Volume 27, Number 13 · August 14, 1980
New York Poets
By Denis Donoghue
The Burning Mystery of Anna in 1951
by Kenneth Koch
Random House, 81 pp., $7.95
The Morning of the Poem
by James Schuyler
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 117 pp., $10.95
Sunrise
by Frederick Seidel
Viking, 76 pp., $12.95
Trader
by Robert Mazzocco
Knopf, 83 pp., $4.95 (paper)
In The Art of Love (1975) Kenneth Koch said that some poets like to save up for their poems, others like to spend incessantly what they have. Spendthrift is better than thrift, according to Koch, because the pocket is bottomless, 'your feelings are changing every instant,' and the available combinations of language are endless. In practice, as in the practice of The Art of Love, the big spenders write on the assumption that if you shoot a lot of lines, some of them are bound to hit the mark. If you feel inclined to out-Byron the Byron of Don Juan, you can write a long poem like Koch's The Duplications (1977), keeping the stanzas going with a little plot and a lot of virtuosity, rhyming Hellas with fellas, and so forth.
Review, 2679 words
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