Kenneth Koch Quotes

Kenneth Koch once said, “You aren’t just the age you are. You are all the ages you ever have been!

You have enchanted me with a single kiss Which can never be undone Until the destruction of language

I wasn’t ready For you. I understood nothing Seemingly except my feelings You were whirling In your life I was keeping Everything in my head "To Marina

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

Do not be defeated by the Feeling that there is too much for you to know. That is a myth of the oppressor. You are Capable of understanding life. And it is yours alone. And only this time.

Maybe poetry took the life out of both of them, Idea and friendship.

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.

Lies belong in poems

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

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.

I probably misunderstand misunderstanding itself

I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut / That will solve a murder case unsolved for years / Because the murderer left it in the snow beside a window / Through which he saw her head, connecting with / Her shoulders by a neck, and laid a red /Roof in her heart. For this we lived a thousand years; / For this we love, and we live because we love, we are not /Inside a bottle, thank goodness! ----- from "To You

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 don't know where you'd find such a magazine." ~ on the stipulations set by a benefactor to the Harvard Advocate that the staff contain no Jews, homosexuals, or drunks

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

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

Write poetry as if you were in love. If you are always in love you will not always write the same poem, but if you are never in love, you may. - from "My Olivetti Speaks

Elegy on Toy Piano" For Kenneth Koch You don't need a pony to connect you to the unseeable or an airplane to connect you to the sky. Necessary it is to love to live and there are many manuals but in all important ways one is on one's own. You need not cut off your hand. No need to eat a bouquet. Your head becomes a peach pit. Your tongue a honeycomb. Necessary it is to live to love, to charge into the burning tower then charge back out and necessary it is to die. Even for the trees, even for the pony connecting you to what can't be grasped. The injured gazelle falls behind the herd. One last wild enjambment. Because of the sores in his mouth, the great poet struggles with a dumpling. His work has enlarged the world but the world is about to stop including him. He is the tower the world runs out of. When something becomes ash, there's nothing you can do to turn it back. About this, even diamonds do not lie.

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.

The very existence of poetry should make us laugh. What is that all about? What is it for?

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

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.

Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.” / The yellow hobbyhorse rocks to and fro, and from the chimney / Drops the Strangler! The white and pink roses are slightly agitated by the struggle, / But afterwards beside the dead “poet” they cuddle up comfortingly against their vase. They are safer now, no one will compare them to the sea. / Here on the railroad train, one more time, is the Strangler. / He is going to get that one there, who is on his way to a poetry reading. / Agh! Biff! A body falls to the moving floor.

Isn't this history, and aren't we a couple of ruins? Is Carthage Pompeii? is the pillow the bed? is the sun What glues our heads together? O midnight! O midnight!

AESTHETICS OF AVANT-GARDE THEATRE Make the stage an actor Make an actor the stage.

AESTHETICS OF COMEDY ASLEEP Don’t wake the clown Or he may knock you down.

The uniform of the gladdest malt is its sureness.

And then there is the poet Kenneth Koch, who while travelling in Kenya came to a railroad crossing at which this sign was posted: One train may hide another. This was meant, of course, as a warning to drivers of the fact that the train you see may not be the only train to reckon with, but it also meant, as Koch points out in his poem, that there are many things in this life that conceal other things. One letter may mean another is on the way; one hitch-hiker may deliberately hide another one by the side of the road; offer to carry one bag and you may find there is another one hidden behind it, with the result that you must carry two. And so on through life. Do not count on things coming in ones.

Where did you come from, lamentable quality? Before I had a life you were about to ruin my life. The mystery of this stays with me. “Don’t brood about things,” my elders said. I hadn’t any other experience of enemies from inside. They were all from outside—big boys Who cursed me and hit me; motorists; falling trees. All these you were as bad as, yet inside. When I spoke, you were there. I could avoid you by singing or acting. I acted in school plays but was no good at singing. Immediately after the play you were there again. You ruined the cast party. You were not a sign of confidence. You were not a sign of manliness. You were stronger than good luck and bad; you survived them both. You were slowly edged out of my throat by psychoanalysis You who had been brought in, it seems, like a hired thug To beat up both sides and distract them From the main issue: oedipal love. You were horrible! Tell them, now that you’re back in your thug country, That you don’t have to be so rough next time you’re called in But can be milder and have the same effect—unhappiness and pain.