Life & Wisdom Quote by Kenneth Koch

Domesticity gets cast as a retreat, but Koch frames it as a kind of aesthetic insurgency: while “other people went off” into the sanctioned routes of ambition, scenes, reputations, he and his partner built a private republic where attention wasn’t outsourced. The sly phrase “another public” is the key. It acknowledges the poet’s hunger for audience, then refuses the usual marketplace. Their “public” is two people, and that’s not a consolation prize; it’s an alternative distribution system for meaning.

Calling themselves “our entire readership” folds marriage into literary labor. The joke is lightly Mencken-ish in its deflation: forget critics, forget institutions, forget the polite fiction of “the public.” For “many years,” the only readers who mattered were the ones in the room. The subtext isn’t anti-social so much as anti-performative. Koch hints at an era when poets were increasingly professionalized - teaching posts, little magazines, prizes - and suggests a countermodel where intimacy becomes the primary venue for risk and experiment.

Then the line lands on “very excited by each other,” which is both tender and strategically immodest. Excitement is an engine word: erotic, intellectual, creative. It implies that attention can be renewable, that a couple can generate its own buzz without needing a crowd to certify it. Koch makes marriage sound less like settling down than like founding a small, high-voltage press where the editors are also the only subscribers.