Kenneth Koch's poetry

This week I chose Kenneth Koch to write a few lines about. I particularly liked his poem entitled “Geography”. This is a very inventive and interesting poem at the same time. It has eight stanzas, seven is dealing with different kinds of people from all around the world and the last one unites all of them and shows us (like a kind of a slideshow) what they are doing at the same time in different places of the world. Interestingly the first and the eight stanzas are the longest ones, giving the poem a framelike structure. In the first stanza we can get to know the fifteen-year-old Amba, from Africa (more exactly from the jungle of Congo). Here we have a beautiful synesthesia: “At morning Amba heard their pink music…”. Moreover, we have a lot of onomatopoeic words as well: “whether it be blue (thhhh) feathers” or “high trala to the nougat birds” or even “The moon (zzzzzz) shining down on Amba’s sweet mocked sleep”. I especially liked this last one as it expresses the sleep of the moon. The image of the sleeping moon can easily fit into the imagination of a fifteen-year-old boy. In the second stanza, we fly through the Ocean and go to Chicago to get to know Louis. He is a boy of seventeen and his life is not full of joy; he has to work as a milkman, probably to support his family or himself. Suddenly we turn to Frank, “a young outlaw”, who is “Crossing Louis’ path gently in the street”. Even the Holocaust is briefly mentioned with two onomatopoeic words (“whizz and burr”), quickly crossing Frank’s mind. We do not exactly know where the people in the third stanza are from, they have English names, but that does not reveal the country where they are. The characters in the fourth stanza must be from Antarctica, as they live in igloos and are spearing the whale. We have a beautiful simile as well: “the green crusty ice”. Ten Ko and Wan Kai in the fifth stanza must be from Korea or from Vietnam, they are working on the rice paddies. Here we have a synesthesia: “blue desire”. We do not know at all where Boon, Angebor and Maggia from the sixth stanza are from. Maybe they are from Africa, as the words “oona” and “zee’th” sound so African, but this must be misleading. The little prisoner in the seventh stanza lives in the desert, but we do not know much about him or his conditions. We do not know why he is incarcerated and who the mentioned lover is. The eighth stanza wonderfully unites the scattered, small “icons” from all around the world, everyone is here together. This is just like the end of a play: every actor and actress shows up once more before they go away. This way we have Amba once more together with a beautiful onomatopoeic word: “Amba arose. Thhhhhhh! went the birds, and clink clank went/ The leaves under the monkeys’ feet…”. We have Wan Kai, Ten Ko, Daisy, Louis, Roon, Maggia, Baba once more, like a great finale. However, the ending is not joyful; someone named Enna plunged into the gloomy lake while screaming. Her indentify remains a secret.