Kenneth Koch's War

By Emily Setina and Susannah Hollister, NYPL Short-Term Fellows
June 10, 2022
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

This post was written by Emily Setina and Susannah Hollister. Setina is an associate professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and author of the forthcoming The Writer in the Darkroom: Photography and Biography in Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Marianne Moore (Oxford). Hollister is a writer based in central New Jersey who works on poetry, pedagogy, and memoir and has taught at the U.S. Military Academy and the University of Texas. Together, Hollister and Setina co-edited Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation (Yale 2012). They are now at work on a co-authored biography of Kenneth Koch.

In December 1999, more than half a century after their last contact, the poet Kenneth Koch received a letter in the mail from a woman named Louise Roy Sellars. In 1945 she had been working at the Red Cross Club on Guam when he had come in, a twenty-year-old rifleman recuperating from hepatitis. The infection proved a lucky break for Koch. Diagnosed the night before the Allied landing at Okinawa, his case was severe enough to send him into a field hospital instead of onto the beach—sparing him, as he later understood it, near-certain death in one of World War II’s bloodiest battles. He had seen heavy combat already in the war, in the battle of Leyte. Hepatitis seems to have been less harrowing for him: twelve days after diagnosis, he sent a telegram to his parents assuring them, “AM WELL AND FIT ANXIETY UNNECESSARY.” [1]

Kenneth Koch, telegram to Lillian and Stuart Koch, April 12, 1945

Kenneth Koch, telegram to Lillian L. and Stuart Koch, April 12, 1945.

Image courtesy of the estate of Kenneth Koch

The soldier from Cincinnati was a witty conversationalist, a new friend, as Louise recalled, whom she could talk to about theater, music, and their shared interest in writing poetry. When she confessed to a difficulty with sonnets, Kenneth boasted he could write one in under twenty minutes, given a typewriter. She held him to it, finding a battered machine for him to use, and soon he brandished an appreciation of Louise in fourteen lines. She kept the sonnet, titled “Paradise Regained,” and other poems he gave her, and enclosed photocopies of the pages from 1945 with her letter of 1999.

The poems and letter from Louise Roy Sellars and the telegram that Kenneth Koch sent home on April 12, 1945 (the day Franklin Roosevelt died, as Lillian Loth Koch noted below her son’s message) are held in the vast archive of Koch materials in NYPL’s Berg Collection. With the support of the Short-Term Research Fellowship program, we started work in the Berg this past fall on a whole-life biography of Koch. The sonnet-writing private on Guam would come to be a transformative figure in twentieth-century literature: known as a founding poet of the New York School (one of the most prominent avant-garde movements in postwar America); a pioneer in creative writing instruction, with best-selling books on teaching poetry to children; and for over forty years a wildly popular professor of English at Columbia University. Comprising nearly five hundred boxes, the two main collections of Koch Papers at the Berg (1939–1995, 1932–2007) document the composition of thousands of individual poems, plays, and stories, and the progress of a sweeping career. Letters, photographs, and collaborative projects convey the extraordinary range and strength of the relationships Koch built through poetry. Our research in these materials shows a charismatic writer intent on cultivating poetic innovation, whose buoyant radicalism steered many other lives in art and multiplied the ways poetry is written, read, and defined. 

From his published work, Koch seems to have turned to World War II as a subject in his very last years after resisting the topic of war for decades. “To my contemporaries I’ll leave the Horrors of War, / They can do them better than I,” he wrote mid-career, feeling compelled to respond to U.S. involvement in Vietnam and answering it with a meditation on war’s absence, “The Pleasures of Peace” (1969). [2] He confronted his own experiences as a young soldier late in life, in the autobiographical collection New Addresses (2000), published two years before his death from leukemia in 2002. [3] His prolific earlier work shows a drive to take in nearly all of life, but little appetite to treat war.

Kenneth Koch, “Paradise Regained” (c. 1945), photocopy of typescript poem

Kenneth Koch, “Paradise Regained” (c. 1945), photocopy of typescript poem enclosed with Louise Roy Sellars, letter to Koch, December 6, 1999.

Image courtesy of the estate of Kenneth Koch

Koch’s archive, however, reveals that his experience of war was foundational to his becoming a writer. The first poem in the Berg’s 1939–1995 collection, the energetic “Ballad Salad” (1939), written in Koch’s ninth-grade fall, begins with a dying soldier’s cry: “O’ Mither I were in a war.” [4] This early parody plays pathos for comedy (the deathbed scene is interrupted by a ballgame). Already, though, Koch was associating poetic speech with a soldier-son’s experience, as language that describes hurt and secures a woman’s (in this case, mother’s) tender care. By the time he turned eighteen in February 1943, with the United States fully engaged in World War II and his own draft imminent, Koch’s poetry turned more serious in both tone and volume of output. He wrote at least thirty poems beginning in March of that year and before he graduated high school and started basic training in June. The pressure of his impending deployment gave him subjects he didn’t have earlier and added weight to others. He made note of these themes to himself: “futility and life,” “war unfulfilled passion,” “death,” “youth.” [5]

Kenneth Koch (yearbook photograph)

Kenneth Koch (yearbook photograph), Walnut Hills High School, 'The Remembrancer', 1943, Cincinnati, Ohio. Koch Estate.

