Best 35 quotes of Kenneth Koch on MyQuotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

It takes a long time to publish a book.

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 was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother's side of the family in general were interested in literature.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

The subject matter of the stories on the surface... there seem to be a number of stories about travel.

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.

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!

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

You can't be too influenced by a great poet. You simply have to live through it.

A basso sings, and a soprano answers him. Then there is thunder in a clear blue sky, And, from the earth, a sigh: “This song is finished.

AESTHETICS OF INTEGRITY For every star in the sky Someone is holding his ground.

AESTHETICS OF OPERA Don’t sing an aria To someone who can’t Sing one back.

AESTHETICS OF THE AESTHETICIAN What is the aesthetician But a mule hitched to the times?

What I want you to do for me is this: I want to understand certain things and tell them to others. To do it, I have to get them right, so they are hard to resist. Stay with me until I can do this. Afterwards, you can go where you want.