This sentence from the Rovi music review of Madonna’s first album contains a wonderful final phrase:
And that’s the hallmark of dance-pop: every element blends together into an intoxicating sound, where the hooks and rhythms are so hooky, the shallowness is something to celebrate.
And there it is. I tend to think that the shallowness we celebrate is the shallowness that offers us escape from who we currently are.
I spent two life-altering semesters in classes with Kenneth Koch, who has since passed on. Last week, I found my notebook from those classes, which is filled not with notes, but with quotes. He could barely speak without seeming to mean, well, everything.
Here is a reprinting of many of the quotes — feel free to return to these from time to time, as I do.
Kenneth Koch Quotes
“Beauty can’t be separated from youth. Even Helen. They probably could have avoided that whole war if she’d have been over 45.”
“Some of the most interesting effects in poetry come from the ability to speed up, then slow down time.”
“There’s a pleasure in being the source of someone’s sublime thoughts.”
“Very few poets with any kind of talent write just to say something that”s already been said. You write to discover your secret knowledge.”
“By ‘talking the new morality’, he’s referring to free love. And she’s thinking of putting that new morality into practice.”
“If you want to be quick, sometimes you have to be obscure. If I say, “Emily was mean to me’, you might wonder who Emily is, but really, who cares? It’s much quicker than, ‘My next door neighbor Emily, of whom I’m quite fond….’”
“I love this little phrase ‘japanese paper napkin’. It’s a little bit of something just right.”
“The advantage of youth is being able to be lazy and enjoy it.”
“One realizes what the dog really should be doing, and, by analogy, what we probably really should be doing.”
“No one would want to wager their life on what ‘slipper green’ means.”
“When I was younger, I sent some of my poetry to Stevens. He wrote me back with a short note that said ‘I enjoy the freedom of your poetry, but I don’t think that you celebrate that freedom enough.’ “
“Understanding, you see, is a type of happiness.”
“With little charcoal eyes? I don’t think so.”
– on a bad, overly literal interpretation of The Snowman
“Well, I like the idea, but I don’t know if it will sustain me until lunch.”
“I like the thrill of evil in this poem.”
– Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
“We are born into separation, and from that comes a music. The poem is a thinking vigil: watching for an idea about what is obscure and dark.”
“Think of marriages and funerals. It’s odd how words make an event.”
“Why buy nice China? Why learn to cook? I don’t know. I kinda think it gets us close to something. Paradoxically, we never really get there, but it’s fun being close.”
“The computer was backed up. What? Oh, I don’t know what computers do….”
“There’s this other concern one has with the sun.”
“Why is it we get excited when something looks like something else? Mistaking one thing for another is a glimpse of order that slips away.”
“It sounds like one might be caught on the blade of an enormous lawnmower, yet it doesn’t sound cluttered…”
– on a part of Le Monocle
As Koch was ruminating on Stevens, we all heard a strange sound in the front of the classroom that resembled a metal clack, which Koch likened to a bullet being accepted into a chamber:
Koch: Does someone have me covered?
TA: I’m sorry. I was trying to open a can of soda quietly.
Koch: Who tries to do that? You can’t do that. Does a cherry have no pit? Does a baby not cry?
“Why not just destroy Nantucket? Williams would say, ‘Because of this moment.’”
“As soon as things get too legato, they’re false.”
“I like the idea of getting dressed up to go to a poem.”
“People tend to look wonderful when they’re absorbed.”
“Everyone, really, loves violence.”
“Suppose you’re looking at the face of someone who gives you delight and despair. What are you going to write about? A nose? Teeth? Some ears? How do you keep that intensity? Art is basically making that intensity more accessible.”
“Take my word for it.”
– To a very amateur student disputing his interpretation of a poem
“It’s like a canteen of childhood happiness that one carries around.”
“People are sentimental around children because they’re threatened by them.”
“I presume there wasn’t much of a courtship.”
“Do lovers get more out of the night?”
“That longing seems to Rilke to be important, to be some part of the truth.”
“I like the way you opened the poem: it’s a bit like being dragged into a dark room and being punched in the stomach.”
“There’s a certain lack of quality…..everyplace.”
“Pleasure should be your guide in eating and art.”
As someone who has wrestled with the Alice Miller type of grandiosity, I’ve thought quite a bit over the past year about activities that I do because I love them, not for any external reward or recognition. The biggest of these is writing.
I’ve always felt like I was five arduous years away from being the kind of writer really worth reading. I could never be a poet or a fiction writer or a news journalist, but when I read Gladwell and Michael Lewis and these guys, I’m both impressed and inspired. I think I have that in me. It’s not going to be easy, but I think it’s within reach if I’m diligent and willing to get my ass kicked into shape by a certain individual whose initials are JK.
One reason I’ve avoided this in my life is because two of my close friends are writers — and better writers now than I’ll ever be, certainly. Yet now I understand my little niche in things, and I think I can do it reasonably well someday.
There is no way to learn writing but to write, and so I’ve begun. While my primary focus is on getting good and ignoring the world of publishing, I’ve recently published two articles and signed a deal to ghostwrite a book. The articles (both on financial risk) are extremely well-thought out but not particularly well written. The book, however, is going smashingly.
I’m writing now for one reason: because I enjoy it. Any publication that comes is truly, truly coincidental. In fact, I still think that (aside from the book in development) the best thing I’ve ever written was the Laguna Beach series of posts on this blog.
To see what I’m referring to with all this, and to chart my little trajectory, I’ve added a new page, which you can see on the top menu called “The Writing Life“. Take a gander.
And, thanks to the fact that I now publish stuff, get paid to write, and think of it as the most enjoyable part of my life, I can now say without any shame, for better or worse: I am a writer.
From Americana, a passage that impresses every real New York man:
She was much more the New York woman now, informed, purposeful, hard to impress. Gone were the cute enthusiasms of the teenage bride, those sudden flings into space which seemed, so I thought, to be the outer extensions of a childhood marked by wandering. But with the new sophistication there was a concomitant nameless threat. Meredith was not so secure in her maturity that she did not suffer those periods of despondency and doubt which seem to weave through the lives of self-reliant women.
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