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"As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry."
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"A tough life needs a tough language-and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers-a language powerful enough to say how it is."
"I suppose that's how it looks in prose. But it's very different if you look at it through poetry and I think it's nicer' Anne recovered herself and her eyes shone and her cheeks flushed 'to look at it through poetry."
"Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it."
"A poet is not an inventor. A poet is a player that plays with words on the field of human imagination to excite a reader's mind with the colors of emotion."
"The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness."
"Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production."
"My soul is wrapped in harsh repose,Midnight descends in raven-colored clothes,But soft... behold!A sunlight beamButting a swath of glimmering gleam.My heart expands,'tis grown a bulge in it,Inspired by your beauty...Effulgent."
"In a real poem a sound does not swallow a letter, but a letter swallows a sound."
Explore more quotes by Kenneth Koch
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The subject matter of the stories on the surface... there seem to be a number of stories about travel."
"It's a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling."
"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 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."
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