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JOHN KOETHE, Sally’s Hair, New York, HarperCollins 2006, pp. 96, $24,95.
John Koethe, who made his debut in 1968, began to receive wide recognition with his volumes Falling Water (1997) and The Constructor (1999). Later, the appearance of North Point North (2002), a collection of new and selected poems, secured his major reputation. Italian readers may have seen his work in Damiano Abeni’s bi-lingual anthology West of Your Cities, but in general he is not well known outside the United States.
Critics have focused on Koethe’s relation to John Ashbery, Wallace Stevens, and Romanticism; he can also be related to Proust, since his long poems are inner journeys winding back into memory. However, the journey into the past, for Koethe, is often not a happy one, and accordingly, the dominant note of these poems is doleful. He describes himself as being «Like a vain man practicing a vain art / Born out of failure – not the grand failure / Of the Will or the Imagination, // But on a more human scale: what happened? / What happened to the incidental life / You try to make up, though it falls apart? / Each year I come again to where I am». That is the opening of the The Unlasting, the book’s long, central poem, a masterpiece rivaling James Schuyler’s renowned The Day of the Poem as it spans a single day and the writing of a poem over its course, mimicking the passage of thought in time, in continuously looping eddies that return the poet, 240 lines later, to «An odd place, yet one I must have chosen / Long ago, like a promise time fulfills / In passing, that comes too late, that leaves me // Floating in the air between a fleeting / Glimpse of nothing and the common knowledge / That lay waiting for me beyond the hills».
Along the way there are moments of doubt and dismissal played off against assertions and illuminations, as, typically for Koethe, each mood slides into its opposite, now verging on magic and mystery, now yielding to banality and boredom, and finally settling for a chastened bemusement: «There is an air of unreality / About this place, as though I looked at it / Through someone else’s eyes. And what I see // Is nothing but an ordinary day / Transformed, unlike all those I’ve known before, / And so strange. And I think it’s wonderful».
Koethe is an extremely subtle poet but he can be surprisingly accessible. What apologists have said of John Ashbery – that all we need for understanding is available on the page – is in fact true of Koethe. Ashbery has always trafficked, always brilliantly, in evasions and escapes, deflections and diversions, but while Koethe adopts Ashbery’s method of moving shiftily and fluidly through a poem, he turns the device to different ends: an aspired-to accuracy (in reproducing the motions of con sciousness) and an unpretentious candor.
The candor encourages Koethe to include personal details that are intimate and trivial («The dinner, the DVD from Netflix,/The drink before I go to sleep»), engaging in a low-key reportage quite the opposite of confessional poetry (which entails a dramatized presentation inseparable from self-assertion); it offers the self as a clinical case study, suggesting that most of our lives are exactly this ordinary, and proposing that any life, looked at as directly as possible, illuminates the universal life, the experience of being a conscious human: an experience less distinctive than we care to think, and doomed to fade into blank anonymity.
His best poems are the meditative, meandering excursions for which he is known, and one of those is the book’s concluding poem, Hamlet (based on a memory of seeing Richard Burton on Broadway in the title role). Shakespeare’s play, in the poem’s reading, casts doubt on the assumption that we are capable of planning our lives, let alone achieving the dreams we had, leading the poet to fear that his Proustian quest – to discover the logic of a recollected life – is equally doomed. As we look back, in an effort to see the pattern of our lives, we hope that any discernible pattern connects with our ambitions and plans, although it usually does not, and any notion «that tomorrow mirrors our / Designs . . . lies in ruins on the stage».
At the poem’s end, Koethe weighs his own accomplishments, asking where his own life has brought him, finding «nothing tangible to see», but because his enterprise is not over – more poems wait in the wings – he concludes, «And so I / Bide my time», repeating a theme introduced eighty pages earlier, in the book’s second poem: «I came here for the view, and what is there to see? / The place is still a place in progress / And the days have the feeling of fiction, of pages / Blank with anticipation, biding their time, / And ever approaching the chapter in the story / Where it ends, and my heart is waiting». Yet Koethe’s book as a whole is strangely fulfilling, as Aristotle proposed that tragedy should be, even if here, as in Hamlet, the wrecks of hopes and dreams lie scattered about the stage. Sally’s Hair is in fact a highly readable book, compelling in the rigor of its inquiry into the human condition, and appealing in the elusive and somewhat eerie blend of the personal and impersonal – the basis of Koethe’s distinctive style.
Over the decades, Koethe has developed a style whose uniqueness rests on his testing of a certain hypothesis: that prosaic, unpoetic language can be the stuff of poetry, quite as much as the genre’s traditional material (figurative language, imagery, rhythm, sound, heightened rhetoric, and so on). If he succeeds, it is partly because his arid abstractions can ease so graciously and imperceptibly into the poetic, and because they are leavened by an intimate, conversational tone whose credibility compensates for an absence of spark and drama. It also succeeds because Koethe is a master at summoning the nuances that swim beneath the surface of his bland diction. He does so through a method similar to the layering of a film’s sound track (if we stay to see the credits we notice songs listed we don’t recall hearing), and listening to Koethe is a matter of hearing those songs, their samplings, their savor and snap, their pop ambiance, their corniness. In Eros and the Everyday, a title more fit for a scholarly essay than a poem, we read «What is this thing that feels at once so nebulous /And so complete, living from day to day / Unmindful of itself, oblivious», lines that would seem dry and stuffy except that beneath them we hear (alerted by the use of love as an end-word in lines before and after) the melody and words of Cole Porter’s What Is This Thing Called Love. It is this counterpoint of the austere and the sentimental, of the dour philosopher and the popular songwriter, the remote and the ordinary, that most distinguishes Koethe’s voice, and best makes his case for style as truth. I encourage read ers to become familiar with this distinctive modern voice: those who do so will be richly rewarded.
Robert Hahn
[A longer version of this essay appeared in Boston Review (Spring 2006)].
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