Life & Wisdom Quote by Kenneth Koch

Koch’s admission lands like an unguarded aside from someone who spent a lifetime in the public audition that is poetry. “I’ve had trouble with criticism” isn’t self-pity; it’s a candid diagnosis of a power imbalance. In a field where attention is scarce and money scarcer, criticism can feel less like dialogue and more like gatekeeping-by-review, an external authority deciding whether your private obsessions deserve public space.

The sly move is the shift from the poet’s ego to the ecosystem: “what role criticism plays” in “encouraging poets” versus “getting other people to read them.” Koch treats criticism as a lever with two possible fulcrums, and he’s not sure it reliably lifts either. That uncertainty is the subtext: criticism often claims it serves readers, but it also polices legitimacy, setting taste and signaling who counts. For poets, the review isn’t just feedback; it can become a proxy for permission to continue, especially early on when doubt is already part of the job description.

Context matters here. Koch, a central figure in the New York School, wrote amid mid-century battles over avant-garde art, academic taste, and the shrinking mainstream footprint of poetry. In that climate, criticism could be a megaphone or a muzzle. His phrasing stays deliberately modest - “I guess,” “hard to know” - but that hedging is its own critique: the institution that presents itself as clarifying value may be opaque about its actual function.

What makes the line work is its refusal to romanticize either side. Koch isn’t asking for kinder reviews; he’s questioning whether the whole critical apparatus can translate poetry into readership without flattening the very strangeness that makes it worth reading.