One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays

200 Pages·1988·6.768 MB·English

by  Kenneth Koch

ONE
THOUSAND
AVANT-GARDE
PLAY
KENN
FPT
$16.95
One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays deals, in a fresh
and poetic way, with history, art, and passion.
It deals, too, with the kaleidoscopic world of
contemporary experience and the modern con-
sciousness beset by a vast variety of modes and
styles. It is a book made up of dramatic flashes
—
and conclusions, of those moments often un-
clear and disconnected, but unquestionably sig-
—
nificant when life seems to mean something.
Kenneth Koch renders these moments as plays:
each insight, each surge of passion or despair,
each moment of hilarity, each perception of his-
torical change, is given a stage and a cast of
characters all its own.
Theater thus conceived and thus freed from
—
convention can breathe again and does so
it
here in 112 brilliant short works about imperial
and modern China, commerce in seventeenth-
century Spain, the history ofcostume, the Avant-
Garde, Wittgenstein, and contemporary Haiti. In
style, Koch’s plays range from the noble vocables
of Agamemnon to the low prose of Mahx Bruddahs;
in form, they are Noh plays, performance art,
Beijing Opera, classical Greek drama, masques,
burlesque skits, ballet. Throughout, one senses
that hallmark of Koch’s art, what one critic de-
scribes as the “liveliness and aesthetic pleasure
that Sartre calls ‘aesthetic joy...that essential
(continued on back flap)
BOSTON
PUBLIC
L1BR?CRY
Digitized by the Internet Archive
2016
in
https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780394569253_0
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Books by Kenneth Koch
POETRY
Poems
A
Ko, or Season on Earth
Permanently
Thank You and OtherPoems
When Sun Go On
the Tries to
The Pleasures ofPeace
TheArt ofLove
The Duplications
The BurningMystery ofAnna in igyi
Days and Nights
Selected Poems: igyo-ig82
On the Edge
Seasons on Earth
FICTION
InterlockingLives
The Red Robins
THEATER
Bertha and Other Plays
A
Change ofHearts
The Red Robins
EDUCATIONAL WORKS
Wishes, Lies, and Dreams:
Teaching Children to Write Poetry
Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?:
Teaching Great Poetry to Children
I Never ToldAnybody
Teaching Poetry Writing in a Nursing Home
Sleeping on the Wing:
An Anthology ofModem Poetry (with kate farrell)
ONE
THOUSAND
AVANT-GARDE
PLAYS
KENNETH
KOCH
AlfredA, Knopf New York ig88