Cemeteries and Galaxies is John Koethe’s thirteenth collection of poetry, so it’s not surprisingly a book of valediction, even of regrets. Its presiding tone is of calm disillusionment, as if it were composed by a Prospero who’d come to believe that he never had any rough magic to abjure, and that his book was drowned in advance. The mood is not exactly what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called dejection, but there is a constant sense that the poetry of things, and poetry itself, might be slipping away—although Koethe’s poetry continues to unroll in long, calmly measured, capacious lines, as they have at least since his 1984 collection The Late Wisconsin Spring, his third. Still, in the concluding “Solvay 1927”—the reference is to a milestone physics conference that was attended by the likes of Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg—Koethe ruminates,
I used to think that poetry and physics would continue
To enchant me with their spells, only now I’m not so sure. It’s hard to pinpoint when that sense
Of possibility became a style, or even if it did, instead of another way of growing older.
I just know that what began in gladness feels perplexing now, though I guess it always was.
Koethe may swerve away from the “despondency and madness” that Wordsworth rhymed with what begins in gladness, but his perplexity seems troubling enough. No wonder that the book opens with the question “Where did it go wrong?”—the first words of “Late Aubade.” The wrongness has to do, it seems, with how “there’s always something more to understand, even after you do.” Our poet sees no way back to what Wallace Stevens called “the plain sense of things” and can only wonder, plaintively, “Why can’t the world be simply there for you to see, with no questions asked / And nothing else about it you can say?” Why can’t the world be what Ludwig Wittgenstein (about whom Koethe, a philosopher, has written a book) specified as “the facts … being all the facts”? Conscious awareness, however, is a fact that seems to unsettle and displace the other facts. It also fails to find its proper place among them, which is probably why no one arrives at what Koethe, in another poem, “Against Materialism,” calls “the Holy / Grail of what there really is, Horatio”—addressing Hamlet’s sidekick by way of the hope that there might be more in his philosophy, if not than in Heaven or Earth, “than I can dream of or imagine.” That’s a tall order, but it represents the mismatch between mind and facts, and between different minds among those facts, that has long haunted Koethe.
That something is real, that there are facts, solves no essential problems. As Koethe asks in a poem with the more or less ironic title “The Divinity Within,” “but what does ‘real’ even mean / When it’s applied to things we can’t begin to understand?” That’s probably why, throughout this book, he keeps taking away with one hand what he’s given with the other. “Necessity feels woven / Into the fabric of the world, even though we know that isn’t true,” according to “The Webb Telescope.” Do we? As we read in “A Sense of the World,” “The world by definition is a whole that doesn’t actually exist.” Maybe the most spectacular example of this bent toward self-contradiction or self-undermining comes in a poem called “The Entertainer,” which takes its inspiration from Tony Richardson’s 1960 film of the same title—
About an aging vaudevillian, Archie Rice, whose art form is becoming obsolete
As he keeps playing to an apathetic audience, because it’s all that he can do.
Sometimes I think my life is like that movie, as the things I do seem less important
Every day to everyone but me, though I keep living for them anyway.
Sometimes I wonder if this sense of life I have is just a parody of life,
And the fantasy of ineffability I have isn’t the heightened silence
I like to pretend it is, but just an ordinary way of living in the world,
Like the disappointed one depicted in The Entertainer, which I’ve never seen.
Those last four words, the poem’s punch line, pull the rug out from under what went before, turning the poet into a kind of unreliable narrator, someone on the outside of his own knowledge, but in a way that somehow confirms what it seems to negate. It’s a particularly striking embodiment of Koethe’s sense that life is, as he writes in “Privacy and Consolation,” nothing but “a long ‘and yet’”—of “Ambivalence as a Way of Being,” as the title of another poem has it.
Koethe’s taste for self-contradiction or self-revision, and for rambling free-associative structures of “meditation gone awry” (as he puts it in the poem “Naturalism”) that move around in strange eddies before circling back to some revised perception of their starting point, may seem surprising in a poet whose day job has been in a philosophy department, where logical consistency and a rigorous organization of argument are valued. But then this is the philosopher-poet who once proclaimed, flatly, “I don’t like poems about philosophy.” His poetry seems to be the place for everything philosophy doesn’t know what to do with, for what in “Against Materialism” he calls, “Things so commonplace it’s easy to forget how strange they are” but which “Make up the furniture of the world, and if none of them pass muster metaphysically, / So what?”
