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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
Know
Trouble
Criticism
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" Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation. "
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" 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. "
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" It's enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work. "
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" Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur. "
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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. "
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Women
Television
Politics
" It seems everything is so full of possibilities one can hardly take it all in. "
Kenneth Koch
Seems
Everything
Possibilities
" I'm a writer who likes to be influenced. "
Kenneth Koch
Who
Writer
Influenced
" As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry. "
Kenneth Koch
Political
Little
Good
" The subject matter of the stories on the surface... there seem to be a number of stories about travel. "
Kenneth Koch
Matter
Number
Stories
" I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet. "
Kenneth Koch
American
Thought
Myself
" 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
Finish
Box
You
" 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. "
Kenneth Koch
Write
Me
Way
" It's a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling. "
Kenneth Koch
Travelling
Ordinary
Well
" I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s. "
Kenneth Koch
War
Know
Love
" I certainly have the feeling that I'm the same person even though I've changed a great deal. "
Kenneth Koch
Person
Feeling
Great
" 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. "
Kenneth Koch
Early
See
Work
" 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
Off
Got
Excited
" 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
Smart
Wife
Poetry
" It takes a long time to publish a book. "
Kenneth Koch
Long
Book
Publish
" 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. "
Kenneth Koch
New York
Over
New
" 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
Side
Literature
Family
" Certainly, it seems true enough that there's a good deal of irony in the world... I mean, if you live in a world full of politicians and advertising, there's obviously a lot of deception. "
Kenneth Koch
World
Good
Advertising