You Want a Social Life, with Friends by Kenneth Koch

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.

This poem was originally published in The New Yorker in the May 18, 1998 issue.

There is much to love about this poem. The rhyme--true and slant--which follows no formal pattern, the title, and the introduction of Michelangelo as "proof" in the second stanza and Homer in the third are all delightful.

The rhyme and the meter in this poem push it into the tongue-in-cheek area; although you may agree with Koch on this, I do not think we are meant to take this poem as a prescription for life. Or, if we are, we can laugh about it.

There are three short stanzas, with the first laying out the argument. You can have two of the following: love, friends, work. You cannot have three. Simple.

Stanza two tells us there is not enough time in the day, and brings in Michelangelo. Every time I read "feeling" and "ceiling" I am delighted. He, according to this poem, did not party. Stanza three gives us Homer, who had work, of course (we would not know of Homer--or Michelangelo--were it not for their work) and also partied but had no lover. We end with a more personal example, a person known to the poet who parties and loves but barely writes/works.

The poem provides three examples of all of the scenarios. Given that Koch was a professor for decades, I wonder if he wrote this to admonish his students and guide them to write more and party and love less.

Kenneth Koch (pronouned coke) also wrote prose. Besides his poetry he is best known for his books about teaching poetry, particularly to children. He enjoyed teaching poetry to kids as well as reading their poems because kiuds' poems were much more joyful than poetry by adults, which he often found depressing and overly distressed. I have an old copy of Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?: Teaching Great Poetry to Children in my collection of books about writing and reading poems. I recommend it.