His prose works included the novel The Red Robins; 1000 Avant-Garde Plays; and three books about teaching poetry writing in schools and nursing homes.
His prose works included the novel The Red Robins; 1000 Avant-Garde Plays; and three books about teaching poetry writing in schools and nursing homes. Known for his exuberant style, his popular poems included the book- length ottava rima Ko, about a baseball player, and other sustained variations on themes, such as "Sleeping With Women", "The Boiling Water", and the relentlessly nonsensical "When The Sun Tries To Go On". His pastiches include the mock-heroic dramas Bertha and Washington Crossing the Delaware; the Raymond Roussel imitation The Railway Stationery; and a parody of William Carlos Williams's "This is Just to Say" in which the speaker regrets that he "chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer." FTP name this member of the early-1960s "New York School" of poets, a professor at Columbia University for 40 years, whose selected poems were collected in On the Great Atlantic Rainway.
His prose works included the novel The Red Robins; 1000 Avant-Garde Plays; and three books about teaching poetry writing in schools and nursing homes.
{Kenneth Koch}