Scott Keeney

Scott Keeney has published six books, most recently Wahoo Sunset (2019). His poems have appeared in BlazeVOX, Court Green, and Mudlark, among other journals. He lives in Connecticut.

A Whimsical Elegy of Sorts

Not gonna lie, man, I was robbed, and somehow
I’m the one ended up in the jailhouse of what
could have been. I’m out now, just this year,
but it was a long fucking time. What am I
talking about? I’ll tell you what I’m talking
about. I’m talking about my sophomore year
at Columbia in the fall, if that ain’t too fitting,
of 1991. Not truly a year, but half a semester
with a poetry class that was bliss—no joke.
No other professor, no one else I ever met,
stoked the fire of poetry inside me like Kenneth
Koch did for those handful of raucous weeks.
I mean, the whole school year would be nuts,
with constant protests on the Low Library steps
over race- and gender-based discrimination
in proposed changes to admissions policy
and then with a strike by District 65 of the UAW
which represented food and office workers
as the university had been slotting minorities
into lower-paying grades than their white
counterparts. But Koch was an incomparable
corkscrew to the cork in the jug of the everyday.
The main text for his class was Sleeping on
the Wing—I devoured the whole thing within
the first week. I had read most of the poets
at least a little bit, but this was my introduction
to Mayakovsky, and it was the first time, not
of course the last, I got into Gertrude Stein.
He was inspiring, declaiming Whitman from atop
his teacher’s desk, like the Robin Williams
character from Dead Poets Society but without
the sentimentality. To stick my neck back
into the jailhouse for a second, how could
a young poet not get hung up in what he might
have got—insights about the art and a little bit
of connection—out of more time to attend
to such a warm, passionate, brilliant mouth?
And if he taught me anything in those few weeks:
don’t end it there on that broad generalization,
and besides I’ve yet to divulge why the big C
grabbed me by the shoulders and booted
my ass out the campus door. It was, after all,
something far more serious than scrawling
an obscenity or two in the dusty film across
my dorm window: yes, they caught me
bare-bottomed in bed with Jack Kerouac’s ghost
or a copy of his Mexico City Blues anyway
and a look in my eyes that said Too far gone
which you can still see if you squint really hard.