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Washington Post
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
The remarkable life of a trailblazing poet
In the first half of the 20th century, the American poetry landscape was dominated by men: T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams. At mid-century, however, a shift began. In 1946, Elizabeth Bishop published 'North & South,' a poetry volume that announced a new, distinctly female voice; four years later, Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for her volume 'Annie Allen.'
New York Times
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Philosopher Who Uses Poetry to Ask What Life Is All About
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 detailsAnd distractions, with a sense of what I am that could be anyone'sAnd makes you what you are and makes me me. I see myselfFrom very far away and then from where I am, and the sense of life I haveIs 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. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
