The new podcast, A social life, with friends is coming soon, and in the meantime I wanted to share the poem that inspired the title.
With so much advice around how to achieve work-life balance, optimise, and avoid burnout, there’s something refreshing about admitting no one has it all together.
Yet the beautiful thing is we keep trying. We keep trying to connect, to love, to find meaning. As the late Kenneth Koch’s partner Karen Koch told me “It's not impossible to have it all, but maybe impossible to have it all at once.”
And that’s what this new project will explore—how we find our own way in friendships, connection and belonging. I hope you enjoy the words that inspired its frame.
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.
You Want a Social Life, with Friends was first published in Straits (1998) in a subsection called “Songs from the Plays” and subsequently in Koch’s The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch (2005), page 588.
Love this poem — have always loved this poem — and am thrilled to see it in use as a title in this way! My memory is that it appeared first in the New Yorker in the late 80s. I even think that I remember when I first encountered it (in the magazine) at the old Shakespeare and Co. bookstore on the upper west side. In any case, it’s so nice to see it out in the world. Took a poetry course with KK once (before then) that had a lasting impact. Best of luck with the project.