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The Man Who Shaved the Beard Off Poetry: Remembering Kenneth Koch (1925-2002)

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From: The Texas Observer
Date: 20020830
Author:Anonymous

"Tell me not in mournful numbers

`Life is but an empty dream!'..."

So Henry Wadsworth Longfellow began his anthem to the superego, "A Psalm of Life." My fourth grade classmates and I--perhaps you, too--were forced to memorize all nine stanzas. We had no idea what it meant, of course, only that it was "stirring." No one would have thought back then to translate Longfellow's opening lines into 1960s English. Or did nobody dare? Shave the nineteenth-century beard off and Longfellow is pleading: "Don't bum me out with another awful poem."

Our textbooks were full of "mournful numbers"--dirges by ...

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