Kenneth Koch Quotes

Do not be defeated by the
Feeling that there is too much for you to know. That
is a myth of the oppressor. You are
Capable of understanding life. And it is yours alone.
And only this time.

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 probably misunderstand misunderstanding itself

You have enchanted me
with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language

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.

Isn't this history, and aren't we a couple of ruins?
Is Carthage Pompeii? is the pillow the bed? is the sun
What glues our heads together? O midnight! O midnight!

Poetry is a deliberate attempt to make language suggestive and imprecise.

I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut / That will solve a murder case unsolved for years / Because the murderer left it in the snow beside a window / Through which he saw her head, connecting with / Her shoulders by a neck, and laid a red /Roof in her heart. For this we lived a thousand years; / For this we love, and we live because we love, we are not /Inside a bottle, thank goodness!
from To You

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.

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

All poetry comes from repetition.

Write poetry as if you were in love. If you are always in love you will not always write the same poem, but if you are never in love, you may.
- from My Olivetti Speaks

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.

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

AESTHETICS OF THE AESTHETICIAN
What is the aesthetician
But a mule hitched to the times?

Summer in the trees! "It is time to strangle several bad poets." /
The yellow hobbyhorse rocks to and fro, and from the chimney / Drops the Strangler! The white and pink roses are slightly agitated by the struggle, / But afterwards beside the dead "poet" they cuddle up comfortingly against their vase. They are safer now, no one will compare them to the sea. /
Here on the railroad train, one more time, is the Strangler. / He is going to get that one there, who is on his way to a poetry reading. / Agh! Biff! A body falls to the moving floor.

AESTHETICS OF AVANT-GARDE THEATRE
Make the stage an actor
Make an actor the stage.

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

I don't know where you'd find such a magazine." ~ on the stipulations set by a benefactor to the Harvard Advocate that the staff contain no Jews, homosexuals, or drunks

It takes a long time to publish a book.

I wasn't ready
For you.
I understood nothing
Seemingly except my feelings
You were whirling
In your life
I was keeping
Everything in my head
To Marina

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

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!

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

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.

The uniform of the gladdest malt is its sureness.

Lies belong in poems

AESTHETICS OF OPERA
Don't sing an aria
To someone who can't
Sing one back.

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.

AESTHETICS OF INTEGRITY
For every star in the sky
Someone is holding his ground.

One trouble with a kind of falsely therapeutic and always reassuring attitude that it is easy to fall into with old people, is the tendency to be satisfied with too little.