Time & Perspective Quote by Kenneth Koch

Art doesn’t just age; it mutates in the mirror. Koch’s sentence is the sound of a poet catching himself doing the most human, most dangerous thing: retrofitting a tidy narrative onto a messy past. When he looks back at early work and thinks, “I could do that then,” he’s acknowledging the eerie competence of the younger self, but also the temptation to treat the past like a set of stepping-stones laid for today’s benefit. The ellipses matter. They mimic the mind rummaging through old drafts, half-amused, half-alarmed by how easily we invent continuity.

Koch came out of the New York School, a scene allergic to solemn, single-track “career arcs.” These poets prized speed, play, and conversational wit; the work often felt like it was happening in real time. That aesthetic makes the problem sharper: if your poems were built to resist grand meaning, how do you later declare an “identity” without betraying their improvisational spark?

The subtext is a quiet argument with the culture’s hunger for branding. Readers, critics, and institutions want the elevator pitch: What kind of poet are you? Koch suggests the hardest part isn’t writing the poem, it’s locating the stable “you” inside a body of work that contains contradictions, detours, and phases you no longer fully recognize. “Identity” here isn’t a theme; it’s a moving target shaped by hindsight, reputation, and the poet’s own shifting sensibility. The line lands because it refuses the comforting myth of mastery and replaces it with a more honest anxiety: your work may know you before you know it.