That doesn’t mean Koethe forbears to mention or quote philosophers classical (Kant, Hume, Berkeley) or contemporary (Donald Davidson, Derek Parfit and “the greatest moral philosopher since Kant,” as he calls the eponymous subject of the poem “John Rawls et al.”), discuss familiar philosophical themes and topics—appearance vs. reality, the existence of God (he doesn’t buy it, though his upbringing was religious)—or recount episodes from his professional life in philosophy, such as the doctoral defense in which Rawls dismissed one of the other examiners’ objections and then invited the young Koethe for a drink, “which I declined.” But he doesn’t make a show of erudition, and philosophical matters don’t have a leading role in his poetry; they’re just things that he’s lived through, like the poetry he’s read and the art he’s looked at and thought about and the people he’s known though he feels so separate from them. They’re ordinary occurrences like driving around the countryside and stopping at a cemetery or looking at the night sky and pondering, as we all might, the vastness of the universe and the strange light of unreality that the unimaginably distant stars, known mainly through reading about them in books, can shed on our little everyday lives. “It’s as if we had two minds,” Koethe writes in “Solvay 1927,” “one part of its surroundings and the other a reflection / Of the galaxies it posits and then attempts to find.”
Poetry may not after all be a form of magic, a charm, but it seems to be where two minds can inhabit the same person, if not precisely in peace, at least without overt conflict: with something like equanimity. Which brings us to the peculiarly ordinary language out of which Koethe’s poems are made. Just as very short lines in poetry have their typical vice of coyness and insipidity, very long line tends to be bombastic, overbearing. Not in Koethe’s hands. His long, meandering lines have nothing of Walt Whitman’s hortatory demands on the reader, nor do they seek the more inward but still incantatory urgency to which C.K. Williams aspired. I suspect the conversationally musing prose of John Ashbery’s Three Poems (1972) has been an influence, though Koethe decants and sets aside the Surrealism that animated Ashbery’s work.
In fact, if it didn’t sound dismissive, it would be worth asking why what Koethe writes is even called poetry. On first glance this writing is resolutely unpoetic, and the only overt sign of its poetic status—an important one, admittedly—is that it’s set not in paragraphs but in lines, and each line announces its autonomy in the old-fashioned way, with an initial capitalized letter. It’s hardly worth mentioning that he eschews rhyme and meter, because that’s been common since Whitman, but what about all the other devices that we poets have continued cultivating to distinguish what we do from other ordinary and prosaic uses of language? Metaphor is scant; assonance and other sonic effects are notable by their absence, as are incantatory devices such as anaphora. Gaudy imagery, verbal fragmentation and collaging, quick shifts of tonal register, playful obscurity, juddering syntax, any kind of overt patterning or lyrical excitation—all that poets typically do to produce that delicious ostranenie or estrangement, as Viktor Shklovsky called it, those noticeable departures from everyday language, are in abeyance. Koethe neither takes the side of things, seeks a convulsive beauty, nor renders anything luminous or numinous or any of the things that blurb writers continually find poetry to be.
And yet poetry it is. Its musicality is the inconspicuous polyphony of a mind-that-is-of-two-minds in motion. It’s a quiet music, hard to hear, though once you’ve got its sound in your ear, instantly recognizable. It achieves something like what Koethe (in “My Privilege”) admires in the art of Jasper Johns, its “deflation of painting’s dramatization of interiority.” And it’s been central to Koethe’s art since his discovery in The Late Wisconsin Spring that “All my life / I’ve meant something I don’t really know how to say” and that “It’s as though the ‘knowledge of experience’ / Were that experience didn’t matter all that much.” The power of that deflation depends on the previous dramatization, and in Koethe’s poetry, interiority keeps going insistently like a ground bass—interiority, which he also likes to call privacy. I take that to be a tacit comeback to Wittgenstein, who refuted the idea that there could be a language “which only I myself can understand.” Johns’s painted target, commonplace as it might be, nonetheless “stood for something / He alone could understand.” That’s what makes it so moving: the artful recalcitrance of something so banal. For Koethe, “That’s what privacy means: not an absence of people, but their presence / In the face of something they can’t recognize.”
