Earliest Ashbery & Koch

"Poem [Though we seek always the know absolute]" and "Lost Cove" were among the earliest of John Ashbery's poems to be published (in Poetry, Novbember 1945, pp. 66-67). The poems are published under the name Joel Michael Symington! According to an unpublished interview by Bill Berkson quoted in David Kermani's Bibliography of Ashbery, these poems were submitted under this name by a "so-called friend" from Deerfield Academy (Ashbery's six earliest poems had already been published in the Deerfield Scroll). These same poems were submitted under his own name a couple of months later and they were returned by Poetry. According to Ashbery: "I felt very upset, not only because he had pirated my poems but also because I had submitted them myself and thus gained a bad name with Poetry Magazine. I felt that I would never be able to publish there under my own name. Also, it seemed a real pity to be just beginning to write poetry and have this success that wasn't a success at all. Now I find those poems kind of embarassing--in fact, I'm glad they weren't published under my own name." The Kermani bibliography does not identify the friend by name. Why not? My hunch is that in fact, either Ashbery submitted them himself under the pseudonym or was happy enough to have someone else submit them. Perhaps he then forgot and resubmitted under his own name. In any case, it seems quite amazing for a young poet just out of prep school to have poems accepted by a national magazine (under any name). The poems themselves are obviously influenced by Auden, but some lines have the wackily perplexed and mysterious tone of the poet's later work ("The trees/Tore our hearts back with them from the canoe. . ."). Twenty year old Kenneth Koch also had three poems in this issue ("Poem for My Twentieth Birthday," "Ladies for Dinner, Saipan" and "The Trip from California"). All the other contributors of poetry to this issue are pretty much forgotten, with the exception of John Frederick Nims. Here is Koch's "The Trip from California" :

"In the shoe-fixery and on the train
each had it always perfect within him,
the multitude of coiled pleasure
with a pulse like wanderlust. . . .

It was amazing, as though you could place your hand in a ripe
fruit and withdraw a beautiful afternoon. "

The shoe-fixery and the last line are typical wonderfully zany Kenneth.