top of page
.png){kind=small}
"As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Poetry quotes
"That men, who might have tower'd in the vanOf all the congregated world, to fanAnd winnow from the coming step of timeAll chaff of custom, wipe away all slimeLeft by men-slugs and human serpentry,Have been content to let occasion die,Whilst they did sleep in love's Elysium."
"You should be more carefulwhen you move, my dearwhat with you...spilling moonlightinto my poem, with a mereflick of your hand."
"My love is a winter's mistgently dissolvingthrough the windowat the nape of your neck."
"In the endit is wordspoetry. sunsetssomeone's deep blue silk voice.mountain scents.someone's smile.eyes. that we haveno defenses against."
"Good poetry does not exist merely for the sake of itself, but rather, is a byproduct of yearning and growth; great poetry canonizes that yearning for the growth of others."
"Poems can getsleepless tooand becomethe loneliest thingin the universe."
"The mint from your breath, the milk from your breast, the best of your mind, now in its worst state of condition. From the womb to the tomb, as a mild flower, you break your petals upon blossom, and seize death openly. Leaving your fragrance to spin and dance, one last time before being blown away."
"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."
Explore more quotes by Kenneth Koch
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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!"
"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."
bottom of page