Kenneth Koch’s Comics
Richard Kostelanetz
Images from Kenneth Koch’s posthumously published
Having grown up in a household that took The New York Times (which I don’t read any more), I could never fathom comics. To my bookish tastes both the words and the pictures of comics seemed too simple, without being ingeniously minimal. Nor did I ever develop much appreciation of adult comics, epitomized for my generation by R. Crumb, or for comicbookish Graphic Novels, as they are now called. I think the simple drawings were more limited than the words. Even with more acclaimed practitioners, such as Will Elder, whose recent retrospective I liked (The Mad Playboy of Art, Fantagraphics, $49.95), I tend not to look at the pictures unless captured by the words.
Recalling my insufficiencies, you can imagine how surprised I am by my enthusiasm for Kenneth Koch’s posthumously published The Art of the Possible, subtitled "Comics Mainly Without Pictures," which could be described as balloons without the dross of childish drawings. Mostly a single page in length, some of these are quite marvelous, written in block letters that compliment the Baby Snooks ingenuousness of Koch’s language. One of my favorites, "Birth Comics," has twenty hand-drawn squares that begin with these episodes: "A BABY IS BORN/SHE IS NAMED "ANGELA"/THE MOTHER HOLDS HER/ANGELA WAVES ONE FAT HAND/THE MOTHER TAKES THIS HAND IN HER OWN HAND/ANGELA TURNS TOWARD HER MOTHER/HER MOTHER’S BREAST, etc. Comics without pictures is such a fertile literary idea that I remain surprised that no one has developed it before; perhaps someone has.
Another masterful Koch comic, "Stained Glass [REPRINT P. 69]," has neckties with words emerging from a center identified as "Ella," who inspired several images reprinted here. A third, "Blank Comic," becomes interesting for panels that are suggestively empty. I’ve haven’t enjoyed anything resembling comics so much since Ad Reinhardt’s hand-written, highly verbal polemics from fifty years ago.
Why didn’t these literary comics appear in print before Koch’s passing in 2002? David Lehman’s introduction doesn’t say, though he reminds us that Koch a few weeks before his death told Lehman that a book of them should be published. By failing to answer that question, which I suspect has something to do with Koch’s (or his agent’s) self-defeating calculations about his "career," Lehman opens the question to speculation, which I had already done. And which dunce gave the book a pretentious title so inappropriate for a writer who for decades deflated literary pomposity?
Kenneth Koch, The Art of the Possible. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull, 2004. 125pp. $14.95.
