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
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.
I mean, there are excesses all over the place. People are always saying what are the different schools of American poetry.
As charming as old people are, one doesn't want to have a 75-year-old baby. One wants to make something new.
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.
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.
Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.
All poetry comes from repetition.
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.
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.
Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.
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.