🏴From Adam Philips essay ‘Against Inhibition’:

“In his book The ‘Last Avant-Garde’, David Lehman tells an Instructive story about Kenneth Koch's becoming a poet - acquiring the sense that it was poetry he was writing and wanted to write - in Ohio in the 1940s. It depended a great deal, accordling to Koch, on a teacher he was fortunate enough to have had in high school called Katherine Lappa. 'Lappa inspired him to a lifelong love of poetry,' Lehman writes,

when she told him it was OK to allow his anti-social impulses into his poetry. The sensuality and violence that the boy felt he had to repress in his daily life found their way into the stream of consciousness writing he set himself to do. In one piece he wrote of the urge to 'step on a baby's head because it is so big and round and soft like a balloon, and would go squash under my feet'. Katherine Lappa remained unflappable. 'That's very good,' she said, 'that's just what you should be feeling - part of what you're feeling. Keep doing it.' Koch would come to regard this as an 'instance of the benevolent influence that Freud has had on my life. I was able to enjoy the benefit of a teacher who in Cincinnati in 1942 had undergone psychoanalysis.'”🏴

📸Card for Robert Mapplethorpe’s duel exhibitions, Pictures, at Holly Solomon Gallery (flower pictures) and The Kitchen (sex pictures) February, 1977. 6.25 x 10in.