Kenneth Koch
Kenneth Koch
Kenneth Kochwas an American poet, playwright, and professor, active from the 1950s until his death at age 77. He was a prominent poet of the New York School of poetry, a loose group of poets including Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery that eschewed contemporary introspective poetry in favor of an exuberant, cosmopolitan style that drew major inspiration from travel, painting, and music...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth27 February 1925
CountryUnited States of America
Kenneth Koch quotes about
You can't be too influenced by a great poet. You simply have to live through it.
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.
I certainly have the feeling that I'm the same person even though I've changed a great deal.
Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur.
As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.
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.
If you want to know how much I love and care for you, count the waves.
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.
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 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 seems everything is so full of possibilities one can hardly take it all in.
The subject matter of the stories on the surface... there seem to be a number of stories about travel.
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!
Poetry, which is written while no one is looking, is meant to be looked at for all time.