"It's enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work"
About this Quote
There is a sly humility baked into Koch's gratitude: the "good review" matters, but only if it comes from someone who "seems to understand your work". That qualifier does a lot of quiet work. He is not chasing applause as such; he's chasing recognition - the rare feeling that your private logic has successfully crossed into another mind without being mistranslated into something safer, simpler, or trendier.
For a poet of Koch's stripe, this lands with extra bite. The New York School cultivated play, speed, surprise, a kind of high-wire spontaneity that could look easy from the outside and be dismissed as merely whimsical. Reviews, then, become less like consumer ratings and more like verdicts on legibility: did the critic actually read the poem as an intentional object, or as a set of mannerisms to be sorted into "charming" or "nonsense"? Koch's "enormously cheering" suggests how bruising the opposite can be: the bad review isn't only negative; it's lonely. It says, in effect, no one was on the other end of the line.
The phrase "seems to understand" also hints at the artist's permanent uncertainty. Total understanding is impossible to verify, even to the maker. Koch is praising a convincing illusion of comprehension - a review that captures the internal weather of the work, not just its plot or technique. The subtext is a critique of criticism itself: not all readers are equal, and praise without insight is just noise. What cheers him is not validation, but contact.
For a poet of Koch's stripe, this lands with extra bite. The New York School cultivated play, speed, surprise, a kind of high-wire spontaneity that could look easy from the outside and be dismissed as merely whimsical. Reviews, then, become less like consumer ratings and more like verdicts on legibility: did the critic actually read the poem as an intentional object, or as a set of mannerisms to be sorted into "charming" or "nonsense"? Koch's "enormously cheering" suggests how bruising the opposite can be: the bad review isn't only negative; it's lonely. It says, in effect, no one was on the other end of the line.
The phrase "seems to understand" also hints at the artist's permanent uncertainty. Total understanding is impossible to verify, even to the maker. Koch is praising a convincing illusion of comprehension - a review that captures the internal weather of the work, not just its plot or technique. The subtext is a critique of criticism itself: not all readers are equal, and praise without insight is just noise. What cheers him is not validation, but contact.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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