Image courtesy of the estate of Kenneth Koch

The dates Koch marked on nearly all the poems he wrote that spring, a practice that wouldn’t become his norm, signal his painful awareness that each day and month pulled him closer to war. He feared dying before really living. “It is hardly fair / that the first clock / should tick no emotion / in the boy’s belly / before the gun / pokes hot fingers in his guts,” he wrote in March. [6] "Some unseen clock” voids April’s pleasures, reducing the month “to a nervous grey geometry,” in a poem dated April 26. Written a week later, “Suburban Reflection” portrays a landscape much like Koch’s suburban Cincinnati that seems grotesquely oblivious to war: “the suburb’s pretty civilisation; / automobiles, aeroplanes, and refrigerators / answer none of the air’s questions.” Meanwhile, “somewhere far off a war sounds its tinny unreal noises,” and “newspapers and radios belch forth death / in tall black letters / and tall black sounds.” “Expectancy,” a rare undated poem in this group, begins, “My life has been considerably shortened / By the present bloody conflict.” [7] But that loss is “no real cause for tears,” he claims with sardonic insight, for his “terrible hurry to accomplish something of note / Before I am twenty” had spurred him to write more poems “in the few months after I knew I had to rush” than the previous eighteen years. 

Koch’s pace slowed as anticipation of war gave way to its actuality. After training in Kentucky, Texas, Chicago, California, and Hawaii, fighting through the campaign at Leyte, and convalescing on Guam, he was sent to Saipan and reclassified as a clerk-typist. He made use of the regular access to a typewriter to explore the traumas he had just experienced, his sense of literary vocation continuing to intensify. “Conversation in 1944” depicts a group of soldiers gathered around a foxhole in the aftermath of gruesome fighting to find camaraderie and escape in language. [8] A poem typed in red ink on Army stationery similarly contrasts the physicality of war with the writer’s mind: “There is no village of bullets in this blue intellect.” The line suggests that imagination might offer refuge from war’s damage, though such consolation cannot be found in an elegy for his friend Jim Gellar, killed in action on Okinawa, at “Age twenty, not yet particularly / Anyone or anything.” A prose piece drawn from Koch’s experiences in Leyte, “The Lesson,” gives a direct view of the battle’s horrors, against the brief thrill of surviving them: “I was alive—oh, marvelously alive.” 

Kenneth Koch, untitled poem [“Blue of sky enormous immaculate mind”] (c. 1945)

Kenneth Koch, untitled [“Blue of sky enormous immaculate mind”] (c. 1945), typescript poem.

Image courtesy of the estate of Kenneth Koch

Koch published three of his war poems in Poetry magazine in November 1945. But he was anxious to leave war behind when, in January 1946, he returned home. “Peace” followed “creative writing (poetry & prose)” in the interests he listed on his college application that spring; for roommate preference, he specified, “NOT from a military school.” [9]

Drafts and journals show war’s language and imagery persisting in Koch’s writing well into the 1950s, though, across an array of styles and modes he tried while coming into his own as a poet. Even his more obscure or abstract writing can be understood in meaningful relation to his war experience; the critic who has explored this topic in greatest depth, Roy Scranton, finds Leyte encoded in an enigmatic poem from Koch’s first collection and sees later works challenging reverent war narratives. [10] Another poem from the early 1950s, in a string of sense impressions, invokes a remembered combat scene—“the ack-ack of the Chinese discomfortable antiaircraft bullets shouting into the clay weather”—and an army unit where even the regimental insignia, “an ordinary, clean polar bear,” looks “surprised to be in a war.” From the approach of his thirtieth birthday, the poem renews Koch’s exhilaration at having escaped death in battle ten years prior: “What lightness it is to be still / Here, among the orange living.” [11] Levity and surrealism become direct responses to living through the violence and disorientation of war.

“Well, I was in you,” Koch says to World War II in a late poem, after recounting how he had prayed as a child that there would be no war for him to go to. [12] From the start of his writing life, war was in him, and in his poetry. His avant-garde experiments and signature exuberance hold buried urgency, the lived experience of a young poet shaped by the fear, and then the reality and survival of his deployment. 

[1] Kenneth Koch, telegram to Lillian L. and Stuart Koch, April 12, 1945, box 137, folder 7, Kenneth Koch Papers 1932–2007, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Louise Roy Sellars’ letter to Koch, dated December 6, 1999, is in box 143, folder 6, Koch Papers 1932-2007.

[2] Koch, “The Pleasures of Peace,” in The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch (New York: Knopf, 2015), 229.

[3] Numerous poems in New Addresses refer to events in Koch’s military service. The volume’s most direct treatment of war, the poem “To World War Two,” appears in alternate form as “To the United States Army,” Poetry (January 2000): 201–2, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=40751

[4] Box 1, folder 1, Kenneth Koch Papers 1939–1995, Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

[5] Koch, annotations on a typescript list of poem titles, box 1, folder 4, “Individual poems dated 1943,” Koch Papers 1939–1995.

[6] Except as noted, all citations in this paragraph are from box 1, folder 4, Koch Papers 1939–1995.

[7] Box 1, folder 7, “Poems, 1942–48,” Koch Papers 1939–1995.

[8] All citations in this paragraph are from box 1, folder 6, “‘Army Poems,’ 1943–1945,” Koch Papers 1939–1995.

[9] Jay Kenneth Koch, Veteran Application for Rooms or Statement of Intention to Live at Home, 1946–47, Office of the Registrar, Harvard College.

[10] Roy Scranton, Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 150–5.

[11] Koch, “En l’An Trentièsme de Mon Eage,” in Collected Poems, 60–1. In a draft note, Koch described the 1954 poem as an attempt to use the more radical style he was developing “to recount (somewhat) an autobiography.” Notes to Sun Out: Selected Poems 195254 (2002), box 41, folder 2, Koch Papers 1932–2007.

[12] Koch, “To World War Two,” in Collected Poems, 604.