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Evan Kindley on Kenneth Koch ("One Train May Hide Another")
2.2k Plays1 year ago
How should we deal with the fact that we have to read the lines of a poem in order, one after another—or, for that matter, that we have to live our days one after the other? That's some of what comes up in my conversation with Evan Kindley about Kenneth Koch and his funny, didactic, and haunting poem "One Train May Hide Another."
Evan is an associate editor at the Chronicle Review. He is the author of two books: Questionnaire (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture (Harvard UP, 2017). With Kara Wittman, he is the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Essay (Cambridge UP, 2022). He is currently writing a "group biography" of the New York School Poets (of which Koch, along with previous podcast subjects Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, and John Ashbery, is a crucial member), which is under contract with Knopf, and his essays can be found in such publications as The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and n+1. You can follow Evan on Twitter.
Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear—and share an episode with a friend. Finally, subscribe to my Substack to stay up to date on our plans.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Close Readings podcast. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and it's my great pleasure to have Evan Kinley on the podcast today. And Evan has joined us to talk about a poem by Kenneth Koch, who is one of the four major first-generation poets of the so-called New York School of Poets.
00:00:30
Speaker
Evan is currently writing a book about those poets and others associated with them.
Evan Kinley's Career Journey
00:00:37
Speaker
And so it's really a thrill for me and a pleasure to have Evan on to talk with you about Kenneth Koch. The poem that Evan has selected for us to think about today is called One Train May Hide Another.
00:00:51
Speaker
And as ever, you'll be able to find a link to the text of that poem and the episode notes that go along with the
00:01:01
Speaker
with the show on whatever podcast service you are using. So lots more to say about Coke and the New York School and, of course, to set up this poem in just a moment. But first, let me tell you a little bit more about our guest.
Evan's Literary Pursuits
00:01:18
Speaker
Until very recently, Evan taught in the English department at Pomona College. But Evan has just begun a new job, very exciting, as an associate editor
00:01:29
Speaker
at the Chronicle Review, which is the Chronicle of Higher Education's ideas and opinions section. Evan is the author of two books, a book called Questionnaire, which
00:01:44
Speaker
came out from Bloomsbury as part of the Object Lessons series from that press in 2016. And then a book which has meant a lot to me as a scholar, a book called Poet Critics and the Administration of Culture. That book was published by Harvard University Press in 2017. And I'll say a bit more about it in a moment, but first let me also
00:02:14
Speaker
tell you that with Kara Whitman, Evan was the co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to the Essay, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. And as I pointed out to you just a moment ago,
00:02:31
Speaker
He's currently writing what's been described as a group biography, which I think is like a wonderful kind of project to be embarked on and totally in the spirit of the poets that he's writing about, I think.
00:02:47
Speaker
and maybe is something as a kind of project to be working on that we can find the space to talk about in this episode as well. But this group biography is, as I said, a group biography of the New York School of Poets, and that's under contract now with Knopf. But you can also find Evans essays in places like the New Republic, The Nation,
00:03:10
Speaker
the New York Review of Books and Plus One elsewhere. So, Evan is a really prolific and wonderful literary critic and historian. The Poet Critics book, as I say, the book, again, the title is Poet Critics and the Administration of Culture.
00:03:29
Speaker
It's just great. And to my mind, and Evan and I, I mean, in that book, Evan's interests are many, but in that book, Evan and I, our interests, scholarly interests are pretty closely aligned. From my point of view, really filled a void in the scholarship of poetry, of 20th century poetry, of modernist poetry.
00:03:51
Speaker
and of the kind of models of sponsorship and support that the creation of literature in the United States in particular have received. So what that book describes
00:04:07
Speaker
is the role played by modernist poet critics. And you can think of a figure like Eliot, perhaps, but many others fit that role.
Cultural and Literary Analysis
00:04:18
Speaker
The role played by modernist poet critics in the transition from aristocratic patronage to what Evan describes as the technocratic cultural administration.
00:04:33
Speaker
Evan's method is appealing and learned. It is a kind of mixture of close readings of particular poems and biographical research into particular poets' lives that is kind of married to the literary history and sociology of literature.
00:04:57
Speaker
So Evan seems to me to manage quite beautifully writing always with kind of one eye as it were on the social and historical and cultural forces at play and the other eye somehow trained on the minutiae of particular texts, particular moments in lives, particular bits of institutional history.
00:05:25
Speaker
He writes books that are—well, I think I've seen this word used to describe both of his first two books, and I wonder if it will apply just as well to the third. I have a feeling it will. He writes books that are brisk.
00:05:41
Speaker
It's a great book reviewing word or blurby kind of word to use, but it's apt in this case. And not all literary criticism or literary scholarship could be described by that word. So I think it's a real virtue of his writing. And I'm also just a big fan of Evan's journalistic writing. So to pick but one example from many his recent article in the New York Review of Books,
00:06:12
Speaker
part of the, I don't know what to call it now, the Guillory discourse. So Evan wrote a review in the New York Review of books on John Guillory's book, Professing Criticism. And I thought it was one of the standout reviews of that much reviewed and talked about, especially if you're on Twitter or talked about book.
00:06:38
Speaker
And if I can ask for Evans indulgence, I'm just gonna read a tiny bit from the end of that review, where after very patiently sort of working through both the strengths and shortcomings from his point of view of Guillory's book, near the very end of the review, Evans has this quote, from the point of view of a contingent academic reading a book by a tenured scholar who is in the latter stages of a celebrated career,
00:07:06
Speaker
I find this resigned presentation of the probable continued contraction of the discipline somewhat maddening. Guillory's reluctance to embrace the empty radicalism of many of his colleagues is understandable, but his tragic realism can feel complacent. It's always easier to give up on something after you and your generation have exhausted its resources yourself. I mean, I found that to be moving, informative,
00:07:37
Speaker
clarifying. It's a hard thing as, you know, I say this as someone who's also an occasional book reviewer and a literary critic.
00:07:50
Speaker
to do the hard work of reviewing a book and then to find a place for yourself within that piece without sort of torpedoing it. And I thought that Evan handled that moment beautifully, taught me something new about the book, sort of clarified some of what was nagging at me in the way people were talking about that book. And I don't mean to swerve this conversation into more talk about
00:08:16
Speaker
that particular moment in our culture. But I offer it instead just as an instance of the sensitivity and perceptiveness of the writer and critic that we have the privilege to have on the podcast today.
Podcast Format and Poem Selection
00:08:31
Speaker
So with that, I want to welcome you, Evan Kinley, to Close Readings and ask you how your day's been going. How are you doing?
00:08:37
Speaker
Hi, Comrade. I'm doing well. Today's going well. It's still relatively early. I'm in California, but feeling good. Happy to be here. Well, it's a thrill to have you here. So for people who are joining the podcast Midstream and for whom this isn't already old news, the format of the podcast is basically that I ask someone who's writing on poetry I've admired
00:09:07
Speaker
to come onto the podcast and I give them the task of choosing a poet, choosing a poem with very few parameters. I say that it should be short enough for us to talk about on the episode. Hopefully there's a good link that we can share of the poem so that limits things somewhat because not everything, believe it or not, poetry-wise, is on the internet.
00:09:32
Speaker
I ask that it be a poem that the guest has loved. And so, Evan, I'm curious. I mean, so, you know, the obvious thing to say or the obvious connection here is, well, you're writing a book on the New York School Poets, so no doubt they're on your mind, but
00:09:51
Speaker
I'm sure that is the shorter version of a story of which a longer and more interesting version exists. So I guess my first question for you is what led you to think about Coke for this occasion? And what was it like for you to choose one poem among the many that he's written? Yeah, so I was thinking back, as you say, I've been thinking about all of these poets in New York school, and we can talk a bit about
00:10:22
Speaker
they were and include some of the poets you've already talked about on the podcast. Kenneth Koch is one that I think I've always had something of a special fondness for. I kind of discovered all of these poets. So the New York School
00:10:43
Speaker
the sort of core figures, people that one automatically thinks of when you hear New York School of Poets includes Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler,
00:10:54
Speaker
John Ashbury, all three of whom you've talked about on the podcast previously. Sometimes Barbara Guest, who I think has a slightly more contested but still significant place in that group. And then Kenneth Koch, who before we started recording you mentioned is the one whose work you know the least well, you fail. I think that's true of a lot of people.
