Kenneth Koch (/koʊk/ KOHK; February 27, 1925 – July 6, 2002) was an American poet, playwright, and professor, active from the 1950s until his death at age 77.
This was a loose group of poets including Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery that eschewed contemporary introspective poetry in favor of an exuberant, cosmopolitan style that drew major inspiration from travel, painting, and music.
After his service, he attended Harvard University, where he met future New York School poet John Ashbery.
In 1951, he met his first wife, Janice Elwood, at UC Berkeley; they married in 1954 and lived in France and Italy for over a year.
Koch won the Bollingen Prize for One Train (1994) and On The Great Atlantic Rainway: Selected Poems 1950-1988 (1994), followed closely by the Phi Beta Kappa Poetry Award winner New Addresses (2000).
His prose work is highlighted by The Red Robins (1975), a sprawling novel about a group of fighter pilots flying for personal freedom under the leadership of Santa Claus.
His wild humor and intense teaching style, often punctuated by unusual physicality (standing on a table to shout lines by Walt Whitman) and outbursts of vocal performance often drawn from Italian opera, drew non-English majors and alumni.
During a poetry reading at St. Mark's Church, a member of the group walked in and pointed a handgun at the podium, shouting "Koch!"
[2] His ideas were developed with close friends Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, along with painters Jane Freilicher and Larry Rivers, among others.
He acknowledged this in an interview and offered his comments: I don’t think the nature of my poetry is satirical or even ironic, I think its essentially lyrical...The comic element is just something that it seems to me enables me to be lyrical in the same way – not to compare myself qualitatively to these great writers – but in the same way that it enables Byron to write his best poetry and certainly Aristophanes and certain others too.He gives a picture of this in "To Kidding Around," where the joys of being a joker are proclaimed: Koch collaborated with the composer Ned Rorem on an opera, Bertha, which received its premier in 1973.