Quotes from Kenneth Koch

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.

The uniform of the gladdest malt is its sureness.

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

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

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.

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

Politics is there the way men and women are there, the way the Atlantic Ocean is there. Sometimes I've written about politics specifically, I mean about politics as it's understood on television and in newspapers.

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.

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.

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

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

It takes a long time to publish a book.

If you want to know how much I love and care for you, count the waves.

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'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

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.

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

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.

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

Total absorption in poetry is one of the finest things in existence—It should not make you feel guilty. Everyone is absorbed in something.The sailor is absorbed in the sea. Poetry is the mediation of life.