00:11:17
Speaker
The name is known, but the work is maybe slightly less known compared to Ashbury and O'Hara. And even Schuyler, which I think was not the case, Coke, I think was actually much more famous than Schuyler during their lives, or certainly during Schuyler's life. But that's changed posthumously, you think, Evan, their reputations? I think so, or at least Schuyler's been on the rise, right?
00:11:44
Speaker
become sort of increasingly prominent. I discovered all of these poets more or less simultaneously. I was actually studying in London just after I graduated college. I did a one year master's program in London and took a seminar with the poet critic Mark Ford who introduced us to Ashbury initially I think and from there I kind of
00:12:14
Speaker
you know, explored and discovered all of the poets that sort of assisted with the New York School and I sort of fell in love with all of them immediately.
00:12:24
Speaker
I think it may have had something to do with being homesick for New York City, where I grew up. So I was kind of having this connection to this idiom, to this kind of group. I mean, these poets are all different, but as we can talk about, they do seem to share something really important, some kind of spirit.
00:12:48
Speaker
or approach to poetry, which I just found immediately attractive, congenial. And yeah, I was living in the UK. I was feeling a kind of yearning for home. And there was something familiar about these poets to me, even as they were also
00:13:06
Speaker
new and exciting and confusing. I didn't quite exactly know what was going on. It's funny. It doesn't seem to me like most people's first encounter with Ashbury would be the strangest one to say this about is like, ah yes, familiarity. But I know what you mean.
00:13:27
Speaker
And it may have been just knowing they were called the New York school, right? Maybe I just attached that. If absent that name, maybe I wouldn't have felt the same way. Sure. But for whatever reason, I really connected with it. I actually ended up writing my master's thesis on kind of Coke, a bit in relation to Ashbury, but sort of primarily looking at Coke.
00:13:53
Speaker
And I was planning to reach out to him and contact him when I got back to New York and share the thesis with him. Unfortunately, this was just after he passed away of leukemia in 2002, so I didn't get to do that, didn't get to meet him. But yeah, Coke has always been special to me. I can't quite call him
00:14:16
Speaker
an obscure and neglected poet. I think he's pretty well known and has achieved his share of recognition. But I always did feel that he, I don't know, I felt a desire to chant the in him and to sort of, and yeah, so this particular poem, one train, I had another,
00:14:44
Speaker
I thought a lot about the kind of different effects and tones of Koch's poetry and some of the things he's known for, which I think is a kind of antique comic energy.
00:15:04
Speaker
which I think is an important part of what he does, and I did want to kind of represent that. But then something that I respond to in his work, and I think especially his later work, and this is a later poem. It's published in 1994. He died in 2002.
00:15:20
Speaker
is that a kind of more meditative, reflective, and even slightly melancholy quality creeps in without kind
Focus on 'One Train May Hide Another'
00:15:30
Speaker
of displacing the comic inventiveness and the energy. So that's something that I always appreciated in his work.
00:15:42
Speaker
And I kind of wanted to find a poem that split the difference somehow between Coke, sort of the comic performer, and Coke, the more kind of reflective philosophical poet, I guess. Well, I think you've done it. I mean, we'll listen in a moment to a recording of Coke reading the poem, and he gets laughs.
00:16:12
Speaker
at times, you know, in the reading, but there are also moments in the poem I think that are quite obviously moving or haunting might be a word I'd use about certain moments in this poem. Yeah, Coke I'd always thought of as like, you know, I don't know if you're like this to Evan, but, you know,
00:16:34
Speaker
In my mind, I have these sort of like thumbnail sketch versions of the poets I know to a greater or lesser extent. It's true. Coke is the poet of the four leading first gen New York school poets that I would say I knew the least well.
00:16:53
Speaker
I always thought of him as the funniest one, or the one who was most invested in a kind of comic mode. And yeah, I love how we get some of that, but we get some of that mixed with a kind of seriousness as well here.
00:17:12
Speaker
Evan, do you want to say something also just, I mean, it feels like almost too big a question to ask of any guest, but since I've got the author of a forthcoming group biography on the podcast, do you want to say a word or two maybe before we listen to this poem about just how in your mind, like the sort of map of the New York school you have in your own mind and where Coke does and doesn't fit into
Exploring the New York School
00:17:38
Speaker
that? And I don't want to restrict things to the,
00:17:41
Speaker
to the four men, the four white men whom we've been talking about since the New York School is somewhat more varied than that, obviously, especially as we get into its second generation. But since the podcast has so far had episodes on O'Hara and Schuyler and Ashbury, and since those poets might be
00:18:03
Speaker
listeners to the podcast might have some sense now of what the kind of texture or fabric of those poets are. Mike, I kind of have two related questions for you here. One is, what sense does it make to think of those four poets as a kind of cohesive school at all? And
00:18:29
Speaker
And what do you think about the name that's given to that school aside from it's being a nice gateway drug for your own kind of active identification? And then I guess the second question is more particularly with respect to Coke, like how does he and doesn't he belong to the group that you've just described?
00:18:55
Speaker
Yeah, so the New York School of Poets, I think, is a term that at this point we're all stuck with. It certainly proved to be a durable label. It's one that I don't think any of the poets really actively embraced, although they may have liked it to one degree or another.
00:19:19
Speaker
You know, one thing, one obvious thing that all of these writers, O'Hara, Skylar, Ashbury, Coke, Barbara Guest, Havin' Common, is they spent time living in New York City in the 1950s and then sort of people moved in and out a little bit, but pretty much from then's forward. And there was a kind of interaction with
00:19:50
Speaker
visual arts, the New York art scene of the 50s and 60s, there was a lot of kind of collaboration and interaction and just friendship, social interaction with visual artists, like Jane Freilacher, Nell Blaine, Alex Katz.
00:20:11
Speaker
And more generally, I think a kind of absorption of new innovative tendencies in the arts, not just in poetry. And I think in a way, one thing you could think about in terms of literary history or poetic history New York School might represent is actually a kind of a turning away from an emphasis only on literary history and on a kind of
00:20:41
Speaker
in a way that maybe recalls some of the earlier phases of modernism, right, where there was a lot of input from the visual arts. But I think that kind of at mid-century, that the tendency to try to kind of canonize modernist poets and create a kind of lineage coming out of figures like Eliot and Pound,
00:21:11
Speaker
William Carlos Williams, there was a way in which things were becoming a bit kind of hermetic, right? And I think that the New York School, part of what they stood for was a kind of receptiveness to input from other arts. So that's one way I understand it. The term New York School actually is kind of borrowed from a term for the abstract expressionist painters, who were presumably called the New York School.
00:21:39
Speaker
of painters that itself was kind of a play on the School of Paris. It's the name for the Impressionists. So it's a name that was kind of almost like a copy of a copy. That's perfect. Yeah. So, you know, other than the obvious sort of geographical aptness of it,
00:22:03
Speaker
It doesn't really tell us a lot about the aesthetic. I've always wondered how seriously to take, and your genealogy back to the Paris school example is useful here, but I've always wondered how seriously to take the kind of academic
00:22:20
Speaker
resonances of school as a way of thinking about a group of artists. I don't think most people talk about, say, the confessional school. Maybe they do, sort of, but I don't hear that. I don't think that term is a salient. I mean, people talk about the confessional poets or confessionalism, right? But how academic is this? Or is there something interesting to note about this group of poets' connection to academia?
00:22:49
Speaker
Yeah. So that's, that's, that's a really interesting, um, that's a really interesting question. And I think the right school in a one way is a total misnomer because I think it's, this was a group, uh, what, what, um, what a lot of the poets themselves, including Coke and Ashbury would always say when asked about New York's cause. Well, it was just, we were just a group of friends, you know, um, like a school of fish. Yeah. Three of them, uh, three of them had gone to Harvard, uh, Coke,
00:23:16
Speaker
Ashbury and O'Hara gotten to know, which is another piece of it, right? Because there is an academic kind of institution behind this seeming just kind of elective affinity, this kind of coming together. But, you know, one stock answer that the poets would often give is, you know, we're just a group of friends who liked each other, liked each other's work, influenced each other.
