K, Alan Kaufman to Stanley Kunitz

“American Spoken Word Poet” Alan Kaufman’s personal site has disappeared, but he’s still everywhere on the Web, as poet, editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry & trumpeter of the Spoken Word movement.

John Keats (1795 - 1821) was of the second generation of Romantic poets, after Wordsworth and Coleridge , and he was a city boy, spending most of his short life in London before he moved to Rome in a vain attempt to combat the tuberculosis that killed him a short time later. The house in Hampstead where he lived, fell in love with the girl...

At John-Keats.com, you’ll find not only his biography, his poems and letters, but an active Keats community in the discussion forum. His portrait, an image of a handwritten letter, poem manuscripts, a photo of Keats House in Rome and audio readings of several of Keats’ poems are in the British Library’s Keats exhibition.

The unstoppable Robert Kelly & his collaborator, German conceptualist poet & chief mischief maker Schuldt, have produced Unquell the Dawn Now, a homeophonic destruction of Friedrich Hölderlin’s Am Quell der Donau. Not to be missed, if you ever have the chance to see his operatic rendition of it live.

Wonderful poet who died too young (but not before writing that most lovely & enduring prayer, “Let Evening Come”), Jane Kenyon has since been eloquently memorialized by her husband Donald Hall -- see Life at Eagle Pond, an online exhibit about their life together from the University of New Hampshire’s Special Collections. Several of her poems are also at Mark Mosko’s Secret Poem Page.

Robert Kidney is a poet, a rocker, a bluesman. With his brother Jack he leads the Numbers Band aka 15 60 75, out of Cleveland, Ohio. “Modern is just old hat chromed. . .”

Australian poet John Kinsella hosted Poetryetc2, a lively international poetry discussion list, and he is the editor of Salt. In 2001 he came to the U.S. to teach at Kenyon College in Ohio.

Poet of wit, serious whimsy & broad range, Kenneth Koch died in 2002 at the age of 77. His poems online include “One Train May Hide Another,” “Talking To Patrizia” & “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams.”

There is no better place to begin getting to know Kenneth Koch than Jacket Magazine’s collection of memories, poems & tributes from many of the poets who knew him or studied with him.

Koch was not only a beloved poet, but a pioneer in teaching children with poetry -- see the excerpts from his Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? in the Academy of American Poets’ exhibit, “Serious Play: Reading Poetry With Children.”

One of our correspondents chose Komunyakaa’s as favorite performance in 2000: “He’s a very musical reader, and his ‘earthy’ voice lends itself to the material he reads. Sort of like wooden windchimes and a tenor sax.” Komunyakaa’s poem “Facing It” is one of the videos at the Favorite Poem Project.

You can hear Komunyakaa read such poems as “Yellowjackets” & “Slamdunk” in RealAudio at the Internet Poetry Archive, and there’s a collection of interviews, quotes & commentary at Modern American Poetry.

Named U.S. Poet Laureate in 2004, Ted Kooser is a Midwesterner through & through, born in Iowa and living in Nebraska, “the great middle.” He is a people’s poet who worked as an insurance executive and rewrote his poems if they were not accessible to his secretary (who was not educated beyond high school).

Four of Kooser’s poems are in Billy Collins’ Poetry 180 project, and Poemhunter.com has five Kooser poems.

Sharon Kourous teaches high school English, is a member of Zeugma Poetry Workshop, & has work appearing in such classy places as Piedmont Literary Review & The Lyric. You can read her poems online at Poetry Magazine & The Melic Review.

Stanley Kunitz (1905 - 2006) was laureate, gardener, founder of the Fine Arts Work Center & Poets House, teacher & beloved mentor to generations of younger poets.

Kunitz was our nonagenarian Poet Laureate in 2000, and he appears twice in the Favorite Poem Project videos, once as reader of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur” and once for his own poem, “Hornworm: Autumn Lamentation.”

One of our Museletter correspondents gathered a collection of Kunitz quotations on the making of poetry when he was named Laureate in 2000. There’s also an interesting 2001 interview with Kunitz posted in RealAudio at NPR, and a 1997 interview at AAP.