JOLLY DAYS

Kenneth Koch

I noticed when I was trying to figure out what science was doing lately that the best sources of information were the very people doing the research. Science has become such an aggregate of specialties that you would think the real experts would embed their words in an arcane guild-speak that would be un-parsable and you would need a popularizer. But rather, the prime researchers were often the clearest and I later realized, the deepest of interpreters. The latter is no surprise given it is their daily bread, but the fact that they could communicate with such clarity and simplicity astonishingly complex ideas always stuck with me.

This is from an interview with the poet Kenneth Koch about the soul-trigger for a poem:

…the way I was inspired to write that poem was I was in Africa, I was in Kenya. And I was on a bus going from one game preserve to another, these 10,000-mile expanses where you see wild animals in their native habitat. And we had just passed a Masai village and right at the end of the Masai village, in the middle of the bush, were railroad tracks and a sign that said, “One Train May Hide Another.” And it seemed—I figured out after a while what it meant, but in the middle of the bush of Kenya, it seemed to me to mean everything, very mysterious. And this sort of stayed in my mind for six years, and then I wrote the poem about it.

Reading Koch again I was reminded of that realization about science and its explicators; about the capacity to unpack the complex transparently. Koch was such a wonderful writer. His interpretations of the dauntingly complex poetry of our common heritage has such fine-grained love, sincerity and depth it is hard to communicate. His book, Making Your Own Days is a good place to start. Brilliant poet, brilliant teacher of children, luminous spirit.

From Koch's poem, (sign at a railroad crossing in Kenya),

In a poem, one line may hide another line,

As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.

That is, if you are waiting to cross

The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at

Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read

Wait until you have read the next line—

Then it is safe to go on reading.

In a family one sister may conceal another,

So, when you are courting, it's best to have them all in view

Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another.

Koch understood that art is at root level what Auden called “serious play”,

To be rid of troubles

Of one person by turning into

Someone else, moving and jolting

As if nothing mattered but today

In fact nothing

But this precise moment…

(Excerpt from To Kidding Around, 2000)