00:23:42
Speaker
And things were then retroactively formalized, presented as if it was some kind of more institutional official
00:23:58
Speaker
entity or movement. And so on one level, one perhaps shouldn't take it too seriously.
Kenneth Koch's Influence
00:24:06
Speaker
But Coke is actually interesting here. And this maybe maybe gets into the second part of your question about how Coke stands out from from his peers, because Coke actually was a teacher he he taught at Columbia.
00:24:20
Speaker
and the story of the New York school becoming something other than a group of friends, becoming something more than this sort of loose grouping of like-minded poets is in large part the work of Coke
00:24:41
Speaker
as a teacher that he taught classes in poetry writing both at the New School and at Columbia that brought a lot of younger poets kind of into the fold socially also kind of disseminated a lot of the aesthetic practices and sort of
00:25:05
Speaker
poetic forms that the New York school were interested in, set the tone for a lot of what's been called the second generation New York school poets. So yeah, so New York school is both a kind of funny misnomer and also something that I think over time does become real. And I think in general with Coke, one thing that's interesting about him is he has a kind of
00:25:31
Speaker
anti-academic posture in some of his works, like he has a well-known poem called Fresh Air, which is kind of an attack on mid-century academic formalism.
00:25:43
Speaker
And yet he's, in certain ways, very didactic poet, very, very much almost in a kind of Ezra Pound way, right? He's kind of like disseminating some truths about poetry and how it ought to be written. And so I think Coke, more than anyone, kind of embodies
00:26:03
Speaker
the idea of a school of a particular kind of, you know, somewhat formalized approach to poetry. Yeah, it's funny. Yeah, go on. Sorry. No, no, even as I think he also tries to deflate the seriousness and kind of official pomp that would be involved in something like that.
00:26:23
Speaker
Yeah, all I was going to say is that, though it's true that his poetry is the poetry of the four or five, which I know the least, I met Ashbery once very briefly at a reading and
00:26:43
Speaker
But Coke, I spent an hour in a room with once when I was in grad school and he came to give a talk, you know? So as sort of evidence of the sort of the academic dimension that his career included. I have that personal memory as well. Another thing I should mention actually about his teaching, just sort of getting into the biography a little bit, but he was very involved in teaching poetry to children.
00:27:12
Speaker
beginning in the late 60s. He worked with New York City Public Schools and would visit schools and conduct workshops. And has edited an anthology or a very well-known, right? Talking to the Sun. Yeah. There's a few books. He wrote a book called Wishes, Lies, and Dreams, which is kind of
00:27:31
Speaker
a book about his pedagogy, his methods, the kinds of assignments and exercises he would do with the children.
Kenneth Koch's Poem Reading and Discussion
00:27:42
Speaker
And then he did also later on edit an anthology of poems. In that case, I think it's poems
00:27:49
Speaker
you know, poems from the canon or poems by adults that he thinks would be a kind of an entree for children. It could work, yeah. Yeah, so he had this whole interest which is I think relatively rare among poets in kind of early education, primary education and in kind of
00:28:14
Speaker
Yeah, in bringing in, so all this to say there is definitely a kind of,
00:28:22
Speaker
didactic impulse in Coke that's in the poems, too, and that I think is often kind of ironized or kind of presented in a slightly goofy, jokey way in the poems, but is nonetheless that sort of real motor of his writing. Well, that's great, Evan, and I think we've really whet the appetite of our listeners now to hear Coke, his own voice, and to hear an example
00:28:47
Speaker
of the kind of humor mixed with didacticism and other kinds of
00:28:56
Speaker
more serious, perhaps, impulses in Coke's poetry. So let's listen to this recording of One Train May Hide Another. This is on the longer side of poems, perhaps, that we do on this podcast. But what you'll hear at first is about a minute, I think, of Coke setting up the poem for audience members and then reading it. So we'll come back and talk about it. Here is Kenneth Coke.
00:29:26
Speaker
I'll conclude, and then I will answer questions if you want, with a poem called One Train. I'll reveal this book before it really is. One Train. That's a de Kooning. It's pretty. This poem was inspired by a sign I saw in Africa in Kenya. I was going from one game preserve to another. All I'd been seeing were wild animals. And we passed through a Maasai village.
00:29:53
Speaker
And that was very strange. And right after we got through there, I saw the first thing in the English language I'd seen for quite a while. It was a sign above some train tracks which said, one train may hide another. And I said, this seemed to mean everything in the world to me. I realized, I realized, I mean, there was a shortage of the English language. I realized after a while what it meant, that if you have a car, particularly, I guess, or you're running,
00:30:20
Speaker
And you're at a train track, and there's a train. It passes by, and you zoom ahead. You'll probably get killed by another train that's behind it. And after I published this poem, I got some fan mail from it, because a number of people sent me pictures of signs in England, said the same thing. And I even got one from France, a sign that said, entrant pour en cachet en autre. However, at the time, I had no idea what it meant, but I knew I'd write about it. Someday I did about 10 years later.
00:30:50
Speaker
This will be the last poem. One train may hide another. In a poem, one line may hide another line. As at a crossing, one train may hide another train. That is, if you're 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've read the next line, then it is safe to go on reading.
00:31:15
Speaker
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. One father or one brother may hide the man, if you are a woman, whom you have been waiting to love. So always standing in front of something, the other, as words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas. One wish may hide another. And one person's reputation may hide the reputation of another.
00:31:44
Speaker
One dog may conceal another on a lawn, so if you escape the first one, you're not necessarily safe.
00:31:50
Speaker
One lilac may hide another, and then a lot of lilacs. And on the apia antica, one tomb may hide a number of other tombs. In love, one reproach may hide another. One small complaint may hide a great one. One injustice may hide another. One colonial may hide another. One blaring red uniform, another and another, a whole column. One bath may hide another bath, as when, after bathing, one walks out into the rain.
00:32:19
Speaker
One idea may hide another. Life is simple. Hide life is incredibly complex. As in the prose of Gertrude Stein, one sentence hides another and is another as well. And in the laboratory, one invention may hide another invention. One evening may hide another. One shadow, a nest of shadows. One dark red or one blue or one purple. This is a painting by someone after Matisse.
00:32:46
Speaker
One waits at the tracks until they pass these hidden doubles, or sometimes likenesses.
00:32:53
Speaker
One identical twin may hide the other, and there may be even more in there. The obstetrician gazes at the valley of the VAR. We used to live there, my wife and I, but one life hit another life, and now she is gone, and I am here. A vivacious mother hides a gawky daughter. The daughter hides her own vivacious daughter in turn. They are in a railway station, and the daughter is holding a bag bigger than her mother's bag and successfully hides it.
00:33:21
Speaker
In offering to pick up the daughter's bag, one finds oneself confronted by the mother's, and has to carry that one too. So one hitchhiker may deliberately hide another, and one cup of coffee another too, until one is overexcited.
00:33:36
Speaker
One love may hide another love, or the same love, as when, I love you, suddenly rings false, and one discovers the better love lingering behind, as when, I'm full of doubts, hides, I'm certain about something, and it is that. And one dream may hide another, as is well known, always too. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve may hide the real Adam and Eve.
00:34:00
Speaker
Jerusalem may hide another Jerusalem. When you come to something, stop to let it pass, so you can see what else is there. At home, no matter where, internal tracts pose dangers too. One memory certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about, the eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities.
00:34:23
Speaker
Reading a sentimental journey, look around when you have finished for Tristram Shandy to see if it is standing there. It should be stronger and more profound and therefore hidden as Santa Maria Maggiore may be hidden by similar churches inside Rome.
