May 17th, 2025
Kenneth Koch Centennial: A Celebration
On the occasion of 100 years since his birth, The Flow Chart Foundation presented daylong Gathering celebrating the legacy of Kenneth Koch featuring talks, readings, screenings, and short performances.
Guest speakers included: Andrew Epstein, Anthony Atlas, David Lehman, Dorothea Lasky, Emily Setina, Jordan Davis, Mitch Sisskind, and Susannah Hollister.
Performers & playwrights included: Corinne Donly, Diane Exavier, Jess Barbagallo, Ry Cook, Erin Courtney, Zach Savich, Karinne Keithley Syers, Kate Kremer, Lisa Clair, Lucas Baisch, Nazareth Hassan, and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff.
Special thanks to the Koch Estate.
REGISTER HERE
For information and videos from our previous gatherings, click on the corresponding year:
2024 Gathering
2023 Gathering
2022 Gathering.
[PROGRAM]
[10am — bagels & coffee]
11am–11:15am — Welcome by Eric Longo, Interim Executive Director, Flow Chart Foundation.
11:15am–12:00pm — Presentation I: Kenneth Koch as Boss and Mentor in the 90s. Andrew Epstein and Jordan Davis will dish about what it was like to work for Kenneth.
Andrew Epstein is the Caldwell Professor of English and the Chair of the English Department at Florida State University. He blogs about the New York School of poets at the website Locus Solus. Jordan Davis is editor of The Nu Review. He is currently helping coordinate a series of events under the title “Kenneth Koch at 100: A Celebration,” of which this symposium is a part.
[12:00pm–1:00pm — lunch on-your-own, see suggestions on reverse side]
1:00pm–1:45pm — Presentation II: Art Collaborations. Anthony Atlas will talk to us about Kenneth Koch’s collaborations with many visual artists such as Joe Brainard, Jim Dine, Alex Katz, Red Grooms, Roy Lichtenstein, Larry Rivers, among others.
Anthony Atlas is an independent consultant and curator based in New York, who primarily works with artists’ estates and foundations, among others: the William N. Copley Estate, Kenneth Koch Literary Estate, and the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.
1:45pm–2:30pm — Presentation III: Making Your Own Days: Kenneth Koch and Education.
Through viewing archival film of Koch teaching poetry to children, as well as excerpts of children reading their wildly imaginative poems written after his teachings, Dorothea Lasky will talk to us about the lessons Koch leaves us with as educators.
Dorothea Lasky is the author of several books of poetry and prose, including the forthcoming MEMORY (Semiotext(e)).
[2:30pm–2:45pm — break]
2:45pm–3:30pm — Presentation IV: Kenneth Koch and Biography. Currently in the process of co-writing Kenneth Koch’s biography, Emily Setina and Susannah Hollister will invite us to play a round of “The End of the Evening,” Koch’s complicated and entertaining 1966-67 board game to reveal moments of biographical thinking in Koch’s vast archive and published writings, moments that show Koch reflecting not just on his past but on how it interacts with his art – and further, show him finding there a powerful catalyst for new artistic directions.
Emily Setina is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and writes about 20th-century literature with a focus on the crossover between literature and other arts. She is coeditor of a forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Gertrude Stein and author of The Writer in the Darkroom, also forthcoming from Oxford. Susannah Hollister is a writer based in central New Jersey and a recent NYPL NEH Long-Term Fellow. Her work focuses on poetry, geography, war, pedagogy, and archives. She has taught at West Point and the University of Texas. Together, Hollister and Setina coedited Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition (Yale, 2012).
3:30pm–4:15pm— Presentation V: Remembering Kenneth Koch. As undergraduate students of Koch at Columbia in the 1960s, David Lehman and Mitch Sisskind will talk to us about the myriad of ways that made Kenneth Koch an outstanding teacher, how his teaching reflects his own achievement as a poet, and his affiliation with other New York School poets such as John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara.
David Lehman (born in New York) and Mitch Sisskind (born in Chicago) write for the Best American Poetry blog and have collaborated on a series of videos in which they discuss great poems.
[4:15pm–5:00pm — break]
5:00pm–6:30pm — 1,000 Avant Garde Plays. A series of readings of Koch plays alongside the works of contemporary playwrights.
Koch 1: The Lost Moment
Lisa Clair: Relational Toxicity
Lucas Baisch: The Satellite
Koch 2: The Animated Room
Zach Savich: The Taxidermy Derby
Nazareth Hassan: Crown Shyness
Koch 3: The Four Atlantics
Rachel Kauder Nalebuff: Tree
Kate Kremer: Our Work
Koch 4: Hippopotamus Migration in Africa
Karinne Keithley Syers: excerpt from
A Tunnel Year
Koch 5: The Yangtse
Jess Barbagallo: Peaches
Diane Exavier: I Love your Hands
Koch 6: The Party
Corinne Donly: The Theater as Taken
These plays will be performed by Erin Courtney, Jess Barbagallo, Ry Cook, Lisa Clair.
