The Aesthetic of Whimsy: A Close Reading of Koch’s “Permanently”
In Brian M. Reed’s chapter, “The New York School,” Reed describes the New York poets as embracing the inherent playfulness of language. Their poems use poetic techniques that, at first glance, do not seem very sophisticated. Wordplay, puns, poetic association, whimsical discontinuity, comedy — these are not the typical techniques associated with the poetic verse of schools before them. However, it is exactly these poetic techniques, and their reversal of the normative, that go beyond the surface of simple wordplay. As Reed points out, it is “…their inquiry into the very tools, conditions, concepts, limits, and processes that make self-expression possible.” (Reed, “The New York School,” 847). Kenneth Koch’s poem, “Permanently” is an example of a poem that challenges older aesthetics while establishing itself, its techniques, and its author as a true participant of modern American poetics.
On the surface, “Permanently,” is a comedic and outlandish love poem. In stanzas 1-3, the narrator relays a narrative in which parts of speech are personified. The characters consist of “Nouns,” “Verbs,” “Sentences,” “Conjunctions,” who are struck by the beauty of a single “Adjective.” Each of these characters, whose only identification lies in their grammatical function, are linked together by association. Koch relies on his reader to engage playfully with his poem by using a basic knowledge of grammar.
Kenneth Koch reading his poetry
“One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a verb drove up, and created the
Sentence” (1-5)
In this first stanza, Koch creates a visual representation of an everyday moment: an infatuation sparked by a single sighting. Immediately, there is an interplay between the feminine and the masculine. The “Nouns” perform the masculine through their voyeurism of the objective. The “Adjective,” which is the object of desire for the “Nouns,” performs the feminine. By personifying parts of speech, Koch complicates this simplistic narrative and contemplates the relationship between men and women — while at the same time embracing the comedy in personifying something so outlandish. Since adjectives modify nouns, the reader can interpret the female as being subordinate to the noun; they can also interpret the adjective as holding power over the noun, as the adjective has the ability to describe, enhance and even limit the noun’s qualities.
In line 2, the “Adjective” is described by way of a modified noun. The narrator describes the “Adjective” as a “dark beauty,” (2) which the reader is left to interpret. The adjective “dark” in “dark beauty” could refer to a woman’s hair, eyes or skin, or it can refer to a sensibility. Koch is showing how much there is to unpack in adjectives, how the sentiment of a poem comes through in their interpretations. In line 3, the “Nouns,” are “struck, moved, changed,” (3) by way of adjective, which the reader interprets as the movement of a relationship between writer and reader, men and women.
In the next stanza, Koch employs associative poetics and whimsical discontinuity. Here, Koch pokes fun at the overly sentimental techniques of older poetic aesthetics. The narrator details the story through description. Each “Sentence” gives their own description of the day they met the “Adjective.” One relays that “‘it was a dark rainy day when the Adjective / walked by, I shall remember the pure and sweet / expression on her face until the day I perish / from the green effective earth’” (7-10). The language here is comical as the speaker exaggerates and dramatizes their speech, using “shall” and “perish” instead of more colloquial terms. This heightened speech, a nod to out of date English, is a parody of Romantic poetics. The next line, “…‘Will you please close the window, Andrew?’” (11) is not directly related to the “Adjective.” However, the reader can associate the desire to close the window with the “dark rainy day” (7), placing the sentence in the same temporal plane. In the next line, the readers are given “window sill” (13) as the only association. The rest of lines 12-15 are discontinuous with lines 6-10. Through this technique, Koch shows the overly sentimental becoming associated with the outlandish. The claims of infatuation are also shown, through this whimsical dialogue, to be silly when they are put to words.
The narrative part of the poem comes to an end in stanza 3. Despite the “Sentences” and “Nouns” having waited until springtime for the “Adjective,” “… the adjective did not emerge” (20). This leads to the fourth, and final stanza:
As the adjective is lost in the sentence,
So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose and throat —
You have enchanted me with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language. (21-25)
Here, the narrator’s story is contextualized as well as the title of the poem. The narrator compares the story of the adjective to his lover/object of desire. The lover/object of desire has “enchanted” the narrator, as the “Adjective” has enchanted language. This enchantment can “never be undone / Until the destruction of language,” (24-25) which becomes the sentiment of the poem: that, no matter how their relationship moves, the moment of love/infatuation is captured in language and becomes permanent. Adjectives, when “lost in the sentence” (21) can become powerful tools of sentiment and power, but if they are overused or relied on too heavily, they can trap the reader into a cliche. Through this more playful aesthetic, Koch is able to transform a typical love poem into a spontaneous, yet profoundly every day, experience, avoiding the overtly sentimental and cliched trappings of a standard love poem.
Question for the class:
Do any of the other poets within the New York School make use of associative poetics and whimsical discontinuity?
Bibliography:
Koch, Kenneth. “Permanently.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine.
Reed, Brian M. “The New York School.” The Cambridge History of American Poetry, edited by Alfred Bendixen and Stephen Burt, 2016, Cambridge UP, pp. 844-868.
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