It’s this nonrecognition that leaves its mark in the “fleeting states of mind” of which the poet writes as he concludes “My Privilege”:
I only know they’re mine,
And that they mean the world to me—and that’s it. Whether or not
They amount to anything at all, or even if I think they’re real,
The point is simply that I think they speak to me, and add up to a life
In which my comfort is their presence, and my privilege privacy.
Likewise, the following poem, “Poetry and Fame,” a rueful meditation on “A poet who went from anonymity to fame and back again,” namely Amy Clampitt, begins by declaring, “Poetry is about what no one else can understand.” As a critic, of course, I have to take exception to that idea. True, what I understand by Koethe’s poetry, or Clampitt’s or anyone else’s, may not be just what its author understood by it, but that’s just to say that, as Koethe says in “Against Materialism,” there’s more in it than the poet can dream or imagine. Though Koethe might not want to say so, that is a kind of magic—and not just a conjuring trick—after all. And yet maybe that “more” is just the problem, leaving the poet or philosopher alone with his or her uniquely limited consciousness.
And it’s only that limited viewpoint that creates “facts” and endows them with something beyond the factual: with meaning. Remember those states of mind that, the poet says, “mean the world to me.” They are what Cemeteries and Galaxies insists on. No wonder variations of the phrase “meaning the world” or “meaning everything” keep repeating themselves again and again throughout the book: “I used to think that the past / Meant everything, as if it were mine and added up to who I am, / Though it never does” (“Late Aubade”). “Sometimes I dream of trying to remember something / I’d forgotten that had meant the world to me, and then wake up to this” (“Poetry and Fame”). “I believe in what I think, including things I don’t understand / And can’t see … / as if the world were everything that is the case, / And those things meant the world to me” (“Naturalism”—this time with a comeback not only to Wittgenstein but also to Stevie Wonder). “The painting” (a failed work by the somewhat forgotten New York realist Darragh Park) “remained / Inert, a private testament to a kind of objectivity that isn’t really there / The way the world is, and yet sometimes means the world to us” (“What Matters”). The world may be everything that is the case, but its meaning something is what makes it a world, and Koethe’s words follow the unheard melody of meaning in the making and unmaking.
Cemeteries and Galaxies is John Koethe’s thirteenth collection of poetry, so it’s not surprisingly a book of valediction, even of regrets. Its presiding tone is of calm disillusionment, as if it were composed by a Prospero who’d come to believe that he never had any rough magic to abjure, and that his book was drowned in advance. The mood is not exactly what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called dejection, but there is a constant sense that the poetry of things, and poetry itself, might be slipping away—although Koethe’s poetry continues to unroll in long, calmly measured, capacious lines, as they have at least since his 1984 collection The Late Wisconsin Spring, his third. Still, in the concluding “Solvay 1927”—the reference is to a milestone physics conference that was attended by the likes of Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg—Koethe ruminates,
Koethe may swerve away from the “despondency and madness” that Wordsworth rhymed with what begins in gladness, but his perplexity seems troubling enough. No wonder that the book opens with the question “Where did it go wrong?”—the first words of “Late Aubade.” The wrongness has to do, it seems, with how “there’s always something more to understand, even after you do.” Our poet sees no way back to what Wallace Stevens called “the plain sense of things” and can only wonder, plaintively, “Why can’t the world be simply there for you to see, with no questions asked / And nothing else about it you can say?” Why can’t the world be what Ludwig Wittgenstein (about whom Koethe, a philosopher, has written a book) specified as “the facts … being all the facts”? Conscious awareness, however, is a fact that seems to unsettle and displace the other facts. It also fails to find its proper place among them, which is probably why no one arrives at what Koethe, in another poem, “Against Materialism,” calls “the Holy / Grail of what there really is, Horatio”—addressing Hamlet’s sidekick by way of the hope that there might be more in his philosophy, if not than in Heaven or Earth, “than I can dream of or imagine.” That’s a tall order, but it represents the mismatch between mind and facts, and between different minds among those facts, that has long haunted Koethe.