7:00-7:30pm — Remembering John Ashbery with poetry readings. Join a small group to walk from Flow Chart on Warren St. to Christ Episcopal Church's churchyard at 431 Union St to commemorate John Ashbery's birthday.
On Kenneth Koch:
Kenneth Koch was born in Cincinnati on February 27, 1925. He studied at Harvard University, where he received a bachelor of arts degree, then attended Columbia University for his PhD.
As a young poet, Koch was known for his association with the New York School of poetry. Originating at Harvard, where Koch met fellow students Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, the New York School derived much of its inspiration from the works of action painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Larry Rivers, whom the poets met in the 1950s after settling in New York City. The poetry of the New York School represented a shift away from the Confessional poets, a popular form of soul-baring poetry that the New York School found distasteful. Instead, their poems were cosmopolitan in spirit and displayed not only the influence of action painting, but of French Surrealism and European avant-gardism in general. In 1970, Ron Padgett and David Shapiro edited and published the first major collection of New York School poetry, An Anthology of New York Poets, which included seven poems by Koch.
Koch’s association with the New York School worked, in effect, as an apprenticeship. Many critics found Koch’s early work obscure, such as Poems (Tibor de Nagy Gallery 1953), and the epic Ko, or A Season on Earth (Grove Press, 1959), yet remarked upon his subsequent writing for its clarity, lyricism, and humor, such as in The Art of Love (Random House, 1975), which was praised as a graceful, humorous book. His other collections of poetry include New Addresses (Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), winner of the Phi Beta Kappa Poetry Award and a finalist for the National Book Award; Straits (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998); One Train and On the Great Atlantic Rainway, Selected Poems 1950–1988, both published by Knopf in 1994, which together earned him the Bollingen Prize in 1995; Seasons of the Earth (Penguin, 1987); On the Edge (Viking Penguin, 1986); Days and Nights (Random House, 1982); The Burning Mystery of Anna in 1951 (Random House, 1979); The Duplications (Random House, 1977); The Pleasures of Peace: And Other Poems (Grove Press, 1969); When the Sun Tries to Go On (Black Sparrow Press, 1969), which was illustrated by Larry Rivers; and Thank You, and Other Poems (Grove Press, 1962).
Koch’s short plays, many of them produced off- and off-off-Broadway, are collected in The Gold Standard: A Book of Plays (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). He has also published Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry (Scribners, 1998); the longer play The Red Robins (1975), a novel; Hotel Lambosa and Other Stories (Coffee House Press, 1993); and several books on teaching children to write poetry, including Wishes, Lies and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry (HarperCollins, 1999) and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012). Koch wrote the libretto for composer Marcello Panni’s The Banquet, which premiered in Bremen, Germany in June 1998. Koch’s collaborations with painters have been the subject of exhibitions at the Ipswich Museum in England and the De Nagy Gallery in New York.
Koch’s numerous honors include 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.
Koch’s teaching career in New York, beginning with three years at Brooklyn College and nine years at the New School, concluded at Columbia, where he taught from 1959 until 2002.
Kenneth Koch lived in New York City, where he was a professor of English at Columbia University. Koch died on July 6, 2002 from leukemia.
About Hudson, NY
About the vibrant, cultural destination of Hudson, NY, from the Hudson, NY Visitor website. A view of Hudson from CondeNast Traveler, visiting Hudson on Vogue, and from the “Adventurous Kate” blog: “The Coolest Small Town in America.”
Most will travel to Hudson, NY by Amtrak train from New York City’s Penn Station (Moynahan Train Hall). The train ride is approximately 2 hours. Tickets can be booked here (you will book tickets for travel from NYP to HUD).
Car travel directions can be found by setting GPS to 348 Warren St, Hudson, NY 12534.
It is recommended that Gathering attendees stay over in Hudson if possible. Hudson has many small hotels though prices can be high during tourist season. Ample apartment and house rentals can be found through AirBnB and VRBO. More affordable hotels (among several more expensive boutique hotels) include the St. Charles Hotel and Hudson Whaler. There are also a wide variety of Bed & Breakfasts in Hudson as well as cheaper establishments in nearby Catskill. Some listings can be found here.
The Flow Chart Space is a relatively short walk from the Hudson Amtrak station. Taxis and Uber are also sometimes available.
Traveling by train for the day from NYC?
Book your Amtrak travel from NYP (New York Penn Station Moynahan Train Hall) to HUD (Hudson, NY).
[pictured below: Warren Street in Hudson NY (left), and The Flow Chart Foundation & Ashbery Resource Center (right, located in the center of town)]
A Partial and Selective List of Local Dining and Takeout Suggestions in Hudson, NY
TAKEOUT & COFFEE
El Sabor de Oaxaca—Mexican take-out with outdoor seating. 9am–9pm Sat./Sun. 364 Warren Street (a few doors uphill from Flow Chart).
