CEMETERIES AND GALAXIES: Poems, by John Koethe
“I want it to be funny and I want it to be real,” John Koethe writes at the beginning of a poem called “The Entertainer” from his new collection, “Cemeteries and Galaxies.” It’s an odd way to start, a bit like a standup comic saying, as he begins his routine, “I want this joke I’m telling you to be hilarious.” The line pulls the “I” of the performer away from the “it” of the performance, and then awkwardly places them alongside each other for the judgment of the audience. It’s not so much breaking the fourth wall as bending it into an extension of the stage.
And yet for all its subtle peculiarity, the line is inviting — funny and real, you might say. It feels personal, even if, by dividing poet from poem, it argues for a kind of distance. This is one of Koethe’s signature effects. Lest you think I’m reading too much into a line, here is how he follows up that opening:
I want it to resemble how life feels without the details
And distractions, with a sense of what I am that could be anyone’s
And makes you what you are and makes me me. I see myself
From very far away and then from where I am, and the sense of life I have
Is of the interplay between them, which isn’t a real sense of life at all.
“Here I am,” for this writer, is also “Here I am not,” and indeed, each assertion is what makes the other possible. This is not what most poets do, to put it mildly. For roughly 50 years, American poetry has been dominated by the idea that “personal” means “autobiographical,” and “autobiographical” means “dramatic.” If your life is a little short on spiciness, then you scavenge anything you can — romantic disappointment, your grandparents’ misfortunes, high school grievances — in order to persuade the reader that you are a Real Person.
Koethe tells us something different: His work says the personal is a style. This departure isn’t surprising, considering that this poet’s entire career is a departure from the norms of the poetry world. Koethe, who will be 80 in December, worked for decades as a philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Philosophy appears in his poems — John Rawls and Thomas Nagel get name-checked here, among other eminences — but Koethe uses these references as he might have used tractors and grain drills had he been a farmer. They’re the scenery of his life; they’re what he uses to ground and animate poems.
The work in “Cemeteries and Galaxies” is long-lined, brooding and sometimes wistful. It tends to stretch over several pages; only one poem here is a single page, and nine reach four or more. This is poetry of reflection and digression and probing — you feel as if you’re sitting on Koethe’s back porch with him as the stars come out, having a whiskey and solving the world’s problems — rather than poetry of betrayal and rapture and fury.
Long poems with titles like “Ambivalence as a Way of Being” might sound like tough sledding, but Koethe’s tone and voice are reliably appealing. If he’s writing about how people struggle to define a “decent” world, we’ll get: “I don’t think/It’s that hard though: John Rawls essentially described it,/Though (a) he was a philosopher” — meaning no one paid any attention — “And (b) other philosophers keep debating it to death,/Since that’s what philosophers are supposed to do.” The wry, melancholy charm is calculated, of course, as any good writer’s persona ought to be, but that makes it no less effective. Where poetry is concerned, style is substance.
The tricky thing about style is that it lives a double life: We think of style as making individuals visible (“he has style”) but also as dissolving individuals into a collective (“he works in a style”). Koethe — in a nervy manner I’m tempted to call “stylish” — engages with this paradox by constantly evoking poetic and philosophical tradition, often via epigraphs (in this collection alone, he ropes in Ashbery, Wittgenstein, Keats, David Hume and, why not, Leonard Cohen, among others).
Koethe is the only contemporary poet whose heavy use of such quotations doesn’t make me want to revoke his library card, mostly because he’s actually doing something with them, rather than attaching them to poems like little Ralph Lauren polo players. He will cheekily begin a poem, “I love epigraphs” (the poem in question, naturally, has two of them), but this will be in service of a larger, more vexing and poignant concern: “How does existence feel from day to day? What is it like to be alive?”
Contemporary poetry is troubled. Its institutions are rickety, its audience is tiny and homogenous, and most of its products are crushingly orthodox. It increasingly resembles a community bake sale in which everyone’s cupcakes are agreed to be super-duper but nobody actually eats them. “Poetry is dead,” writes Koethe, “until it actually is and you want it to come back, whether you liked it or not.” But the art still has its outliers, talking into the advancing dusk. And what they tell us is what Koethe describes as his ultimate sense of life; they say, “And yet…”
CEMETERIES AND GALAXIES: Poems | By John Koethe | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 63 pp. | Paperback, $18
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