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You can't be too influenced by a great poet. You simply have to live through it.

Kenneth Koch

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Kenneth Koch
Age: 77 †
Born: 1925
Born: February 27
Died: 2002
Died: July 6
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Cincinnati
Ohio
Kenneth Koch
Influenced
Poet
Simply
Live
Great

More quotes by Kenneth Koch

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It takes a long time to publish a book.
Kenneth Koch
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The subject matter of the stories on the surface... there seem to be a number of stories about travel.
Kenneth Koch
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It's a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling.
Kenneth Koch
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Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur.
Kenneth Koch
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Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.
Kenneth Koch
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I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.
Kenneth Koch
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This rose became a bandanna, which became a house, which became infused with all passion, which became a hideaway, which became yes I would like to have dinner, which became hands, which became lands, shores, beaches, natives on the stones, staring and wild beasts in the trees, chasing the hats of lost hunters, and all this deserves a tone.
Kenneth Koch
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Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.
Kenneth Koch
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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.
Kenneth Koch
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When you get an idea, go and write. Don't waste it in conversation.
Kenneth Koch
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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.
Kenneth Koch
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One trouble with a kind of falsely therapeutic and always reassuring attitude that it is easy to fall into with old people, is the tendency to be satisfied with too little.
Kenneth Koch
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As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.
Kenneth Koch
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Poetry, which is written while no one is looking, is meant to be looked at for all time.
Kenneth Koch
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I got married, other people went off. We had sort of another public-we were our entire readership for many years, and we were very excited by each other.
Kenneth Koch
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I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother's side of the family in general were interested in literature.
Kenneth Koch
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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!
Kenneth Koch
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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.
Kenneth Koch
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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.
Kenneth Koch
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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.
Kenneth Koch