Sun Out

Mr. Koch’s poems have a natural voice they are quick alert instinctive . . . He has vivacity and go originality of perception and intoxication with life. Most important of all he is not dull.” --Frank O’Hara Poetry 1955. Gathered together for the first time the exciting startling early work of one of our finest poets. Writing as a young man in the 1950s Koch a member of the now famed New York School along with John Ashbery Larry Rivers Frank O’Hara and others experimented with the delicate balance between sound and sense to offer a series of poems resembling music or abstract painting. For example he opens the title poem with: “Bananas piers limericks / I am postures / Over there I are / The lakes of delectation / Sea sea you!”Also included are a selection of short plays in verse and Koch’s innovative masterpiece “When the Sun Tries to Go On” a poem that “produces a radical reworking of the life-poem myth predominant in American poetics since ‘Song of Myself’” (William Watkins In the Process of Poetry). . About “When the Sun Tries to Go On” David Lehman wrote “Koch takes a great deal of delight in the sounds of words and his consciousness of them; he splashes them like paint on a page with enthusiastic puns internal rhymes titles of books names of friends and seems surprised as we are at the often witty outcome” (Poetry 1968).. When the poems in Sun Out were originally published they set a standard for the freshness and surprise of language used in extraordinary ways. For almost five decades they have delighted readers lucky enough to find them. It is our pleasure to make them once again available in this new and provocative collection.