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.
I took a course at Harvard with Delmore Schwartz, a writing course, and there were about 30 of us... I don't really see vast movements full of wonderful poets all over the place.
I suppose that... it's really hard to tell... I mean, certainly the brightness, the dash, the excitement, the sort of self-confidence of the hand on the canvas-all that was exciting. It's hard to say how it influenced my poetry.
I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.
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.
Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.
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.
All poetry comes from repetition.
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.
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.