Kenneth Koch Quotes

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!

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

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.

Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one’s own connoisseur.

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.

Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.