Kenneth Koch

This book is specifically for high school students, though it is useful to college students and anyone interested in the art and craft of poetry. Koch and Farrell, experienced teachers as well as poets, write about poetry in such a way that students will find it accessible and interesting. The book includes selections of poetry by twenty-three poets, among them Dickinson, Hopkins, Pound, Williams and Eliot, as well as Ginsberg, O'Hara, Baraka and...

Selections from the work of sixty-five poets, from Homer and Ovid to Frank O'Hara and John Ashberry, accompany a discussion of poetry, including meter, line division, rhyme, and poetic forms.

A brilliant follow-up to Koch's award-winning New Addresses. The three long poems in this book are ambitious attempts at rendering the complete story of a life. Taken together they present a dazzling picture of the pleasures and confusions of existence, as well as the pleasures and difficulties of expressing them. Other poems bring Koch's questioning, lyrical attention to more particular aspects of experience, real and imagined -- a shipboard meeting,...