Kenneth Koch Quotes & Sayings

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

All poetry comes from repetition. — Kenneth Koch

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

AESTHETICS OF COMEDY ASLEEP
Don't wake the clown
Or he may knock you down. — Kenneth Koch

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. — Kenneth Koch

I probably misunderstand misunderstanding itself — Kenneth Koch

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

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

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

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. — Kenneth Koch

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. — Kenneth Koch

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! — Kenneth Koch

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 — Kenneth Koch

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! — Kenneth Koch

Maybe poetry took the life out of both of them,
Idea and friendship. — Kenneth Koch

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. — Kenneth Koch

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. — Kenneth Koch

Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams
1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next
summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.
2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do no know what I am doing.
3
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the
next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.
4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor! — Kenneth Koch

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

It takes a long time to publish a book. — Kenneth Koch

A basso sings, and a soprano answers him.
Then there is thunder in a clear blue sky,
And, from the earth, a sigh: This song is finished. — Kenneth Koch

The uniform of the gladdest malt is its sureness. — Kenneth Koch

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

If you want to know how much I love and care for you, count the waves. — Kenneth Koch

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. — Kenneth Koch

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

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 — Kenneth Koch

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. — Kenneth Koch

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

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. — Kenneth Koch

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. — Kenneth Koch

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

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. — Kenneth Koch

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. — Kenneth Koch

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

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

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. — Kenneth Koch

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced. — Kenneth Koch

This rose became a bandanna, which became a house, which became infused with all passion, which became a hideaway, which became yes I would like to have dinner, which became hands, which became lands, shores, beaches, natives on the stones, staring and wild beasts in the trees, chasing the hats of lost hunters, and all this deserves a tone. — Kenneth Koch

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. — Kenneth Koch

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. — Kenneth Koch

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. — Kenneth Koch

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 — Kenneth Koch

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. — Kenneth Koch

Lies belong in poems — Kenneth Koch

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. — Kenneth Koch

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. — Kenneth Koch

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

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. — Kenneth Koch

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

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

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

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

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 — Kenneth Koch

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