Kenneth Koch Quotes (43 Quotes)


    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!

    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.

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

    One idea may hide another: Life is simple
    Hide Life is incredibly complex, as in the prose of Gertrude Stein
    One sentence hides another and is another as well.

    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.



    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 think it's worth making an effort to write about certain important things, as I made an effort to write about the war.

    As charming as old people are, one doesn't want to have a 75-year-old baby. One wants to make something new.

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

    Also, I liked John Cage's music. I liked it for its craziness, the use of silence, the boldness-anything to get me away from writing about... I don't know what academic poets write about.

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

    I think my poetry was very influenced-it seems almost dumb to say it-but it was very influenced by Shakespeare. Very early on I read his plays... and, I don't know, I started speaking in blank verse at a rather early age.

    When I was 18 years old I had to go in the Army-it was World War II-and I didn't write very much at first, but when I was actually in combat in the Philippines I managed to write a few poems. It was reassuring to be able to write poems while I was in this terrible war.

    In a family one sister may conceal another,
    So, when you are courting, it's best to have them all in view
    Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another.

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

    My poetry changed when I was 15 years old. One of my uncles, Leo, had written poetry when he was a young man, and he took me down to the family business and he opened a safe and showed me some poems he'd written when he was 19. He also gave me a book of the collected poems of Shelley. And I still have that book.

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

    I suppose that... it's really hard to tell... I mean, certainly the brightness, the dash, the excitement, the sort of self-confidence of the hand on the canvas-all that was exciting. It's hard to say how it influenced my poetry.

    I discovered modern poetry I think quite late, when I was 17, through an anthology, a Louis Untermeyer anthology. Of course, I was crazy about modern poetry as soon as I discovered it.

    I saw a way that I could write fiction about my own experience and things that I've done and imagined. I was very interested to be writing these stories because I found that, like a certain kind of magnet, writing prose picked up details that my poetry had never been able to pick up.

    We used to live there, my wife and I, but
    One life hid another life.

    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 also have travelled in Africa, so there are about seven or eight stories about Africa. I've also been to China, so there are five or six stories about China, and some about Mexico. I was a little surprised after I'd completed the book to see how many took place in other countries.

    I mean, there are excesses all over the place. People are always saying what are the different schools of American poetry.

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

    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.

    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.

    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.

    Some people who write about poetry seem to have had trouble with my poetry because it is sometimes comic. 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.

    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.


    It's not that I was indifferent ot the horrors of war, because that's what inspired the poem to a large extent, but I couldn't write about them.

    As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

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

    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.

    I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.

    I simply was ignoring the fact that The Waste Land indeed made it seem to many poets that one had to be depressed-not that The Waste Land is a bad poem, it's a wonderful poem-that one had to feel despair, that one had to think that the modern world was te

    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.

    Here I was in my 20s, and life seemed to me so exciting and full of girls and gardens and steamships and drinks and tennis games and countries and cathedrals... I mean, it seemed absurd to be writing these drab, depressed little poems. I knew there were things like death and poverty and injustice, but they weren't everything.

    I took a course at Harvard with Delmore Schwartz, a writing course, and there were about 30 of us... I don't really see vast movements full of wonderful poets all over the place.

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

    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.


    More Kenneth Koch Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Literature - Poetry - War & Peace - Books - Family - World - Poets - Writing - People - Man - Politics - Place - Work & Career - Music - America - Life - Advertising - Identity - Television - View All Kenneth Koch Quotations

    Related Authors


    Shel Silverstein - Emily Dickinson - Thomas Middleton - Robert Burns - Max Jacob - Jorge Luis Borges - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - Henrik Ibsen - Dylan Thomas - Aristophanes


Authors (by First Name)

A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M
N - O - P - Q - R - S - T - U - V - W - X - Y - Z

Other Inspiring Sections