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
almost fiction found stories tried true written
I've written fiction before... I had tried to write stories, almost true stories before, but I never had found a way to do it.
certain details experience fiction found interested picked poetry prose saw stories
I saw a way that I could write fiction about my own experience and things that I've done and imagined. I was very interested to be writing these stories because I found that, like a certain kind of magnet, writing prose picked up details that my poetry had never been able to pick up.
bad fact ignoring indeed land modern poets seem simply waste wonderful
I simply was ignoring the fact that The Waste Land indeed made it seem to many poets that one had to be depressed-not that The Waste Land is a bad poem, it's a wonderful poem-that one had to feel despair, that one had to think that the modern world was terrible.
certainly hand hard influenced sort suppose
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.
absurd countries death depressed drinks exciting full games gardens girls knew life poverty seemed tennis
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.
crazy discovered louis modern poetry quite soon
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.
course crazy keats suppose
Of course, I like Byron enormously; I'm crazy about Don Juan. And of course Keats and Shelley and I suppose everyone that everyone likes.
course full harvard movements poets took vast wonderful
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.
brought french full war york
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.
american-poet influenced painting poetry seems thousands
I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not.
interested painter poetry seemed sort
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.
charming people wants
As charming as old people are, one doesn't want to have a 75-year-old baby. One wants to make something new.
again nature people poetry position satirical seem trouble
Some people who write about poetry seem to have had trouble with my poetry because it is sometimes comic. 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.
book business changed collected family gave opened poems poetry safe took written
My poetry changed when I was 15 years old. One of my uncles, Leo, had written poetry when he was a young man, and he took me down to the family business and he opened a safe and showed me some poems he'd written when he was 19. He also gave me a book of the collected poems of Shelley. And I still have that book.