We are now in our third season of writers on poets, a series in which fiction writers introduce favorite poets. We have been thrilled at the engaging exchanges these evenings provide and are excited to present the introductions from two of these readings, along with a poem from each night.   On May 30th Jonathan Lethem introduced Kenneth Koch at The Bowery Poetry Club. Jonathan Lethem    Kenneth Koch    I'm subject to an awful temptation here, and that is to lapse into some version of a shameless imitation of one of his own poems in introducing to you my hero, Kenneth Koch. How easy and disastrous it would be to begin Oh Thank You for giving me the chance of being Kenneth Koch's introducer! Or A serious moment for the novelist is when he is asked to draw aside the curtain for his favorite poet! Or At a reading, one writer may hide behind another—And yet I'm going to try to resist this temptation, this seduction, because I know where it leads, or at least I know where it led me once: when I was eighteen my adoration for Kenneth Koch led me to mistake myself for a poet. In 1984 as a college freshman I bluffed my way into a poetry workshop that was meant to be closed to freshmen. I did this by appearing in person at the office of the poet who led the workshop, and when he looked at my trembling sheaf and asked me who my favorite poet was I declared proudly Kenneth Kotch! Rhyming it with crotch. I'd never heard the name said aloud. Now I know that that declaration was a very early warm-up for this evening. The teacher-poet corrected my pronunciation and let me into the workshop, and then, in a matter of months, taught me that I was not a poet. Or he allowed me to teach myself. Still, I wasn't done with being seduced by Kenneth Koch, not by a long shot. A few years later my then-wife and I began a photocopied zine which we called Idiot Tooth, and the motto of the zine, which was printed on the contents page, was "The only thing I could publicize well would be my tooth!" from Kenneth Koch's "Thank You." What is so seductive in those lines I'm compelled to mangle in my parodies, what it is that compels me to read and re-read Kenneth Koch's poems alone and in company, silently and aloud, what it was that once compelled me to read the entirety of "The Boiling Water" to a wedding full of people waiting to dance to a Klezmer band, is the forever-startling freshness and exuberance and generosity of the voice, the mock-effortless way that Kenneth Koch sweeps aside the drab curtain of formality to offer plain talk, wit, rhapsodic inventions, memories, dreams, regrets, fresh air. How odd it is, in a way, to try to introduce poems whose every first line is itself a how-do-you-do, a handclasp, a hot cookie cooling on a tin sheet in a corner of the kitchen when the baker's back is turned. So often Kenneth Koch has offered us an apparent transparency —the gesture or impulse seemingly recorded naked for the page. Not that we should be fooled for a minute as to the rigour and purposefulness required to deliver such excellence —except, of course, for the endless pleasure in being fooled this way. In an early poem called "The Artist," Koch seems to display his own ambition and restlessness for us to admire: I often think Play was my best work. It is an open field with a few boards in it. Children are allowed to come and play in Play By permission of the Cleveland Museum. I look up at the white clouds, I wonder what I shall do, and smile. Perhaps somebody will grow up having been influenced by Play, I think—but what good will that do? Meanwhile I am interested in steel cigarettes... Well, I'm not a poet, but I am a child who was permitted to play in Play. Kenneth Koch, as a writer, showed me the value of paradox and surprise, he showed me the value of intimacy and informality, and when I studied him harder he taught me the value of alertness, and hesitation, and of reading myself as patiently as I read others. He taught me how much of what I love might be allowed into my work—and, beyond that, and writing completely aside, he taught to me consider how much of what I loved might be allowed into my life. I'm terribly grateful to be invited to introduce to you a man who, though we've never met before tonight, is one of my oldest friends, Kenneth Koch. —Jonathan Lethem To My Twenties How lucky that I ran into you When everything was possible For my legs and arms, and with hope in my heart And so happy to see any woman— O woman! O my twentieth year! Basking in you, you Oasis from both growing and decay Fantastic unheard of nine- or ten-year oasis A palm tree, hey! And then another And another—and water! I'm still very impressed by you. Whither, Midst falling decades, have you gone? Oh in what lucky fellow, Unsure of himself, upset, and unemployable For the moment in any case, do you live now? From my window I drop a nickel By mistake. With You I race down to get it But I find there on The street instead, a good friend, X----- N-----, who says to me Kenneth do you have a minute? And I say yes! I am in my twenties! I have plenty of time! In you I marry, In you I first go to France; I make my best friends In you, and a few enemies. I Write a lot and am living all the time And thinking about living. I loved to frequent you After my teens and before my thirties. You three together in a bar I always preferred you because you were midmost Most lustrous apparently strongest Although now that I look back on you What part have you played? You never, ever, were stingy. What you gave me you gave whole But as for telling Me how best to use it You weren't a genius at that. Twenties, my soul Is yours for the asking You know that, if you ever come back. —Kenneth Koch Reprinted from New Addresses, Knopf, 2000.   