That something is real, that there are facts, solves no essential problems. As Koethe asks in a poem with the more or less ironic title “The Divinity Within,” “but what does ‘real’ even mean / When it’s applied to things we can’t begin to understand?” That’s probably why, throughout this book, he keeps taking away with one hand what he’s given with the other. “Necessity feels woven / Into the fabric of the world, even though we know that isn’t true,” according to “The Webb Telescope.” Do we? As we read in “A Sense of the World,” “The world by definition is a whole that doesn’t actually exist.” Maybe the most spectacular example of this bent toward self-contradiction or self-undermining comes in a poem called “The Entertainer,” which takes its inspiration from Tony Richardson’s 1960 film of the same title—
Those last four words, the poem’s punch line, pull the rug out from under what went before, turning the poet into a kind of unreliable narrator, someone on the outside of his own knowledge, but in a way that somehow confirms what it seems to negate. It’s a particularly striking embodiment of Koethe’s sense that life is, as he writes in “Privacy and Consolation,” nothing but “a long ‘and yet’”—of “Ambivalence as a Way of Being,” as the title of another poem has it.
Koethe’s taste for self-contradiction or self-revision, and for rambling free-associative structures of “meditation gone awry” (as he puts it in the poem “Naturalism”) that move around in strange eddies before circling back to some revised perception of their starting point, may seem surprising in a poet whose day job has been in a philosophy department, where logical consistency and a rigorous organization of argument are valued. But then this is the philosopher-poet who once proclaimed, flatly, “I don’t like poems about philosophy.” His poetry seems to be the place for everything philosophy doesn’t know what to do with, for what in “Against Materialism” he calls, “Things so commonplace it’s easy to forget how strange they are” but which “Make up the furniture of the world, and if none of them pass muster metaphysically, / So what?”
That doesn’t mean Koethe forbears to mention or quote philosophers classical (Kant, Hume, Berkeley) or contemporary (Donald Davidson, Derek Parfit and “the greatest moral philosopher since Kant,” as he calls the eponymous subject of the poem “John Rawls et al.”), discuss familiar philosophical themes and topics—appearance vs. reality, the existence of God (he doesn’t buy it, though his upbringing was religious)—or recount episodes from his professional life in philosophy, such as the doctoral defense in which Rawls dismissed one of the other examiners’ objections and then invited the young Koethe for a drink, “which I declined.” But he doesn’t make a show of erudition, and philosophical matters don’t have a leading role in his poetry; they’re just things that he’s lived through, like the poetry he’s read and the art he’s looked at and thought about and the people he’s known though he feels so separate from them. They’re ordinary occurrences like driving around the countryside and stopping at a cemetery or looking at the night sky and pondering, as we all might, the vastness of the universe and the strange light of unreality that the unimaginably distant stars, known mainly through reading about them in books, can shed on our little everyday lives. “It’s as if we had two minds,” Koethe writes in “Solvay 1927,” “one part of its surroundings and the other a reflection / Of the galaxies it posits and then attempts to find.”
Poetry may not after all be a form of magic, a charm, but it seems to be where two minds can inhabit the same person, if not precisely in peace, at least without overt conflict: with something like equanimity. Which brings us to the peculiarly ordinary language out of which Koethe’s poems are made. Just as very short lines in poetry have their typical vice of coyness and insipidity, very long line tends to be bombastic, overbearing. Not in Koethe’s hands. His long, meandering lines have nothing of Walt Whitman’s hortatory demands on the reader, nor do they seek the more inward but still incantatory urgency to which C.K. Williams aspired. I suspect the conversationally musing prose of John Ashbery’s Three Poems (1972) has been an influence, though Koethe decants and sets aside the Surrealism that animated Ashbery’s work.