00:34:38
Speaker
One sidewalk may hide another as when you're asleep there, and one song hide another song. A pounding upstairs hides the beating of drums. One friend may hide another. You sit at the foot of a tree with one, and when you get up to leave, there is another whom you'd have preferred to talk to all along.
00:34:59
Speaker
One teacher, one doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man may hide another. Pause to let the first one pass. You think now it is safe to cross and you are hit by the next one. It can be important to avoid it at least a moment to see what was already there. Thank you.
00:35:24
Speaker
So that was Kenneth Koch reading One Terrain May Hide Another, and I'll make a link available to that recording as well in case people want to listen to it again. It comes from the wonderful Penn Sound Archive, which is just a place where one should and could get easily lost.
00:35:45
Speaker
Evan, as you listen to Coke read, what do you find yourself thinking about, whether with respect to his voice, the performance? I'm curious what seems new and fresh to you at this moment. Yeah, it's a very kind of even reading, right? The poem has a kind of
00:36:13
Speaker
accumulation, acceleration, sort of jumping from one idea to the next, one line to the next. And he keeps it, the reading is fairly steady, right? So I guess I'm struck by that. And I think in a way that actually maybe enhances what we were talking about earlier, that kind of didactic quality, right? That kind of sense of a kind of patience
00:36:42
Speaker
explanation. I think on the page the poem you might be inclined to sort of
00:36:48
Speaker
move through it a bit faster and just kind of be struck by the juxtapositions and the kind of speed of it. I guess if people aren't looking at it, it's not broken up into stanzas or anything like that or sections. It's simply a kind of long block of lines, which are
00:37:14
Speaker
A few of them are, I would describe maybe as shorter lines, but the general tendency seems to be to like long lines here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which is something you find a lot of in Coke's work. These long lines, I think sort of inspired by Walt Whitman, right? Sometimes lines that even exceed the page and go on. And perhaps like Whitman here too, there's this kind of anaphoric rhythm, right? Where the sentences are beginning the same way over and over again.
00:37:43
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Coke liked anaphora. He liked repetition. He liked lists with variation. Many of his pawns, and especially many of his early pawns, have that kind of building up, piling up of phrases and images that are related. So I think in one way, he's working in what's a pretty familiar
00:38:11
Speaker
familiar mode for him. And I think what strikes me about this poem
00:38:20
Speaker
is the way in which, yeah, we have that, what I think in his earlier work can be like an almost like manic energy of like, here's another thing that's like this, right? Here's more and more of this. To me, this poem, there's something about it that also is slowing that energy down, right? Or is,
00:38:44
Speaker
And in a certain way, it's also a poem about slowing down and hesitating and being patient, right? Because there's peril if you don't, right? You're going to get killed by a train. Yeah, exactly. I think that's something about the kind of basic conceit that
00:39:05
Speaker
that's really interesting and that kind of emerges over time in the reading and maybe especially in hearing it aloud, right? On the one hand, the train that hides another seems like a figure for just moreness or multiplicity or how anything is, there's a kind of richness in things or life that there's always more to be discovered, a kind of revelation, right?
00:39:31
Speaker
That's one part of what I think appeals to him about it, this sense of, okay, there's always another thing. One thing is always- Like clowns piling out of the car or something. Yeah, exactly. One feels with this poem,
00:39:47
Speaker
It is pretty long, as you say. It could go on much longer. It could go on forever. Coke actually often would write drafts that were incredibly long and then edit them down. I don't know if that's the case with this poem, but I suspect it may be that he had many more
00:40:02
Speaker
variations on this formula. So I think on the one hand, Cokes really interested in that, that sense of multiplicity and proliferation, and it can go on forever and ever. On the other hand, yeah, I mean, in a certain way, what we're talking about here is, is trying to slow oneself down is trying to hesitate and be patient and not
00:40:28
Speaker
move too fast through something, not be in too much of a hurry. I guess that's something that interests me about the poem and again thinking about its place where it sits in his oeuvre or his longer career, that there seems to be an awareness of his tendency to
00:40:54
Speaker
move quickly, right? And then it's almost as if he's cautioning himself or cautioning his reader not to do that, right? To sit with the lines a little longer, to not immediately look for the next variation.
00:41:06
Speaker
I don't think I'm saying anything that you haven't already, but it's like there's the instruction for patients, but what he's not doing is giving up on the form that produces the
00:41:25
Speaker
manic kind of energy. It's not as though there's something about the list that makes you want to accelerate because you get the way it works, right? So you're kind of internalizing that and you can speed up as you read. But it's not as though having recognized the danger of that, he suddenly breaks out of that form. I mean, it is true that there are all kinds of interesting variations on the
00:41:54
Speaker
on the repetitions that we get in this book, but the basic form persists. Yeah, I guess one thing I sort of wonder about it is, are these lines hiding each other, right? Or are they kind of, is Coke, I mean, in one sense, he's giving lots of illustrations of a maxim, right? And again, I used the word didactic a couple of times earlier, and I think Coke,
00:42:24
Speaker
You know, he was explicitly interested in trying to write didactic or instructional poetry. He has a book from the 70s called The Art of Love, which is modeled on Ovid's Art of Love, which includes, you know, many, that volume, The Art of Love includes sort of various instructional poems where he is to some degree parodying
00:42:49
Speaker
these kind of classical didactic poems, but also I think exploring the formal possibilities of poems that express, you know, to give advice or provide instructions or sort of dispense wisdom, right? And here too, it seems like on one hand, he's trying to impart something that seems to him like a
00:43:13
Speaker
a deep and serious idea and a kind of, you know, an ethical, an ethical injunction like this is this is something to bear in mind as you move through life, right? That one thing can hide another thing and you need to be patient and take time with it. But then but then as we're saying, the form almost seems to
00:43:35
Speaker
work against that by proliferating these illustrations. So that's one thing I wonder, and I don't know how how conscious this would have been, but the way in which the form of the poem, the anaphoric list form, is working against, in a certain way, the thing it's trying to impart. Right. Yeah, that's beautiful. And I think probably as we get into the poem and start to look at some of the moments where
00:44:05
Speaker
whether literally so in the recording we just heard or whether in some kind of slightly more metaphorical sense as we read the poem, our own pacing might slow down or be disrupted or something. It might be interesting to think about.
00:44:18
Speaker
what it is about those moments that produces that change of pace and how that change of pace correlates or doesn't with a kind of change in the sort of example that's on offer at that moment. I'm interested also the sort of one more prefatory kind of thing before maybe diving in fully is just to think for another moment about the occasion of the poem as as Coke describes it. So this seems to me to be an example of a kind of a
00:44:45
Speaker
I don't know if it's right to call it a found poem exactly. It's like it's occasion as a found poem. There's a bit of language in the world which strikes Coke at first as sort of mysterious and profound. Some of the mystery is cleared up for him in his own account of it as he sort of thinks about it a bit longer and then realizes that it's not so terribly exotic a phrase or anything anyway.
00:45:12
Speaker
And that itself is interesting to me. But I'm kind of interested in the implications or the premises behind a poetry that would think like, oh, I'm recognizing something in the world that is already poetry and that it's an occasion for more poetry.
00:45:29
Speaker
Like what view of like the way the world works, does that imply? Or what view of like what poetry is, or what the poet's role in producing poetry is, does that imply? And like, does that feel kokian to you in some way? Yeah, that's a really interesting question. Yeah, and I think, I mean, I was struck by that too, you know, in the poem as reproduced in the book, we have a kind of,
00:45:58
Speaker
abbreviated version of the story that he tells. It just says, one treatment had another, and then there's a kind of subtitle in parentheses, signed at a railroad crossing in Kenya. So yeah, so even in the printed version of the book, he's pointing to, like you say, he's found a poem, he's found a bit of language out in the world, right? That seemed to him meaningful, right? And then he's kind of working
00:46:25
Speaker
working through it by working variations on it, which I think is kind of a natural way that his mind works or that his poetry works, right? His kind of thinking through something by kind of reiterating it and replaying it with variations. I mean, on the one hand, to take a bit of language, sort of found language from the world and repurpose it in art feels like a kind of
00:46:54
Speaker
familiar avant-garde technique, right? A kind of almost collage.
