Beats and NY School

Gregory Corso’s “Marriage” and Kenneth Koch’s “To My Twenties” are two poems that caught my attention with their similarities. While Corso’s work was from the Beats generation and Koch’s from the New York School, they brought about similar emotions when reading. “Marriage” made me think about what will come in the future. My initial reaction was a feeling of uncertainty. I do not know what is in store for me down the road and marriage in particular is something that I have not attempted just yet. This poem also poses many questions that I might not have thought about until I was planning on actually getting married such as, “what will it be like after 10 or 20 years of being married?” By the end of the poem I concluded that I can only imagine these things and I decided that I will just have to find out in the future. “To My Twenties” was very similar in that is made me contemplate a personal time period, more specifically the present. My initial reaction when reading this poem was a feeling of helplessness. In the poem Koch writes as if he wishes he could go back in time to relive the carefree and joyful part of his life. The feeling of helplessness was replaced with a sense of appreciation by the end of the poem. This was due to the fact that unlike Koch, I am still in my twenties. I have never thought of my twenties as being the best time of my life or life to come until reading this piece. I am now hoping that my perspective will continue to evolve so that maybe every decade of my life will be the one that people wish they could go back to. While these poems have many unique qualities they are both pieces that inspired me to consider the future, as well as enjoy the present.