“Amnesia”: A Poem by Jeffrey Harrison ’80

AMNESIA

In my dream, someone mentioned
“Kenneth Koch’s great poem ‘Amnesia.’”
“I don’t remember that one,” I said,
but suddenly, as though projected on the air,
I could see the first few lines.

I decided to go home and find
the rest of the poem but couldn’t remember
where home was. When I woke up,
of course I was home, but I didn’t
remember those lines from the poem,

and when I looked through Kenneth’s books
I didn’t find a poem called “Amnesia”
or even “To Amnesia,” one of his odes,
which might have begun, “I’m sorry I forgot
to write a poem about you/ until now!”

Remembering that the internet
remembers everything (supposedly)
I googled “kenneth koch + amnesia”
and found a poem entitled “Amnesia”
in the online magazine Jacket

by the Australian poet John Kinsella
but dedicated to Kenneth Koch. Weird—
was I still dreaming? (No.)
I liked the poem but couldn’t help thinking
it wasn’t quite as much fun

as Kenneth Koch’s “Amnesia” would be—
a poem that exists only in my dream
and wherever dreams go when you
wake up; a poem whose first few lines
I briefly knew but can’t retrieve,

though I can picture him writing it
in his headlong scrawl, and I won’t forget
that, in my dream, someone
(though I can’t remember who)
called it great, unforgettable.

—First published in The Threepenny Review.

I don’t remember anything about writing this poem. Just kidding — I remember everything. And everything that happens in the poem really happened: having the dream, searching for the phantom Koch poem titled “Amnesia” and even finding, online, the John Kinsella poem bearing that title and (incredibly) dedicated to Kenneth Koch. That sequence of events exhilarated me in much the same way that reading Koch’s poetry often does, propelling me through the first draft.

As a freshman at the College in 1976–77, I took Koch’s yearlong “Imaginative Writing” class (he didn’t like the term creative writing). Of the 12 students in the class, four of us went on to publish books of poetry — the other three are Stephen Ackerman ’79, Jessica Greenbaum BC’79 and Daniel Meltz ’78 — and we’ve remained friends ever since. It was a thrill to be in a classroom with Koch, who, among other things, could speak fluently off the top of his head in sestinas, pantoums or ottava rima.

In the late ’90s, when I was teaching at Phillips Academy, Kenneth came to Andover to do a reading and meet the student writers. I had the pleasure and honor of introducing his reading and hanging out with him during his visit. At that point he seemed like the youngest 73-year-old in the history of the world. Sadly, he would only live a few more years.

Not long after the poem was published in The Threepenny Review, the composer Scott Wheeler, who studied with Koch’s friend and collaborator Virgil Thomson, set it to music, and the song recently had its premiere — serendipitous timing, since 2025 is Kenneth Koch’s centenary.

Jeffrey Harrison ’80 was born in 1957, in Cincinnati (also the hometown of Kenneth Koch, the subject of his poem). Harrison’s six books of poetry include The Singing Underneath, a National Poetry Series winner; Into Daylight, winner of the Dorset Prize; and Between Lakes, selected as a 2021 Must-Read Book by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. His poems have appeared in three previous editions of Best American Poetry. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bogliasco Foundation, among other honors.

Poem and statement have been reprinted from Best American Poetry 2025, edited by Terence Winch, with series editor David Lehman ’70.