00:47:00
Speaker
Um, and, um, I think that's, that's probably part of the, part of the gesture, but it also makes me think, I mean, he, in his introduction there, he, he talks about, uh, it being the first English phrase he'd seen in a while and that he felt there was a shortage of the English language, right. And the, the meaningful phrase too, what does shortage of the English language mean for him? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, the, this idea that the significance of it, um,
00:47:27
Speaker
you know, has to do with it being the first kind of semantically intelligible written phrase he's come across in a while, right? And… Sean must make it seem sort of functionally like a lyric moment or something, right? Yes, exactly, right. And something that seems like it must be a significant piece of advice or wisdom, right? Solely by virtue of it being
00:47:52
Speaker
the first thing that he can read in a while. And it made me think of a similar kind of account that's been given by Ashbury actually about his book, The Tennis Court Oath, which is the book that he wrote when he was living in Paris. Ashbury spoke French, but it wasn't his native language.
00:48:14
Speaker
And he's talked, I don't have the sort of exact quote in front of me, but he's spoken about how his kind of estrangement or his distance from English and particularly American English sort of
00:48:29
Speaker
filtered into the poems in that book and the kind of fragmentation of the work there. But you know in both cases this sort of moment of coming across one's native language or thinking about one's native language
00:48:45
Speaker
when you're out of that environment seems to be generative. So yeah, I don't know what more to say about that, other than that it does seem like somehow a very, not just an avant-garde kind of collagist move, but a very kind of New York school gesture, right, to be almost like,
00:49:11
Speaker
regarding the English language from afar, right? Or I think in the case of this poem, Coke didn't actually write it in Africa. He says he wrote it 10 years later and sort of reflecting on her experience, right? But that sense of being a little bit out of one's elements and a little bit
00:49:30
Speaker
a little bit out of one's comfort zone, linguistic comfort zone is something that degenerates a poetic impulse. Whereas for the romantic poet, maybe it's like the vision of a field of daffodils or something which reflected upon later produces the poem here, it's like a sign, a bit of language, which is interesting. Yeah, exactly.
00:49:51
Speaker
a bit of language that has a context and can be kind of demystified and explained, but I think the purpose of this poem in a way is to re-mystify it or preserve the mystery of it, preserve the fact that in that moment it felt inexplicably significant to him, even though it could be explained later.
00:50:13
Speaker
Well, let's talk about some of the way that works in the poem. So like the basic structure of the poem, I mean, is almost such that the explanatory apparatus that he gave at the reading is kind of built into the opening lines of the poem almost with the help of the subtitle that you're the, I don't know if it's right to call it a subtitle, but that little explanatory parenthetical note at the beginning. And then subsequently, right after the,
00:50:43
Speaker
Well, actually the first line of the poem doesn't do that. In a poem, one line may hide another line. So it sort of begins in a kind of meta poetic kind of mode and then compares that to the sign that he's seen. So what do you think about that ordering of things? Right, he's almost reversing what would have been the real or the sort of biographical genesis, right? Where he might see the sign that's about the train
00:51:11
Speaker
one train, hide another train, and then think about poetry, right? Here, we begin with the poem. In a poem, one line may hide another line. Is that a crossing? One train may hide another train. But it's an instance of it, right? Because the meta-poetic moment is hiding the occasion of the poem in a line. Yes, exactly, right, right, right. Yeah, that's nice, yeah.
00:51:37
Speaker
Right. And I think it's it's it's meta. It's also perhaps establishing just I mean, this is a poem. This is a poem which will kind of proceed line by line to hide or to kind of re cover or re obscure the idea, right? Like each time we get a new variation.
00:52:05
Speaker
on the image or sort of a new analogy, we move slightly away from what would be the kind of clarifying point of an analogy, if that makes sense, right? I think so. It's as though you've sort of used the reader or in the original example, the traveler or whatever thinks they've recognized
00:52:29
Speaker
the danger and have mastered it. And then proceeds with confidence, only to realize that there's something new that was being hidden by that first experience. Well, we could imagine a two-line poem, a kind of imagist poem that just goes, in a poem, one line may hide another line, as at a crossing, one train may hide another train. We'd have a very tidy, elegant, poetic thought.
00:52:59
Speaker
it is the continual elaboration and proliferation and kind of switching of that, that kind of
00:53:11
Speaker
propels this poem, right? And then immediately we get a, that is, if you are waiting across the tracks, which is actually sort of a unnecessary explanation maybe, or a kind of, you know, he's, this is again, I think where the comic is still here in the poem, right? I think Coke was interested in the comic possibilities of
00:53:37
Speaker
over explanation or over elaboration or kind of, you know, almost like a pedantic voice. It's like, okay, I don't think you really got it yet. I got it. I should keep going, right? That is, if you're 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've read the next line, then it is safe to go on reading. Like there's almost, again, if you're imagining this sort of like crystalline images, two line poem, it's like a deliberate urge to wreck it by, by elaborating, right?
00:54:06
Speaker
Right. The rhetorical, I don't know what the term for it actually is in rhetoric, but there must be one, but of the, you know, the, in other words, kind of trope is the generative trope of this poem. Yeah. Yeah. And also literalizing the analogy in a way, right? Where the train hides another train and you're being told that because it's dangerous, right? The second train might hit you. Right.
00:54:35
Speaker
then bringing that rhetoric of safety to reading, right? When you read, wait until you have read the next line, then it is safe to go on reading. And then bringing it to this, like I'm interested that it seems like the next, you used the word, the sort of proliferation of examples here. Well, the first direction that the proliferation takes all seems to have to do with like,
00:55:05
Speaker
family formation or drama or something. So I don't know, Evan, as you look over that first section of the poem, so I'm thinking of lines like, 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. I mean, the lines that one father or one brother may hide the man and following.
00:55:32
Speaker
How do you make sense, Evan, of the fact that that is the first sort of once we dispense with the metapoetic and the kind of literal example of the train, that that's the first place Coke's mind is going? Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, one thing I forgot to mention or sort of didn't have cause to mention earlier, but it could be another answer to the question of how Coke
00:56:01
Speaker
differs or stands out among his peers is that Coke was the only heterosexual man in the New York School of Poets, sort of the original grouping, right? Most of them were gay men. And that's sort of often marked on just the kind of unusual status of a kind of mostly queer coterie that has this one heterosexual man. And so one thing to say here,
00:56:30
Speaker
maybe not the most interesting thing to say, but one thing to say is he is immediately shifting to a very kind of heteronormative scenario, right? Where it's not just a family, but it's taking on the perspective of suitor, right? Of either gender, but who's kind of selecting their mate from the family, right?
00:56:59
Speaker
And so a family one sister may conceal another so when you're recording it's best to have them all in view. Otherwise incoming to find one you may love another. One father one brother may hide the man if you are a woman whom you've been waiting to love. I mean I mentioned the art of love earlier and that poem this is I think in some ways a kind of callback to the mode of that poem which is similarly sort of dispensing advice about love, courtship, sex in a kind of
00:57:30
Speaker
I don't know, slightly tongue in cheek way, I think, right? That again, it's sort of pleasure taken in this kind of slightly ridiculous voice of authority, like that is giving advice, which is, you know, somewhat
00:57:49
Speaker
somewhat obvious, right? Like just to say like, oh, before you pick which sister you want to marry, you should make sure you can see them all. What you know, why it's the first place his mind goes is an interesting question. I mean, I think in one way, it broadens it out, right? I mean, it's like he's he's addressing something that is
00:58:16
Speaker
life advice, right? Or it's like something that like, this is the kind of thing that you need to know in order to conduct yourself properly in the world, like how to select. Yeah, I hear it in your tone of voice and in what you said a moment ago that it's like so I mean, it's, it's, it's so kind of authoritative or so relies on like,
00:58:40
Speaker
it sounds like a father giving advice to a son or something, right? That there's something, there must be something kind of self-parodic or tongue in cheek about the kind of authority that's assumed in that. I mean, I don't know. I don't, like when you are courting, even that phrase, having heard and acknowledged what you said about Koch's straightness, let's say, still seems to me like,
00:59:10
Speaker
I don't know, like he's putting us on or something with that kind of language. Yes, absolutely. I think in Coke's poems there's often a kind of very overt erotic quality to them. At the same time as I think it can almost feel like a parody of eroticism or a kind of
00:59:37
Speaker
uh um self self-parody right um and i think something like that may be going on here i mean according to yeah you mentioned the sort of paternal tone i think you know sort of reads as an old an old-fashioned word right a kind of um uh so and and um and and also this sort of again i think a sort of comic touch um
01:00:03
Speaker
you know, if you were a woman, right? This kind of idea that the reader of this poem is not specified, it kind of could be, it could be anyone, it could be a man, it could be a woman. And the narrator is trying to give us advice that is generally applicable, right? At the same time as he's sort of drawn to be specific and getting lost in these little stories and anecdotes and illustrations.
