Life & Wisdom Quote by Kenneth Koch

A poet quoting Picasso to warn you off self-connoisseurship is a sly way of attacking a very modern sickness: treating your own work like a collectible you’re curating instead of a living thing you’re making. Kenneth Koch doesn’t argue it head-on; he borrows Picasso’s swagger to smuggle in a discipline. The authority here matters. Picasso stands for ruthless production, for appetite and risk. Invoking him lets Koch imply that the real danger isn’t bad taste, it’s self-surveillance.

The phrasing is pointedly paradoxical. “Connoisseur” sounds refined, even flattering, but Koch turns it into a vice. A connoisseur evaluates, ranks, polishes, looks for the “right” reference point. Applied inward, that becomes a kind of aesthetic narcissism: you start performing discernment instead of doing the work. You become the museum guard of your own output, protecting it from embarrassment, improvisation, and failure. That’s death for poetry, which thrives on the not-yet-known.

There’s also a jab at the workshop mentality and the artist-brand mentality: the pressure to have a coherent “taste” and a consistent “voice” at all times. Koch is suggesting that craft develops less from constantly judging yourself than from staying porous, letting others be the connoisseurs for now, and allowing your own standards to arrive late. The subtext is almost pastoral: make first, admire later, and don’t confuse inner commentary with artistic intelligence.