"Once I start writing about something, it goes off rather fast, and sometimes details which might be interesting such as what the room looked like or what somebody said that was not exactly on the same subject tend to get lost"
About this Quote
The line reads like a candid confession from a poet who knows his own engine runs hot. Koch isn’t apologizing for sloppiness so much as naming a bias: once the poem’s current catches, it pulls everything toward velocity, association, and the central obsession. The “room” and the “somebody said” details aren’t dismissed as worthless; they’re casualties of momentum. That’s the point. He’s describing how a poem can be less a camera than a chase.
The subtext is a quiet refusal of the realist contract. In prose culture, especially memoir and narrative nonfiction, the room is evidence: it grounds the reader, proves you were there, makes memory legible. Koch implies that for his kind of writing, fidelity to atmosphere can feel like a drag on the real subject, which is often a moving target anyway. “Not exactly on the same subject” is tellingly slippery; conversation and setting are always about the subject, just not in the straight-line way a plot would demand. His sentence mimics the phenomenon it describes: it runs long, stacks clauses, accelerates, and leaves the sensory “room” behind.
Context matters: Koch, a key figure in the New York School, wrote in a milieu that prized spontaneity, urbane comedy, and the art of the swerve. His work often trusts immediacy over polish, delight over documentation. What he’s really defending is a poetics of attention: not attention to everything, but to the thing that ignites. The loss of detail becomes a trade-off that protects intensity, letting the poem keep its pulse instead of becoming a report.
The subtext is a quiet refusal of the realist contract. In prose culture, especially memoir and narrative nonfiction, the room is evidence: it grounds the reader, proves you were there, makes memory legible. Koch implies that for his kind of writing, fidelity to atmosphere can feel like a drag on the real subject, which is often a moving target anyway. “Not exactly on the same subject” is tellingly slippery; conversation and setting are always about the subject, just not in the straight-line way a plot would demand. His sentence mimics the phenomenon it describes: it runs long, stacks clauses, accelerates, and leaves the sensory “room” behind.
Context matters: Koch, a key figure in the New York School, wrote in a milieu that prized spontaneity, urbane comedy, and the art of the swerve. His work often trusts immediacy over polish, delight over documentation. What he’s really defending is a poetics of attention: not attention to everything, but to the thing that ignites. The loss of detail becomes a trade-off that protects intensity, letting the poem keep its pulse instead of becoming a report.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|
More Quotes by Kenneth
Add to List