The Maker Café—offers delicious coffee, pastries, sandwiches, salads, and soups to stay in or to go. 8am-3pm. 302 Warren Street
Talbot & Arding—gourmet grocery store with excellent takeout prepared sandwiches and salads (order at the counter or find “grab ‘n go” sandwiches in refrigerator case); a few tables inside to eat there. 9am–6pm Sat./Sun. 202 Allen (parallel to Warren Street. Walk down to 3rd, make a left, then continue to Partition Street and make a right to enter from the back at corner of 2nd Street).
Kitty’s Market Café—takeout cafe has excellent egg sandwiches in the morning, and rotisserie chicken plates with sides during the day. May close at 6pm (full restaurant open until 9pm), lovely outdoor garden with bar. 8am—9pm Sat./Sun. 60 S. Front Street (across from Amtrak Station)
Moto Coffee Machine—coffee bar with small selection of sandwiches with tables inside. 8am–6pm Sat. / Sun. 357 Warren Street (across the street from Flow Chart)
Little Rico—vegan offerings and juice bar. 8am–4pm Sat. / Sun.—8am–4pm. 437 Warren Street
WYLDE Hudson—coffee bar & bar with excellent baked goods, indoor and outdoor seating. 8am–6pm Sat. / 8am–5pm Sun. 35 S. 3rd Street
Supernatural—best coffee in town and nice selection of baked goods. 8am–4pm Sat. (closed Sun.) 527 Warren Street
The Juice Branch—juice bar and vegan “bowls.” 9am–4pm Sat. / 9am–2pm Sun. 719 Columbia Street
DINING
Swoon Kitchenbar—American farm to table and bar. Reservations recommended. noon–10pm Sat./noon-9pm Sun. 340 Warren Street
The Red Dot—bar and restaurant, an old standby with lovely “secret garden” in back. 11am–3pm and 5pm–10pm Sat./Sun. 321 Warren Street
Backbar—bar, beer garden, and Malaysian food. 347 Warren Street (across the street). 347 Warren Street
Baba Louis’s—gourmet pizza. noon–3 and 5–9 Sat./Sun. 517 Warren Street
Issan Thai Star—Thai with lovely back garden. Reservations recommended. noon–10pm Sat. / noon–9pm Sun. 41 N. 7th Street (walk uphill to 7th and make a left)
Wunderbar Bistro—sandwiches, pizza, and schnitzel. 11am–9pm Sat. (closed Sun.). 744 Warren Street
Lil’ Deb’s Oasis—destination-worthy Pan-Latin restaurant that doesn’t take reservations but is worth the wait. 5pm–10pm Sat./Sun. 747 Columbia Street (walk uphill on Warren to town square, cross it diagonally and continue on Columbia Street to pink awning)
Le Gamin Country—French café with crepes, sandwiches, omelettes, salads. Cash only. 9am–5pm Sat./Sun. 609 Warren Street
Savona’s Trattoria & Bar—Italian. Reservations recommended. 11:30am–10pm Sat./11am–9pm Sun. 136 Warren Street
Ca’Mea Restaurant—Italian. noon–3pm and 5–9pm Sat./noon–6pm Sun. 214 Warren Street
Kitty's—excellent new American, shared plates, cocktails. 60 S. Front Street (reservations recommended). 60 S. Front Street
Bodega Aguila Real—excellent and inexpensive Mexican food, breakfast and lunch. Eat there or take out and eat in the nearby town square park. 7am–5pm Sat. / 7am–2:30 Sun. 749 Columbia Street.
Casa Latina—excellent and inexpensive El Salvadoran and Mexican food (though a bit of a walk). Limited seating inside, tables outside. 10am–9pm Sat. (closed Sun.). 78 Green Street.
COCKTAIL BARS (in addition to above)
Padrona—craft cocktails. 3pm–midnight Sat./3-10pm Sun. 17 N. 4th Street (walk uphill and make a left)
The Hereafter—craft cocktails and small plates. 4pm–1am Sat. / 4pm–midnight Sun. 721 Columbia Street
The Maker Lounge—almost secret, hotel speakeasy lounge. 3pm–11pm Sat./3pm–10pm Sun. 302 Warren (entrance at N. 3rd Street & Prison Alley)
MICROBREWERIES
Return Brewing—1pm–10pm Sat. / 1pm–8pm Sun. 726 State Street
Upper Depot–noon–10pm Sat. / noon–8pm Sun. 708 State Street (across the street from Return Brewing)
Union Street Brewery—noon–10pm Sat. / noon–8pm Sun. 716 Union Street
Hudson Brewing Company—noon–10pm Sat. / noon–8pm Sun. 99 S 3rd Street (to get there, walk all the way downhill to Front Street, make a left, and pass the train station and industrial tracks, then walk inland)