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
new-york smart writing
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.
writing ideas waste
When you get an idea, go and write. Don't waste it in conversation.
writing interesting details
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.
writing silence use
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.
writing looks able
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.