The Banquet: The Complete Plays, Films, and Librettos

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"Theater such as Kenneth Koch cannot be simply paraphrased, and presents to the audience the classic Mennipean challenge: to ponder, to mull it over, to think."Mac Wellman

The Banquet brings together 144 plays, ten screenplays, and five operas spanning more than five decades of experimental work from a writer John Ashbery has called "simply the best we have." Witty, provocative, and playful, Kenneth Koch's work draws on poetry, musicals, improvisational comedy, satire, and other forms for their inspiration and touches on subjects ranging from the silly to the sublime.

Kenneth Koch (19252002), known for his association with the New York School of poetry, wrote many collections of poetry, fiction, plays, and nonfiction. His books include Seasons on Earth, On the Edge, Thank You and Other Poems, The Art of Love, One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays, Hotel Lambosa, and The Collected Fiction, and several books on teaching children how to write poetry. Koch was awarded numerous honors, including the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Library of Congress in 1996, as well as awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Ingram-Merrill foundations. In 1996 he was inducted as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Kenneth Koch lived in New York City, where he was professor of English at Columbia University.

Reviews

The Banquet succeeds in spades, giving us an entire 'world of pure experience,' to borrow William James's phrase, one that is just waiting to be brought to life." --Los Angeles Review of Books "Some writers excel in more than one form ... the 600-plus pages of The Banquet suggest that the late poet Kenneth Koch had two right hands."--New York Observer "[T]he plays abolish time and space... If we lived in Koch's Arcady, the text seems to ask, might we live forever" --Poetry Magazine "[These plays] are as funny and inventive as Koch could be. Count him among the few to move beyond Gertrude Stein in establishing alternative performance texts." --Rain Taxi Review "These are bursts of charming joy, mystery, surprise and delight animated by a love of language and a deep belief in its possibilities... The Banquet is the perfect title for this collection, a book to be read and reread." --BODY

Author Bio

Kenneth Koch (1925 -- 2002), known for his association with the New York School of poetry, wrote many collections of poetry, fiction, plays, and nonfiction. His books include Seasons on Earth, On the Edge, Thank You and Other Poems, The Art of Love, One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays, Hotel Lambosa, and The Collected Fiction, as well as several books on teaching children to write poetry. Koch was awarded numerous honors, including the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Library of Congress in 1996, as well as awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Ingram-Merrill foundations. In 1996 he was inducted as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Kenneth Koch lived in New York City, where he was professor of English at Columbia University.