© Sharon Guynup

KENNETH KOCH

I worked on “The Boiling Water” over a period of four years. I began writing it in 1975, in early summer, when I was living in a house I rented on Millstone Road, about a quarter of a mile down from the intersection of Millstone with Scuttlehole Road, and next door to the house I later bought and spend summers in now. Some friends from out of town came to visit (a short visit, not an overnight one) and I put some water on to boil for tea. I went in from the deck to the kitchen a few times to see if the water was boiling yet, and, when I saw that it finally was, it seemed, rather suddenly and absurdly, to be a dramatic event. “How serious this must be for the water!” I thought, or something of the kind; and I had the suspicion this might lead to something in a poem. So it did, though the poem took a long time to write. I ended up thinking a lot about “seriousness.” I put in a tremendous number of examples, most of which I later took out. My work on the poem began and ended on Millstone Road, though I was writing it also in New York City and in France. Some of its details come directly from Long Island, such as the tree waving in the wind, the hurricane (of 1976), the fly, and the bee; and the tree, full of pink and whitish blossoms, which was an apple tree in the yard between my house and the fields. The duck in the poem is not a Long Island duck but a duck I saw in Normandy. These are things that were there while I was writing the poem. Others, like the Cordillera of the Andes, were from before, and remembered; some, like the match factory, just imagined. “Fate,” which I wrote in a few hours in New York City in 1977, is about an afternoon conversation with friends after I came back from Europe for the first time, in 1951, when I was twenty six. Its composition has nothing to do with Long Island, though the people who appear in the poem do. Toward the end of the poem I mention another afternoon soon after this one, in which Larry Rivers proposed that he and I and Jane Freilicher take a house for a month or so in East Hampton; at that time I hadn’t visited that part of Long Island, and, in fact, didn’t know quite where it was.