Life & Wisdom Quote by Kenneth Koch

Travel doesn’t just change the scenery; it vandalizes your sense of “normal.” Kenneth Koch’s line has the casual tone of a postcard, but it’s really a sly poetics manifesto: perception isn’t a stable camera, it’s a moody instrument that retunes itself the moment you’re dislocated. “It’s a well known thing” is doing ironic work here. He pretends this is common knowledge, a truism you’d overhear in an airport lounge, while smuggling in a more unsettling claim: the ordinary is only ordinary because habit has anesthetized it.

Koch, an exuberant New York School poet, often treated daily life as material that could be re-lit, re-cut, made weird and bright through attention. The “strange aspect” isn’t necessarily danger or revelation; it’s the tilt-shift effect of being elsewhere. When you’re traveling, even a grocery store, a traffic light, a neighbor’s dog becomes newly legible as an object rather than background. Language starts doing that too: signs, accents, and small social rituals expose how much of your reality is unexamined convention.

The subtext is that estrangement is a tool, not an accident. Travel provides it cheaply, but poetry can manufacture the same perceptual defamiliarization at home. Koch’s sentence invites you to notice that the mind’s default setting is laziness - and that a change of place, like a good poem, interrupts it just long enough for the world to look freshly made.