Kenneth Koch Quotes

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

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

You aren't just the age you are. You are all the ages you ever have been!

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.

All poetry comes from repetition.

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.

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

Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.