David Lehman on Kenneth Koch, in The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Anchor Books, 1999):
The comic element in Koch’s poetry allows it to act as a corrective—to ward off the false poeticisms that mar many overly earnest poems. . . . Sure, Koch can be silly, but so, as Auden says, can Yeats. “I don’t think being comic keeps one from being serious,” Koch points out. “It keeps one from being solemn.” [pp 207 & 208]
I apologize for making everybody read a bunch of italics. I need to get into the code for the theme and edit that out but I’ve been procrastinating.
