Politics & Power Quote by Kenneth Koch

Politics, for Kenneth Koch, isn’t a topic so much as a weather system: ambient, unavoidable, and frequently misrecognized. By lining it up with “the way men and women are there” and “the way the Atlantic Ocean is there,” he refuses the tidy premise that politics is something you can opt into, like an opinion segment or a voting-season hobby. It’s infrastructure. It’s ecology. It’s the given condition around which life arranges itself, whether you’re paying attention or not.

That opening move also smuggles in a poet’s skepticism about scale. The ocean metaphor dwarfs the daily churn of talking points, reminding you that the real political is slow, massive, and often indifferent to individual narration. Then Koch pivots: “Sometimes I’ve written about politics specifically,” and the qualifier matters. He distinguishes politics-as-reality from politics-as-performance, “as it’s understood on television and in newspapers.” That’s not just a jab at media simplification; it’s a critique of how modern politics gets flattened into legible storylines: heroes, villains, polls, optics. Poetry, by contrast, is built to register the background radiation - power, fear, desire, belonging - that preexists the headline.

Contextually, Koch’s New York School sensibility prized immediacy, collage, and the everyday, but it wasn’t naive about the era’s pressures: Cold War anxiety, Vietnam, the rise of mass media as a civic metronome. The subtext is a warning and a dare: if you only recognize politics in its televised costume, you’ve already conceded your attention - and maybe your agency - to the narrowest version of what shapes your life.