In fact, if it didn’t sound dismissive, it would be worth asking why what Koethe writes is even called poetry. On first glance this writing is resolutely unpoetic, and the only overt sign of its poetic status—an important one, admittedly—is that it’s set not in paragraphs but in lines, and each line announces its autonomy in the old-fashioned way, with an initial capitalized letter. It’s hardly worth mentioning that he eschews rhyme and meter, because that’s been common since Whitman, but what about all the other devices that we poets have continued cultivating to distinguish what we do from other ordinary and prosaic uses of language? Metaphor is scant; assonance and other sonic effects are notable by their absence, as are incantatory devices such as anaphora. Gaudy imagery, verbal fragmentation and collaging, quick shifts of tonal register, playful obscurity, juddering syntax, any kind of overt patterning or lyrical excitation—all that poets typically do to produce that delicious ostranenie or estrangement, as Viktor Shklovsky called it, those noticeable departures from everyday language, are in abeyance. Koethe neither takes the side of things, seeks a convulsive beauty, nor renders anything luminous or numinous or any of the things that blurb writers continually find poetry to be.
And yet poetry it is. Its musicality is the inconspicuous polyphony of a mind-that-is-of-two-minds in motion. It’s a quiet music, hard to hear, though once you’ve got its sound in your ear, instantly recognizable. It achieves something like what Koethe (in “My Privilege”) admires in the art of Jasper Johns, its “deflation of painting’s dramatization of interiority.” And it’s been central to Koethe’s art since his discovery in The Late Wisconsin Spring that “All my life / I’ve meant something I don’t really know how to say” and that “It’s as though the ‘knowledge of experience’ / Were that experience didn’t matter all that much.” The power of that deflation depends on the previous dramatization, and in Koethe’s poetry, interiority keeps going insistently like a ground bass—interiority, which he also likes to call privacy. I take that to be a tacit comeback to Wittgenstein, who refuted the idea that there could be a language “which only I myself can understand.” Johns’s painted target, commonplace as it might be, nonetheless “stood for something / He alone could understand.” That’s what makes it so moving: the artful recalcitrance of something so banal. For Koethe, “That’s what privacy means: not an absence of people, but their presence / In the face of something they can’t recognize.”
It’s this nonrecognition that leaves its mark in the “fleeting states of mind” of which the poet writes as he concludes “My Privilege”:
Likewise, the following poem, “Poetry and Fame,” a rueful meditation on “A poet who went from anonymity to fame and back again,” namely Amy Clampitt, begins by declaring, “Poetry is about what no one else can understand.” As a critic, of course, I have to take exception to that idea. True, what I understand by Koethe’s poetry, or Clampitt’s or anyone else’s, may not be just what its author understood by it, but that’s just to say that, as Koethe says in “Against Materialism,” there’s more in it than the poet can dream or imagine. Though Koethe might not want to say so, that is a kind of magic—and not just a conjuring trick—after all. And yet maybe that “more” is just the problem, leaving the poet or philosopher alone with his or her uniquely limited consciousness.
And it’s only that limited viewpoint that creates “facts” and endows them with something beyond the factual: with meaning. Remember those states of mind that, the poet says, “mean the world to me.” They are what Cemeteries and Galaxies insists on. No wonder variations of the phrase “meaning the world” or “meaning everything” keep repeating themselves again and again throughout the book: “I used to think that the past / Meant everything, as if it were mine and added up to who I am, / Though it never does” (“Late Aubade”). “Sometimes I dream of trying to remember something / I’d forgotten that had meant the world to me, and then wake up to this” (“Poetry and Fame”). “I believe in what I think, including things I don’t understand / And can’t see … / as if the world were everything that is the case, / And those things meant the world to me” (“Naturalism”—this time with a comeback not only to Wittgenstein but also to Stevie Wonder). “The painting” (a failed work by the somewhat forgotten New York realist Darragh Park) “remained / Inert, a private testament to a kind of objectivity that isn’t really there / The way the world is, and yet sometimes means the world to us” (“What Matters”). The world may be everything that is the case, but its meaning something is what makes it a world, and Koethe’s words follow the unheard melody of meaning in the making and unmaking.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.