01:00:32
Speaker
Right. It was so useful to hear you describe Koch's interest in the list as a form more generally, Evan, and as ever when one gets a list, you want to start thinking about, well, what are the
01:00:50
Speaker
What are the kind of implied rules of this list? What is the logic that gets us from one thing on the list to the next? And what kind of sense does the ordering of the list make? So we get those kinds of examples and then
01:01:13
Speaker
And one person's reputation may hide the reputation of it. I'm going to be sort of skipping around. So if I'm skipping past something you want to come back to, please feel free. And then we get the kind of comical and again, literal, one dog may conceal another on a lawn. What are you noticing as we sort of move into the ever proliferating train of, sorry, bad pun there, of examples?
01:01:37
Speaker
Right. I mean, I think I'm not noticing a kind of consistent pattern or tendency. And I think that's part of the point is I think that there's a miscellaneous quality. But I am noticing kind of alternations between things that are to some degree sort of general and abstract. Right. Right. One person's reputation may hide the reputation of another.
01:02:06
Speaker
you know, later on, one injustice may hide another, things that are kind of like not fully elaborated or fully described or spelled out. Right, sort of abstract, yeah. Yeah, and then things that are a bit more specified, one dog may conceal another on a lawn, and then things that get very concrete like using proper names, right, or using the names of places.
01:02:33
Speaker
on the Apia Antica, one tune may hide a number of other tunes, right? So I guess it's almost like zooming in and out in terms of our level, how close we are to these illustrations. And as those illustrations proliferate, I keep using that word, but it's the perfect one for this poem. Do you think we're supposed to get some,
01:03:03
Speaker
I'm now looking, oh, and there is a moment that I really do want to be sure we talk about because it's for me one of the most touching ones in the poem, where a first person pronoun is used. But even before we get to that moment, is there some like, I don't know, the thing that made me think of this was the Apia Antica, which
01:03:27
Speaker
Like the implication of it seems to be like, oh, this poet has been there, right? Are we getting a kind of like implied autobiography or something that's sort of emerging from this sort of list of, you know, where it's like nominally what's being done is like advice is being given wisdom is being dispensed, but are you learning something about the kind of fellow who's talking to you or something?
01:03:50
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's elements of that, right? I think, absolutely. And I mean, I think there's, I mean, I said the narrator earlier, right? And I think there is a kind of persona here or a kind of distance from the eye. But yeah, I think there are autobiographical elements. And there are, a moment, I don't know if this is the one you were thinking of, right? But about halfway through the poem,
01:04:20
Speaker
where he says, the obstetrician gazes is the valley of the bar. We used to live there and my wife and I, but one life hit another life and now she is gone and I'm here. Yeah, absolutely. It makes the hair raise up on the back of my neck that moment. I mean, it just did again now to be honest. Yeah.
01:04:35
Speaker
I don't know if you want to go there already, but feel free. Yeah. Well, yeah, I think we can skip around. I mean, is it the only first-person pronoun in the poem? That section might be. I think so. There are some in quotation marks, but the only time when the narrator is kind of
01:04:53
Speaker
you know, talking not about one, one or you or something like that. And, you know, the, as far as I can piece together, it does conform to Koch's biography. I mean, the Valley of the Var is in the French Riviera, I think. And Koch spent time, spent time in France.
01:05:18
Speaker
And at the time he wrote this poem, I think he was divorced from his first wife, Janice Koch. I think actually she had passed away by the time this poem was written, but at first they got divorced, right? So we used to live there, my wife and I, but one life hit another life and now she is gone and I'm here. So I think it is an elegiac moment, a kind of autobiographical moment.
01:05:41
Speaker
But a hidden one, right? Yeah, well, yes, a hidden one. And also, well, in some ways, like a disclosing or revelatory one, we used to live there, my wife and I, nothing could be plainer than that. But one life hit another life. Right.
01:06:05
Speaker
What is that? I mean, and then if it were just that, maybe we wouldn't understand what that even was like trying to mean or something. And now she is gone and I am here. Yeah. Clearly makes it seem elegiac. But what sense even sort of retrospectively does one life hit another life? Yes. I mean, I think it's a bit ambiguous. I mean, I can think of at least two ways to read it and maybe we will be able to come up with more.
01:06:35
Speaker
Just one life hit another life. Time has passed. My life now hides the life that I have then, right? That I'm more concerned on a day-to-day basis with the life I currently live.
01:06:52
Speaker
than I am with that life that I spent. It's like for some reason I keep thinking of Wordsworth today, but it's almost like the child is father of the man, the sort of idea of a former life of yours producing the life you have now, but thinking of the possibility of them being discreet from each other. Yeah, so that's one way to read it, and I think that
01:07:17
Speaker
sort of relates to the later line about memory. One memory hides another, that being one memory is all about the eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities, right? The sort of idea that hidden beneath our daily concerns, our immediate concerns are these sediments of memory and these things we can recover if we look. So that's one way to read, I think, the line, one life, hit another life. Another way, and maybe this is a little bit
01:07:46
Speaker
a little bit less intuitive, but I think about that even in the moment that they were living together, one life hid another life, sort of a suggesting that, I don't know, like an opacity to each other, right? A kind of hiddenness, like you're living together, right, when you're married.
01:08:12
Speaker
but it's always possible that your own life is kind of hiding the life of your spouse or partner that you are. Always possible, some might say inevitable. Inevitable, right. And this just kind of relates to what I think is another theme of the poem, which is just the possibility of kind of overshadowing or being overlooked or kind of, you know,
01:08:39
Speaker
So just to finish with this line, I think one life had another life. One reading of that might be my own self, my own kind of self-obsession or narcissism or my own concern with myself made it so that I didn't pay enough attention or didn't sort of fully appreciate or regard this other person.
01:09:09
Speaker
I think two of the line we sort of skipped over earlier, one person's reputation may hide the reputation of another. I mean, Coke was a very competitive and reputation conscious poet, I think. And as we've discussed, was part of this kind of celebrated group of coterie, right? And this is complicated because Coke was certainly always extraordinarily
01:09:34
Speaker
He did a lot to sort of promote and celebrate his peers, but I think there is also a sense, and this is late in his career, that Coke himself may be a little bit overshadowed or hidden, right? His reputation hidden behind the reputation of Coke.
01:09:55
Speaker
Ashbury and O'Hara, right? So I feel like that's one of the sub-themes that emerges out of this creation, right? Is this idea of people who may be hidden behind others, right? And he both thinks of that perhaps in terms of his own literary career and potentially in the other direction in terms of his marriage, right?
01:10:23
Speaker
Right. Yeah, so I have this question that's like swimming around in my mind, and I wonder how fully formed it's going to come out when I give it a try. Yeah, go for it. So I'm thinking back to what you said about the New York school's general kind of interest in visual arts and also maybe in
01:10:52
Speaker
in sort of making more kind of porous or intermedia the relation between writing and other kinds of artistic production. But one thing that's one of the things that distinguishes a poem from a painting is that a poem you sort of have to read in time, you know, like you have to read one line after another. Yeah.
