KOCH, Kenneth

Not unlike that of his Harvard College buddy John Ashbery , Koch's early poetry was more experimental than what he later produced. His classic avant-garde text is When the Sun Tries to Go On, which was written in 1953, first published in a one-shot magazine, The Hasty Papers (1960), and later reprinted as a book. Many pages long, it offers interminable unintelligibility in a regularly irregular meter, evenly measured lines, and consistent diction. The critic Jonathan Cott (1942) wrote...