Some years ago Kenneth Koch, who died this past summer, at age 77, received a letter asking, " How can I enroll in the New York School of Poets? " I don’t know what, if anything, Koch replied, but he was amused to think that anyone believed that he, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, and James Schuyler constituted an actual school with a campus, curriculum, classrooms, etc. Had there been such a place, he could have filled the chair of professor, for among his colleagues he was the natural teacher. In addition to teaching poetry and inspiring poets at Columbia University and the New School, he published two books on teaching children to write poetry and one on teaching nursing-home residents. Four years ago he published the valuable book of essays and examples Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry (Scribner, 1998). Koch was, without fanfare, America’s chief voice for the joys of poetry.

He was also a poet who turned his " excitement prone " (Frank O’Hara’s description of him) imagination to plays, a novel, short stories, an epic poem on baseball, on-target parodies of Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and D.H. Lawrence, and 18 books of poems in which he deliberately never sat still. His poetry is nothing so clandestine as T.S. Eliot’s " raid on the inarticulate " ; it is a full-scale invasion. Sun Out and A Possible World stand as bookends to a talent and career as varied as any in recent American poetry.

The books have little in common beyond Koch’s name on their covers. In the note introducing Sun Out, he describes the poems as being " in such a different style from those I wrote afterwards that they never seemed to fit into my books. " Two lines chosen at random from the long poem " When the Sun Tries To Go On, " which was originally published with drawings by Koch’s late friend and frequent collaborator Larry Rivers, will give the flavor of this work, " Bong! Went the faery blotters; Ding Dong! the/Country of Easter! shore! each toes . . .  " Almost 70 pages of this! It doesn’t flow, doesn’t make conventional sense, and isn’t interested in flowing or making sense or delivering a message or doing anything the dominant New Critics of the 1950s thought poetry ought to do. It is interested in the sort of freedom that sends even the liberated to huff and puff about the need for limits.

In a note Koch says he had Tolstoy in mind, the way he had put " everything imaginable " into War and Peace. The overall effect is exhilarating. These poems seem written without a sense of outcome, of finite possibility, of knowing more than the language knows. Sun Out is also silly, maddening, at times formulaic, funny (from the start Koch’s poetry had the gift of humor), and impossible to paraphrase. To my taste, only the " formulaic " passages derail the total liberties he takes.

A Possible World has Koch’s last poems, several of which pierce the heart with an emotional directness that was unusual in his work but that he achieved at the end. Read " Movement " and " Proverb " to experience the courage with which this poet faced the death he knew his cancer would bring. These poems deliver felt experience the way real poetry always has. A Possible World is set in China, Kuala Lumpur, Paris, Rome, and New York, the real places and Koch’s imaginings of them. The poems often have a deliberate gait; this is one of the ways they avoid the poetic and seem fresh. His tone, a sort of levelheaded wonder, is unlike any other in American poetry, and his leaps, his sense of play, are unlikely too. Some readers have always hated Koch’s poetry, the character of it is that strong. We have lost an original, a poet whose work fulfills his sense that for poetry " no one, including the poet, can ever say anything that is sufficient. "