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
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.
I think my poetry was very influenced-it seems almost dumb to say it-but it was very influenced by Shakespeare. Very early on I read his plays... and, I don't know, I started speaking in blank verse at a rather early age.
As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.
It's enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work.
It seems everything is so full of possibilities one can hardly take it all in.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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've written fiction before... I had tried to write stories, almost true stories before, but I never had found a way to do it.
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 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.