Kenneth Koch: The Poem Writes Itself

Below I offer to readers of this blog a pre-New Year’s gift in the form of “You Want a Social Life, with Friends,” a delightfully funny poem by Kenneth Koch (1925–2002).  

“Kenneth Koch” by Alex Katz. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. © Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA at Artist Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Perhaps the poem, which first appeared in the May 18, 1998 issue of The New Yorker, may spur your thinking about the parameters for hatching resolutions for 2022. A poet of great and often giddy ebullience, Koch, I imagine, would have appreciated how its rhetorical structure seems almost to have enabled the poem to write itself. It’s a player piano of a poem.

In the first three lines, we discover the terms governing the situation, and their whimsical arbitrariness is part of the fun: You can have two out of three particular satisfactions of life—a robust circle of friends, a “passionate love life,” and fulfilling work—but only two out of three. Once the rules of the game have been established, it remains for this poet to work out the implications of each set of choices for the reader.

For an example of someone afforded the advantages of love and work, but not of a decent social life, the poet offers Michelangelo, who achieved the awesome task of painting the Sistine Chapel and whose passions were said to have been stirred by Vittoria Colonna. But no parties for you, Buonarotti.

Proceeding with seeming logic to the instance of another immortal artist, Koch envisions Homer as a party animal with enough staying power to write the Odyssey, the Iliad, and the Homeric Hymns. Rhyming, with a witty preciousness, “banquets” and “lockets,” Koch portrays the great blind poet as lovelorn. And it’s hilarious to think of “Poor Old Homer,” as Ezra Pound referred to him, as shedding tears over the absence of a “Girl” in his life.

The two examples of artists whose labors spawned masterpieces set up the pleasure of a contrast with that of a bon vivant who has a great time at parties and in bed but achieves very little in life. While the poem ends just where we might have expected it to—at the point where Koch’s two-out-of-three formula is fully worked out—the shift in the tone of the poem in the last line to a colloquial, off-hand putdown has the subtle economy of a perfectly turned joke. “It must give pleasure,” wrote Wallace Stevens, in proposing the indispensable requirements of a poem. I hereby attest that Stevens’s poetic descendent, Kenneth Koch, has done so in “You Want a Social Life, with Friends,” and you can hear him read it here as you read along :

You Want a Social Life, with Friends
By Kenneth Koch

You want a social life, with friends.
A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day. What’s true
Is of these three you may have two
And two can pay you dividends
But never may have three.

There isn’t time enough, my friends—
Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends—
To find the time to have love, work, and friends.
Michelangelo had feeling
For Vittoria and the Ceiling
But did he go to parties at day’s end?

Homer nightly went to banquets
Wrote all day but had no lockets
Bright with pictures of his Girl.
I know one who loves and parties
And has done so since his thirties
But writes hardly anything at all.