God Bless You, Dr. Mayhew

If America's greatest living poet dies, does he (or she) become America's 200th greatest dead poet? In the case of Kenneth Koch, I'd argue he's STILL the greatest living poet. I'm reading the Collected Poems from start to finish. I'm almost to Thank You and Other Poems. It doesn't include Ko or The Duplications, or When the Sun Tries to Go On or 1,001 Avant-Garde Plays, which I usually read as a book of poems that happens to be in dramatic form. Even so, it comes in at more than 700 pages. Koch, along with other notorious co-conspirators, created a new language for poetry in the mid-century. New Languages. Koch's is very much the language of 2005, the language of flarf, of the New Sincerity, of Anselm Berrigan or Jordan Davis. Is there a better attack on the SoQ than "Fresh Air"? From The Pleasures of Peace to Drew Gardner's "Chicks Dig War," I see an unbroken line.