Kenneth Koch Quotes

Some of the French surrealists at the beginning of the war had come over to New York and they brought out this magazine. It was a big, glossy magazine full of surrealist things.

Politics is there the way men and women are there, the way the Atlantic Ocean is there. Sometimes I’ve written about politics specifically, I mean about politics as it’s understood on television and in newspapers.

I’ve had trouble with criticism, I guess. It’s hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

It’s enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work.

I don’t think the nature of my poetry is satirical or even ironic, I think it’s essentially lyrical but again I don’t know if it’s my position to say what my poetry is like.

You aren’t just the age you are. You are all the ages you ever have been!

I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it’s not.

I certainly have the feeling that I’m the same person even though I’ve changed a great deal.

It seems everything is so full of possibilities one can hardly take it all in.

As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that… That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is.

You can’t be too influenced by a great poet. You simply have to live through it.

When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven’t experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!

I was excited by what my painter friends were doing, and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too, and that was a wonderful little, fizzy sort of world.

Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.

The subject matter of the stories on the surface… there seem to be a number of stories about travel.

All poetry comes from repetition.

Poetry, which is written while no one is looking, is meant to be looked at for all time.

I got married, other people went off. We had sort of another public-we were our entire readership for many years, and we were very excited by each other.

I love painting and music, of course. I don’t know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I’ve certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn’t read it until I was in my late 20s.

It’s a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling.

I’m a writer who likes to be influenced.

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother’s side of the family in general were interested in literature.

I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.

Once I start writing about something, it goes off rather fast, and sometimes details which might be interesting such as what the room looked like or what somebody said that was not exactly on the same subject tend to get lost.

When you get an idea, go and write. Don’t waste it in conversation.

Certainly, it seems true enough that there’s a good deal of irony in the world… I mean, if you live in a world full of politicians and advertising, there’s obviously a lot of deception.

Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one’s own connoisseur.

I thought, ‘There are a lot of poets who have the courage to look into the abyss, but there are very few who have the courage to look happiness in the face and write about it,’ which is what I wanted to be able to do.

Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.