was to discuss poems of 'love through the ages'. Floundering a little I spoke a bit of the poets I had chosen for us to talk about, and the ones they reminded me of, and the ones that got me interested in poetry in the first place.

But somehow I managed not to say that I love the work of Kenneth Koch. I know this because I was irritated with myself on the drive back from the school: how could I have forgotten him, especially when I managed to remember to mention his colleagues James Schuyler, John Ashbery and Frank O' Hara?

I first came across this poem in the review of New Addresses, from which it comes, by Mark Halliday in Poetry Review (posted at the bottom of this piece). If you will forgive the pun, I felt it was the game-changer. There is something more than autumnal about the piece, the voice dropping to a conversational murmur which is intimate and troubled. In a poem about a summer pastime which is played out on a grand scale in front of crowds, this is refreshingly ironic.

I think the poem is playful on other levels (please forgive that pun also). I think Koch is playing with his public persona of 'wackiness'. Read the first four and a half lines out loud: there is more than a hint of Edward Lear about them. I think those famous 'contemporaries' of his also ghost this poem, with the inevitable comparisons that were and are and probably always will be made between that famous school of New Yorkers, who were after all friends who supported and encouraged each other.

I delight in this poem, even though I know next to nothing about baseball. Underneath all of these plays for attention, the poem unleashes the twin terrors of a ball coming 'smashing toward you' in the 'sudden' darkness. The 'great step' we take toward it may indeed be a 'thrill', but the poem is careful not to prescribe anything so definite as an outcome. 

Finally I think Koch is playing with the idea of poems being words that can knock you for six (forgive the pun). That is what this one does to me.

 

 

 

To My Heart at the Close of Day

 

 

At dusk light you come to bat

As George Trakl might put it. How are you doing

Aside from that, aside from the fact

That you are at bat? What balls are you going to hit

Into the outfield, what runs will you score,

And do you think you ever will, eventually,

Bat one out of the park? That would be a thrill

To you and your contemporaries! Your mighty posture

Takes its stand in my chest and swing swing swing

You warm up, then you take a great step

Forward as the ball comes smashing toward you, home

Plate. And suddenly it is evening.

 

 

Kenneth Koch, from New Addresses (Knopf, 2001)

 

Lifesaving Poems

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My Hero: Michael Laskey

Photo: Derek Adams

Some writers influence you through the pull of their imagination on your work, opening up new worlds as you read them. As I wrote recently, Ted Hughes is an example of this for me. Other writers come in and out of your life through firendship and collaboration. Michael Laskey is my hero because on top of these influences he also rescued me.

Towards the end of 1998 Michael rang me to invite me to consider coming to Suffolk to work as the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Spring Poet in Residence. he described a two-week programme of visiting schools, colleges and community groups where I would encourage children, teachers and writers with their poetry writing. It was a fantastic opportunity. Like an idiot, I turned him down. I explained that the PhD I had embarked on was very time-consuming. For good measure I also threw in an excuse concerning my worries about childcare.

Michael listened to me patiently, and finally put the phone down accepting what I had told him.

I think the real reason I said no to Michael was my complete lack of confidence at the time. My first book, published in 1996, had done very well for a first volume of poems, selling out its print run within a year. My publisher, however, was reluctant to commit to another print run, and interest in the book stalled.

The gap between acceptance and publication of the manuscript for the book had been three years. In the intervening period I had begun writing new poems, but was not sure if they amounted to enough material for a new book let alone whether they were any good.

When it became clear, early in 1998, that no new print run would be forthcoming, I began to wonder if these new poems might ever see the light of day in book form.

I had met Michael once before, at a reading for Smiths Knoll at the Troubadour Coffee House. I liked him immediately, quickly learning to relish both his enthusiasm, and his disdain for what he called 'showy' behaviour. I knew I was letting him down by saying no to his kind offer, which I had not asked for, but genuinely felt I had no option to say anything else.

My wife came home later that evening and confirmed that I was indeed an idiot for turning him down. I rang him back and was relieved to find he had not offered the residency to anyone else. I would be delighted to come to Suffolk, I told him. By now thanking him profusely, he stopped me, saying, 'Of course with your book now out of, we'll have to put some new poems out. Do you have any new work I could see?'

I asked him what he meant. 'Well, you know, a pamphlet or something. We can't have our poet in residence giving readings with no book to sell.' Excited and still not catching up with him I asked him what he meant again. Ever gracious, he explained in words a child would understand. 'What you need to do, Anthony, is send me some new work, your best stuff mind you, and then we'll print a pamphlet for you with some of your older work that's now out of print so that people can see a range of what you've been up to. How does that sound?'

I told him this sounded brilliant, and began thanking him profusely all over again, at which point he told me to shut up and stop being so silly, it was his pleasure and they were really looking forward to working with me.

And that is what happened. I went to Suffolk, working in schools and with writers groups, and I gave readings from my brand new pamphlet which we decided to call The Difference. 

I can still see Michael now, pounding the steering wheel with pleasure on the way to some tiny village school in the middle of nowhere, then attacking it when some opera came on. Once, in a traffic jam somewhere outside Sudbury, he saw two children, a girl and her younger sister, shouting at each other. 'Look at that, Anthony, that's 'Kin' by CK Williams, do you know it?' I told him I did not. 'Oh, Anthony, you must, what do mean you don't, you should, you know, God, really? It's the one that goes 'Next the wretched history of the world'.'

Even now he is probably turning to a newly-arrived poet in his car, handing them a book of poems and saying 'You really should read this, you know, it's bloody brilliant, what on earth were England thinking of in the rugby?'

 

The Difference

for Jim

 

The lives we're living,

what difference do they make?

 

We wake up,

throw our children in the air

and catch them laughing

into our arms.

 

Friends come and go, seasons pass,

the leaves collect silently

in the garden.

 

Which reminds me,

there's pruning to be done

and bonfires to build.

 

What is it that we're doing

in this world to make it better,

a place more easy to wake in

for our children?

 

In the middle of all this

I am amazed

the sun still finds time

to rise beautifully over these roofs

and never asks anything in return.