Life & Wisdom Quote by Kenneth Koch

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.