Kenneth Koch's short poem " Permanently " (1960) paints a simple, evocative portrait of romantic longing through the playful use of an absurd metaphor: units of grammar personified as characters in a poem. While the poem is enjoyable to read (especially when taking a seemingly more personal turn in the final stanza), “Permanently” also demonstrates the effectiveness of using unusual tropes to transform a potentially tired subject into a sparkling example of modern lyric poetry. What might have been trite, in the hands of a lesser poet, becomes instead a simultaneously humorous and poignant poem, filled with an elusive sense of reflexivity and a fresh application of language.
Two Structures, Entangled as One
In a later poem, "The Art of Poetry," Koch asserts that a good poem needs both people and an environment if it hopes to create a effective, internal dynamic. But more importantly, he continues, it needs life and compassion. The skeletal foundation on which "Permanently" creates these attributes is really no more than a simple scene and its aftermath: young men, clustered in a street, who catch sight of a beautiful young woman and are then beset with a sense of hopeless longing. In its simplicity, the 'environment' of this poem recalls brief scenes from a commercial Hollywood or Broadway production (i.e. it is practically a cliché), but a scenario like this also elicits genuine emotional resonance: as readers we know this feeling of sexual/romantic allure and the subsequent longing. The effectiveness of the scenario (when handled with a light touch) is such that it only needs to be briefly established in order to color the entire poem, almost surreptitiously, with heartfelt experience.
Building from this near-narrative context, Koch does the unexpected: he personifies grammatical units of written language to serve as characters within the scene. In fact, the personification is striking enough that an over-used, sentimental context is pushed to the background where it can work unhindered by the overly-serious scoff of a discriminating reader. Moreover, it provides levity and curiosity, rounding off the emotions portrayed in this poem with a deeper sense of life experience. Beyond these two structural distinctions, the poet’s handling of language and trope also reflects back on his own experience of creating a poem – a romantic affair, filled with longing, life, frustrations, and humor. If a poem’s greatest need is for the infusion of life experience, Koch accomplishes this by counterposing the playfulness of language to the simplicity of felt emotion as a means of creating dynamic tension at the heart of the poem. Considered as different categorical structures at work within the same poem, we, as readers, can experience the way these structures reflexively speak between themselves, inviting us into the conversation as a third dynamic at work in our reception of the verse and its meaningful content.
Examining the Juxtaposition of Stanzas
As previously mentioned, the romantic scenario is only briefly established, in the relatively short first stanza, with an aftermath/effect-of-the-encounter masterfully sketched in the equally short third stanza. Intervening between these two is the much longer third stanza in which Koch takes a detour, framing irrelevant examples of spoken dialogue between quotes while unexpectedly setting the sentences off as objects for our examination - as opposed to contextual dialogue, which they clearly are not. It’s a simultaneously playful and serious device that again distances a reader from the romantic context of the poem while, at the same time, deepening the reflexive exploration of language at the poem’s creative core. With three sentences set aside as objects, we’re invited into their structures to examine the differing uses of language, the application of adjectives (or their lack), and the counterposed examples of expressive voice in writing.
The fourth and final stanza, however, takes a completely different turn, transforming the preceding elements of the poem into a metaphor applied by the poem’s speaker (a rather late introduction of the first person into the poem) as he addresses an anonymous lover. Drawing on the emotive playfulness of everything that came before, Koch brings the poem to a close with a thoroughly romantic statement of enduring love and devotion - a statement that might not have been nearly so complete (or palatable) if the rest of the poem had taken itself too seriously. For instance, if "the Adjective" had played too large of a role (both literally and figuratively), a poem like this could easily drown in its own pathos.
Despite its fully satisfying conclusion, “Permanently” accomplishes what all good poems hope to accomplish: it instigates a return to the poem for multiple reads. If Koch were to have merely concentrated on a heartfelt depiction of a long delayed kiss, it might have been a pleasant poem, but it would also, perhaps, have been equally forgettable - a poem that stirs emotion without stimulating anything beyond a smile or, conversely, a cynical scoff. Instead, by playing with references to the language of its own creation, Koch invites us deeper into the poem itself, to examine its “characters” both as personifications and as units of speech - to see if their function within the poem’s language is similar to their function within its brief narrative.
On Further Reads
Focusing on the depicted allure of “the Adjective” and a later statement that “the Adjective is lost in the sentence,” a reader can find additional ideas to contemplate: the function of poetic language; how it works; what secrets it might reveal under close scrutiny; what ‘life’ it might enact if experienced in the full glory of its living presence. Because that’s what a successful poem does: it enacts a living (dynamic) presence of language and can be experienced by any reader intrepid enough to enter into the depths of its charm. When a poem like “Permanently” walks by, it is difficult to resist being “struck, moved, changed.” If good poetry didn't accomplish that, why else would we read it?
More on Kenneth Koch (and the milieu in which he wrote): The New York School of Poets
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