01:11:15
Speaker
Whereas a painting, even if your eye moves around the canvas in some sequence, it's at least theoretically possible in a way that it doesn't seem to be with respect to a poem to sort of take it all in at one moment. And so I'm thinking in this poem of a moment like,
01:11:40
Speaker
One idea may hide another. Life is simple. Hide. Life is incredibly complex. As in the prose of Gertrude Stein, one sentence hides another and is another as well. So I don't know what the question is here for you exactly, but like, you know,
01:12:01
Speaker
But maybe you want to say something, you want to just jump in and rescue me from having to form the question. Just talk to me. No, I mean, the invocation of Stein here is very interesting, right?
01:12:18
Speaker
people may be familiar, but typically writes a kind of prose that's very repetitive, sort of variations on the same phrases. It's not the only way she writes, but it's a sort of mode that's associated, styled, associated strongly with her, where you get these kind of minute variations on the same sentence over and over and over. And the effect of it and the meaning of it kind of arises out of these very small
01:12:46
Speaker
changes, right? And I think actually the way Coke has of describing that one sentence hides another and is another as well. That sounds like Stein almost, right? It sounds like Stein and it's also a good description of what she does, right? Because it's two sentences might be so similar
01:13:05
Speaker
that they seem to almost be the same and you don't register the difference immediately, right? Or you register only a kind of monotonous similarity of repetition. But in fact, there are variations that are significant and kind of accumulate and kind of build up. And so Stein, I think, is actually a really excellent example of what you're talking about of the kind of
01:13:34
Speaker
acknowledgement and kind of leaning into the time-based aspect of writing, right? There are moments like the, just to come back to that moment that we were talking about a moment ago, we used to live there, my wife and I, but one life hit another, and now she is gone and I am here. And now she has gone and I am here moment. It does seem to kind of take us out of
01:14:04
Speaker
I don't know, it takes me out of the time. But you know, it's like, it sort of kicks things to a different level temporarily. I mean, it's like we're all.
01:14:12
Speaker
We're in the kind of, I don't know, something one might want to call the lyric present or something, right? He's writing from a position in time as opposed to being a kind of disembodied, advice-giving consciousness or something like that. Yeah, although actually, no doubt that's right. But in a way, I think I was saying almost the opposite of that, like there's the kind of historical reporting of the fact that we used to live there, my wife and I. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:14:41
Speaker
And then what supersedes it is this kind of eternal present moment that any reading of the poem will invoke, so the theory would go. And that seems to be more like the relation that the viewer of a painting has to the painting than a reader of language has to language. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. She is gone and I am here, is putting us in a... Where is here?
01:15:10
Speaker
Right. Here is the poem. Here's the poem. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. No, that's that's that's interesting. Right. I mean, it's almost to sort of push the analogy with visual art. It's almost like standing back. Yeah. And this or something. Yeah. Yeah. I find it. Yeah. I find it moving as well. And yeah. And just kind of an interesting example of
01:15:38
Speaker
know, a kind of perspectival shift or a kind of, you know, reorientation of, you know, where the speaker and sort of, and, and then by implication, the reader is in, in, in, in relation to everything that's, that's being said. And then of course, he continues with the present tense of a vatious mother hides a gawky daughter.
01:16:02
Speaker
right, the daughter hides her own vacation daughter in turn, it's present tense, but it's, it's back into, yes, it's back into a description of a narrative, you know, it's a little, it's a little scene that's being, and then they are in a railway station and the daughter is holding a bag bigger than her mother's bag, right, and successfully hides it, we have a little
01:16:21
Speaker
a little story all of a sudden, right? And only late in that story does something like the poet sort of enter into it, if he does at all. I don't know, maybe it's just because we know the poet's a man. So a vivacious mother hides a gawky daughter, he has no place in that. He couldn't be either of them. But he could be the one who offers to pick up the daughter's bag and then get stuck with the mother's as well.
01:16:52
Speaker
Well, and I think it also points back to the few lines earlier where there's, I think, a sort of figure for pregnancy, right? One identical twin may have the other and maybe even more in there, right? So, yes, I mean, it's a slippery poem, right? I think we do have that moment which we both identified as kind of anomalous and moving where we're all of a sudden in a kind of elegiac space of loss, but we don't stay there long, right? We're very quickly pulled back into
01:17:17
Speaker
Thank you.
01:17:22
Speaker
Into this kind of what becomes a kind of comic scene, right? Yeah
01:17:29
Speaker
of having to carry these bags. And then there are moments that are anomalous differently, I think, right? Yeah. So I'm thinking, for instance, of the stretch that starts from, one love may hide another love or the same love as when I love you suddenly rings false and one discovers the better love lingering behind as when I'm full of doubts hides. I'm certain about something and it is that.
01:17:56
Speaker
Yes. And one dream may hide another is as well known always too. So that all sounds like a kind of psychological hiding or something, right? Yeah. Sort of layering of consciousness and the sort of unconscious. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think Coke was really interested. This is maybe something else that I think is
01:18:19
Speaker
separates him a little bit or differentiates him from some of the other New York school people. I think psychoanalysis was really important to him. He was in analysis, I think kind of like strict Freudian analysis in the early 50s. He started going like five days a week to an analyst. And I know that that was a very sort of important experience to him personally.
01:18:41
Speaker
He writes pretty frequently about psychoanalysis or kind of alluding to it. And this is definitely a place where it feels like he's taken the conceit, he's taken the image of one thing hiding the other thing and is discussing something like repression or kind of latent content, right?
01:19:04
Speaker
One love may hide another love or the same love as when I love you suddenly rings false when discovered the better love lingering behind the dream hiding another dream.
01:19:14
Speaker
Yeah, I think that that's a swerve we take into the sense that even within our minds, there are things that are hidden or obscured and that we don't immediately recognize it. And I think that also brings him back to the
01:19:40
Speaker
a kind of trope of danger, right? Because he goes on a little after that. When you come to something, stop to let it pass so you can see what else is there at home, no matter where. Internal tracks pose dangers too. So I think he doesn't make this pun or this play on words literal, but like a train of thought, right? Or whatever kind of, but internal tracks pose dangers too. This idea that you,
01:20:10
Speaker
you may be kind of having a thought that takes you along one track, right? And that you are then exposing yourself somehow to danger, right? Or some kind of unexpected surprise that the unconscious might spring on you. Yeah, yeah. In the Garden of Eden,
01:20:36
Speaker
Adam and Eve may hide the real Adam and Eve. Jerusalem may hide another Jerusalem. So that's a different kind of anomalous moment, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you have any thoughts about Adam and Eve hiding the real Adam and Eve? I don't, I don't. It's quite a... Adam and Eve may hide the real Adam and Eve. I mean, is it maybe just, I don't know,
01:21:03
Speaker
Is the point being made there something about, well, let's say you accept that story, right?
01:21:13
Speaker
you know, we receive that story through the lens of the history of the millennia that have intervened between now and then as a kind of explanatory myth about who we are or something, the same we carry or whatever else. But at first they were just, you know, two people that they weren't really Adam and Eve, you know, in that sense, yeah. Well, and I'm tempted to read it as, yeah, sort of something about
01:21:44
Speaker
allegorical or mythological types hiding or distracting us from the real people or real things that kind of, you know, embody the same meaning as those types. It doesn't quite resolve into that as neatly as I would like it to. No, that's good though. It's not quite the same thing as
01:22:11
Speaker
you know, the poem proceeds by giving us examples, right? So to the extent that
01:22:25
Speaker
one of the examples in it is exemplary. I mean, that is, we can think of any item on this list in terms of its exemplary status of the principle that's being explored. But to do so might also occlude our view of what it is in its own right as a thing that doesn't only exist as a thing on the list.
01:22:53
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So maybe there's something there. I'm wondering as we'll probably want to wind up this conversation not too long from now. So if there are other lines in the poem that you're sure to want to take us to, please do. But one observation I have here also
01:23:16
Speaker
And I think this is a version of what we were trying to say earlier, but it's come to me with some more clarity in the last few moments, is that the kind of implied logic of the poem is here's this bit of found language. It gives a kind of advice or dispenses a kind of wisdom. Now let me give you other examples.