On September 18th Walter Mosley introduced Nikky Finney at The Bowery Poetry Club. Walter Mosley and Nikky Finney I was very happy when I was called by the Poetry Society and asked if I would like to present a poet that I admired. Happy for a few reasons: 1) was that I could possibly help to bring the Poetry Society closer to my poetry love Cave Canem; 2) was so I could become better acquainted with a poet that I've admired from afar for a few years now—Nikky Finney; and 3) so I could cast the net of the Poetry Society beyond the seemingly endless borders of New York City. I'll tell you a little bit about myself so that you might understand my choice of poets. I studied poetry for years under the tutelage first of Molly Peacock and then William Matthews—both past presidents of the PSA. I'm a really rotten poet, but I learned a great deal from these two generous souls. I found that understanding the rules and goals of poetry brings one very close to knowing all there is to know about writing fiction. I also realized a few things that have nothing to do with my chosen profession. One thing I discovered was that poetry is telling someone something they know and in doing so you also tell them something they don't know, often by using surprising realization. You might even tell someone something that they once knew but forgot and, doing that, you connect with the unconscious or what someone forgot that they forgot. Poetry contains the magic of language, the ache of truth, and the possibility of entering a world where the rules play hide and seek with your sense of being. A poem, when it works, is a rolling realization of ideas and emotions that bring you somewhere you've never been with a sense of familiarity that opens up a whole new world right there in your mind. Nikky Finney has done all of these things for me. In backyards and back roads, in a redneck's reality, or in me, the only child, now crowded in a small bed with three siblings. She has flung me into an afterbirth of stars and made my stiff bones as loose as jelly. Molly and Bill also taught me that poetry is not an intelligence test. It isn't bound only by verbal smarts or the mathematical mastering of meter. Poetry, they always said, is a gift. Some have the knack of making lines work like colors and notes and shadows and words that fold in on themselves becoming something else as they transform. Some people, like me, and you here tonight, receive that gift Nikky Finney taught me that my suspicions about who I am might be true. She brought me back home to the South and said welcome. She became my guide and my protector and my joy on the dangerous back roads of America's hidden passions. But for all that I don't really know Nikky. Every now and then I find myself in a room and there's a stage and there she is reading poems, pulling me out of myself and bringing me home. Poetry can be many things, maybe it can be anything, but one thing I know is that it can bring you home. That's why when I was asked who would I like to present Nikky Finney was my only choice. She opens all of my doors and windows and airs me out with a cold and truthful wind. —Walter Mosley Metallurgy For Cassandra Wilson She's the one who won't leave us. She sings and cobwebs are strung like salve, like liniment laced, every note forging iron. Her low sulfur notes swim in a buttered brine. Her reddened mouth parachutes around leaping Africans, resuscitating the butterbean breath of Black boys. She keeps bringing up the past like it's a throat, with a muddy Mississippi fish bone stuck crossways. At her Marian Anderson table we always eat our fill. She opens like a furnace (all southern), walks us to the flame (all polite), refuses to enter the pretty waters of the melody without the rest of the scorched story in tow. She sees to the keeping of the shells, studies the motions of Black mermaids; draped in crepe myrtle, waist high in red dirt octaves. She learns it back to us by way of the highway of the ear. Before the end of the song; we check our wrists, we lick our lips, we taste ankle iron. She's the one who won't abandon. On stage, under lights, she's slipping through the thicket again, untying grandmama's hands, every gnarled throat in the room straightens, finally free of scuppernong, wisteria. She enters the room and a valley of blackbirds takes off, the furnace opens and closes, all the copper in us turns toward the magnet of her breath. Every penny we've ever saved in mason jars, for the ritual closing of the eyes, rattles. Her coral indigo humming raises adolescent cousins full term, pouring salt into the historical wound. When her eyes close on the clef of treble, when her head goes back past the beginning of hypnosis, she is seeing things again. The Atlantic ocean's greatest slaughter is scribbled beneath her lids in scarred Black codes. With or without guitar she can pluck you. She enters counterclockwise all the while in Ring Shout time slipping slew-footed mildly like a monk, round and round the floor until gold is discovered in the pan of her feet. In half notes she flutters. She's the one who won't leave us. A girl from Jackson, from that place where in concert daughters are raised only once, given African guitars, then taught the iron songs, instead of bedtime stories, then set upon the world. Songs that tell; How never to leave, How never to leave us, How never to leave well enough alone. —Nikky Finney Reprinted from The World Is Round to be published by InnerLight Books in January 2003. For more info contact www.nikkyfinney.com or www.innerlightpublishing.com.