One night in the 1970s at St. Mark’s Poetry Project, my father did a reading of what he thought were his best-ever poems. No one laughed, even at the funniest lines. When he finished reading, the applause was feeble. The audience seemed dejected, maybe even angry.
“That was really … good,” someone chastised him on his way out.
By that time O’Hara had gone somewhat out of fashion. In the New York Herald Tribune, John Ashbery wrote that O’Hara might be “too hip for the squares and too square for the hips.”
In 1985, my father wrote a letter to the New York Times explaining exactly how he felt about the post-O’Hara poetry scene.
The rise of serious pop songwriting two decades ago usurped poetry’s last, most vulgar and least dispensable function in society, the articulation of youthful feeling … Until poetry of some kind again grips the imaginations of the young—as painting, its sister art, lately has to a surprising extent—poetry will remain a quaint pursuit limited to bland coteries and the death embrace of academe. Until then, discussions of form and quality will have a hollow ring. When a job has no social consequence, who cares if it is done well or badly? How today would we qualify a “good” buggy whip?
By contrast, Kenneth Koch, O’Hara’s contemporary and my father’s teacher, wrote and taught poetry for the rest of his life.
In 2019, Koch’s widow, Karen, opened the door to her apartment near Columbia University. Wearing dark pants and a brown sweater, her bob swaying lightly, she looked too pretty and too calm to be attached to the downtown poetry world, and yet her apartment resembled a New York School museum. She showed me around, brought out snacks, and gave me copies of Koch’s books. We talked for a couple of hours. She explained how she recruited a team to help her manage Koch’s estate. She showed off the collections and laughed when she pulled out one that had turned out a little differently than she’d expected. The blue and orange were so bright that the book looked like Mets swag. She was okay with it. She seemed okay with everything. I adored her.
Ron Padgett would later tell me: “She’s not only a great person but also a very good literary executor, especially as a person who was not highly connected to the publishing industry. She’s gone really way out there to make Kenneth’s work available. She’s been great at it. She’s generous and helpful. She tries to find a way to say yes to every request.”
The executorship team she put together was diverse in terms of age and skillset. “The good thing is that when I die and Karen dies, these guys will be younger, and they’re already signed on for the long haul,” Padgett said. “So, she’s provided as far down the road as she can. Everybody should have such a literary executor as Karen.”
I made a mental note that my mother and I should emulate Karen when it came to my father’s estate. I could assemble a team with people who knew different aspects of his work and who were a range of ages, like Ron and Spencer. Together we’d be able to keep his work and legacy alive for the foreseeable future.
Karen met Kenneth in 1977, the same year my father was trying to write his book. She was running an education consulting agency and loved his books about teaching poetry. Her company had a grant to spend, so she hired him to work with teachers on their writing curriculums. They started dating in the eighties and spent weekends in Southampton playing music with Larry Rivers.
She felt she got Koch’s best years: “He was past a lot of his difficult times at that point. I’ll say that’s also true of your father, probably.”
I agreed.
“I don’t think he liked Kenneth very much,” she said without malice.
“I don’t know about that, but I do know he’s a huge fan of his writing,” I said. “I was talking to him the other day, and he said that one of his favorite poems of all time was—”
Karen interrupted me: “I’ve got to guess. I’m going to guess! ‘Variations on a Theme’ by William Carlos Williams?”
“No, that’s one of my favorites,” I said.
“Oh! I just wanted to make the guess. Go ahead, please.”
“It’s actually really funny because I was at dinner at my parents’, and I quoted that poem. My father said, ‘Oh, that’s a good one, but an even better one is the one where he’s doing a Robert Frost impression.”
“Ah! ‘Mending Sump’!”
“Yes, exactly. And his favorite line is: ‘Hay is dried-up grass when you’re alone.’”
She laughed a charming laugh. “I’d forgotten that line. Thank you for reminding me.”
“My dad quotes it all the time. I do think he cared for him, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some sort of difficulty.”
“Kenneth says when he was younger, he sometimes made some enemies.”
“Well, so did my father.”
“I think that happens to people with strong personalities.”
When I said something about the Village being full of strong personalities, she said, “I’m such a Midwestern girl, I think. I’m an amateur musician, a pianist. Kenneth used to have his office in here. When he died, I decided I had to make the living room my own. The apartment already is sort of a shrine to him.” She put her piano in the space formerly occupied by his desk.
Karen Koch even gets along with Maureen. “She’s really wonderful,” Koch said, though she admitted that Maureen could be protective.
She told me that Kenneth Koch, along with Larry Rivers and Bill Berkson, went to O’Hara’s apartment after he died and made photocopies of every scrap of paper because they were afraid otherwise some of the more explicit work would be lost: “They pulled everything because they were afraid at that time, Maureen would not have liked—and she said as much, actually—his being gay was not something that she wanted to really put out there. She just needed time to adjust to the grandeur of Frank, I think.”
She talked about the poets’ “groupness.” “Jane [Freilicher] was hard as nails and wonderful,” Koch says. “She didn’t pull her punches ever. She was great with me. After Kenneth died, being out in Long Island, I spent quite a bit of time with her. When Kenneth was in the hospital, she would call me at night just to catch up. One night I said, ‘Well, they have to shave his head.’ She said, ‘Oh, but he has a really nicely shaped head! He’ll look fine.’”
When Freilicher was dying, Koch went to sit with her for a couple of hours: “I got some books and I started reading John’s and Frank’s—I couldn’t find a James Schuyler—and Kenneth’s poems to her. I kept reading them to her and she was kind of responding even though … I still remember she was sort of propped up in bed. Her hair was flowing across the pillow like in a Pre-Raphaelite painting. She had this regal bearing. I finished reading. She looked tired. I said, ‘You know, Jane? Those guys really loved you. They really, really loved you.’ No one was there with me. She pushed back on the pillow and said, more or less, it sounded like, ‘I love them!’”
Freilicher died the next day.
I leave half in love with Karen and convinced that if she thought I stood a chance of getting Maureen to support my project, it must be true.
And yet, Maureen still hadn’t written me back. I sent her my “journalist inquiry” on January 10. I followed up with my book proposal on February 1 and asked if I could take her out for lunch or coffee that month. A week after that, I wrote her to say that Katie Schneeman, whom she’d met many years earlier, sent her regards. Weeks passed, and nothing.