01:23:36
Speaker
of circumstances in which that same kind of wisdom applies. So the implied logic, in other words, is that these examples are all like each other, right? And I'm going to give you one after another of them that are like each other.
01:23:53
Speaker
But then the kind of message of the poem or the content of the poem, as it were, is like, especially insofar as the verb here is hide, you know, is like the examples or a thing,
01:24:15
Speaker
I mean, I guess it's true that the second train is like the first train, but the idea of something hiding another thing is to say that there's a difference between, you know, or take the one love may hide another love, right?
01:24:33
Speaker
There, the message seems to be that the kind of, to use a bit of psychoanalytic jargon, the kind of manifest thing is different in quality from the latent thing. In fact, it might be diametrically opposed to it, right? Right, right. Anyway. Yeah, yeah. Right. I mean, I think I see what you're saying, that in many of these examples, we don't have
01:25:00
Speaker
one thing and then another version of the same thing, but we have something else, something different or something. Yeah, we have the thing like take the example of the little girl with the bag who's hiding her mother with the larger bag. It's like the first thing that presents itself is something that we think like, oh, that's familiar enough and safe.
01:25:24
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. And so that invites us to kind of enter into some relation with it, which exposes us to the kind of hidden danger of the thing. I mean, I take that as in like the, you know, at the end, there's this sudden list, like he's not even pausing to give us the second half of it. One doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man may hide another. So to me, I took like the one illness as like, oh, that's a frightening idea, right? So you go to the doctor because something's wrong.
01:25:52
Speaker
And they say, oh yes, here's what's wrong. And they might be right, but they might be missing the kind of thing that's lurking that's going to kill them. Yeah, absolutely right. And I think that's partly that's a great observation of that reading of that moment. But just in general, and he really does, when he ends, he ends
01:26:13
Speaker
He returns to this moment of potential danger or rather sort of preservation, trying to preserve oneself from danger. Pause to let the first one pass. You think now it is safe to cross and you were hit by the next one.
01:26:26
Speaker
It can be important to have waited at least a moment to see what was already there. So, you know, I think one thing that keeps this from being just kind of a charming list poem, goofy list poem, which certainly Coke, you know, wrote a share of and I think is a mode that the New York School is often associated with,
01:26:44
Speaker
is the way that it preserves this sense of potential danger, like the wisdom here is a wisdom that is oriented towards preservation and a sense of like real consequences. So yeah, I feel like that's part of why the poem
01:27:08
Speaker
is powerful or at least has the power that it has for me, right? Even as we are kind of like ringing variations on this one kind of formula and pushing it in kind of ridiculous directions and it almost feels like sort of stretching it too far, it ends on this moment of feels like real
01:27:37
Speaker
It feels like a real kind of, a real sense of stakes or consequences or, I don't know, sort of potential harm. Yeah, there's also something kind of disarmingly modest about that last sentence. It can be important to have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.
01:28:02
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you can't be so cautious that you never cross the tracks, right? Yes. But it's trying to sell us on the wisdom of like, just take a moment. Yeah. Again, in a poem that doesn't seem particularly interested in taking a moment and stopping and pausing, it seems always to be rushing on to the next thing. I mean, so I find something interesting about that kind of almost like
01:28:32
Speaker
impulse to hold himself in check or hold the poem in check or recommend to people that they kind of
01:28:41
Speaker
they kind of work against their impulse to just move on to the next thing. That verb tense is interesting at the end too, to have waited at least in that sort of future perfect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's another way of like mildly disrupting or resisting the kind of temporality of the poem.
01:29:05
Speaker
Yeah, and I think, you know, you think now it is safe to cross and you are hit by the next one, the this sort of, I don't know, tragic irony of that, I guess. It's just the note where he lands here, right? And I guess in general, like, I find this this is a poem that that's kind of about
01:29:27
Speaker
It's kind of about revelation or epiphany or realization, like this moment of, I see this new thing that I didn't know was there. But it's also very much a poem about getting blindsided and being
01:29:45
Speaker
perhaps unpleasantly surprised, right? So I find those, the way he's keeping those two things in suspension, the kind of joy. I love that. Recognizing something or realizing something and also the terror of knowing that at any moment.
01:29:59
Speaker
you know, something you didn't know was there could be upon you. But also it's like, I don't know, maybe this sounds weird to say, but there's a kind of like, joy would be the wrong word, I think, but like a kind of perverse pleasure in the imagining
01:30:17
Speaker
of the catastrophe that would ensue if you just lively stepped into the train tracks or something. And the poem is kind of engineering that moment again and again for its reader.
01:30:33
Speaker
Well, Evan, one reading may hide another. So I mean, I know we've gone very long, but I think I think it's fine. And I think we really would benefit from hearing the poem one more time this time in your voice. So unless unless there was some some last point you wanted to make before we conclude, I wonder if I could ask you, in which case, please offer that. And then and then maybe in any case, we can end by listening to you read the poem one more time.
01:31:03
Speaker
No, I'm happy to read it. One train may hide another, 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.
01:31:29
Speaker
In a family, one sister may conceal another, so when you're recording, it's best to have them all in view. Otherwise, in coming to find one, you may love another. One father or one brother may hide the man if you are a woman whom you have been waiting to love. So always standing in front of something, the other, as words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas. One wish may hide another, and one person's reputation may hide the reputation of another. One dog may conceal another on a lawn, so if you escape the first one, you're not necessarily safe.
01:31:59
Speaker
One lilac may hide another, and then a lot of lilacs, and on the apia antica, one tomb may hide a number of other tombs. In love, one reproach may hide another. One small complaint may hide a great one. One injustice may hide another. One colonial may hide another. One blaring red uniform another and another, a whole column. One bath may hide another bath, as when after bathing, one walks out into the rain. One idea may hide another. Life is simple, hide. Life is incredibly complex.
01:32:29
Speaker
As in the prose of Gertrude Stein, one sentence hides another and is another as well. And in the laboratory, one invention may hide another invention, one evening may hide another, one shadow, a nest of shadows, one dark red or one blue or one purple. This is a painting by someone after Matisse. One waits at the tracks until they pass these hidden doubles or sometimes likenesses. One identical twin may hide the other and there may be even more in there.
01:32:55
Speaker
The obstetrician gazes at the valley of the VAR. We used to live there, my wife and I, but one life had another life, and now she is gone and I am here. A vivacious mother hides a gawky daughter. The daughter hides her own vivacious daughter in turn. They are in a railway station and the daughter is holding a bag bigger than her mother's bag and successfully hides it. In offering to pick up the daughter's bag, one finds oneself confronted by the mothers and has to carry that one too.
01:33:21
Speaker
So one hitchhiker may deliberately hide another and one cup of coffee another too until one is overexcited. One love may hide another love or the same love as when I love you suddenly rings false and one discovers the better love lingering behind as when I'm full of doubts hides I'm certain about something and it is that. And one dream may hide another as is well known always too. In the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve may hide the real Adam and Eve. Jerusalem may hide another Jerusalem.
01:33:49
Speaker
When you come to something, stop to let it pass so you can see what else is there. At home, no matter where, internal tracks pose dangers too. One memory certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about, the eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities. Reading a sentimental journey, look around when you have finished for Tristram Shandy to see if it is standing there. It should be, stronger and more profound and there to forehidden, a Santa Maria Maggiore may be hidden by similar churches inside Rome.
01:34:17
Speaker
One sidewalk may hide another, as when you're asleep there, and one song hide another song. A pounding upstairs hide the beating of drums. One friend may hide another. You sit at the foot of a tree with one, and when you get up to leave, there is another whom you have preferred to talk to all along. One teacher, one doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man, may hide another. Pause to let the first one pass. You think, now it is safe to cross, and you are hit by the next one.
01:34:45
Speaker
It can be important to have waited at least a moment to see what was already there. Well, Evan Kinley, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thanks for talking about Kenneth Koch and this great poem with us. And dear listeners, thank you for hanging out with us for the last hour and a half or so. Please make sure to follow the podcast and we will have more episodes for you soon. Be well, everyone.