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
As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.
It's enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work.
When you get an idea, go and write. Don't waste it in conversation.
It takes a long time to publish a book.
You can't be too influenced by a great poet. You simply have to live through it.
All poetry comes from repetition.
The subject matter of the stories on the surface... there seem to be a number of stories about travel.
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.
Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.
It's a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling.
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 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.
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.