"It's a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling"
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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.
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.
Quote Details
| Topic | Travel |
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