Art & Creativity Quote by Kenneth Koch

Koch’s sentence performs a sly vanishing act: it begins with the tidy confidence of influence-talk and ends by yanking the rug out from under the very idea that you can inventory what “became a part” of you. The first clause is almost disarmingly social. “As were thousands of other people” flattens the romantic myth of the poet as lone antenna; surrealism wasn’t a private lightning bolt but a mid-century weather system. He’s placing himself in a crowd, which is both modesty and a way to preempt the critic’s taxonomy.

Then comes the pivot: “it seems to me” is a quiet warning label. Influence here is not an objective fact but a feeling, a story the writer tells himself after the work is done. Koch, a New York School poet, lived in a cultural ecosystem where painters, poets, and parties cross-pollinated; surrealism arrived not just as technique (the dream logic, the jump cut, the odd metaphor) but as permission to move fast, to be associative, to treat seriousness as something you can smuggle in under comedy.

“But it’s not” is the knockout. The sentence refuses to resolve into a thesis, mirroring the surrealist suspicion of rational closure. It’s also a defense of agency: yes, the art is in his bloodstream, no, you don’t get to reduce him to a label. Koch dramatizes influence as both real and unprovable, a force that shapes the writing precisely because it can’t be cleanly separated from the writer anymore.