Politics & Power Quote by Kenneth Koch

Koch’s line lands like a friendly knife: it pretends to shrug, then quietly indicts an entire genre. The opening hedge, “As for… as it’s usually defined,” is doing the real work. He isn’t only complaining that political poems are often bad; he’s challenging the cramped definition that turns poetry into a leaflet with line breaks. In that framing, “political” becomes synonymous with correct opinions, timely outrage, and easily decodable virtue. Koch’s dry “very little” is a comedian’s understatement, but the target is serious: propaganda flatters its audience, poetry refuses to.

The subtext is an aesthetic defense with moral stakes. Koch, an influential New York School poet, came up in a mid-century moment when art was pressured to be socially “useful” and ideologically legible, whether by Cold War pieties, academic seriousness, or activist urgency. He’s wary of poems that treat language as a delivery system for conclusions rather than as a medium that complicates experience. Good political art, in his view, doesn’t just announce what to think; it reorganizes how you perceive power, intimacy, fear, boredom, complicity.

The sly paradox is that Koch’s statement is itself political: it pushes back against a cultural demand for art to perform righteousness on cue. By refusing the expected pieties, he makes room for a politics that lives in form, voice, surprise, and discomfort - where the poem can be partisan without being predictable, and committed without becoming a slogan.