Life & Wisdom Quote by Kenneth Koch

Koch’s line is a craft confession disguised as a joke, and the joke lands because it’s jealous of its own elegance. The “click” of a poem is tactile: a tiny mechanical certainty, the sensation that form has done its job and sealed the thing you were trying to say inside something hard, bright, and finished. A “jewel box” isn’t just closure; it’s value. The poem, in this metaphor, earns its ending the way a well-made object does: by fitting, by snapping into place, by refusing further fiddling.

Then Koch swerves to prose, which he calls “endless” with the wry impatience of someone who knows how easily narrative becomes an alibi for not deciding. Prose can always add a clause, an anecdote, a clarifying paragraph; it’s hospitable to second thoughts. That’s liberation and trap at once. The subtext is a poet’s suspicion that prose’s expansiveness can dilute intensity, and also a prose writer’s envy of poetry’s authority to stop.

The kicker - “I haven’t experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!” - is self-deprecation with teeth. Koch was associated with the New York School, a scene that prized spontaneity, speed, and a conversational bounce; the line nods to that aesthetic while quietly admitting its cost. It also punctures the romantic fantasy of inspiration. Finish isn’t a mood. Finish is a mechanism, and he’s telling you how rarely it engages.