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John Koethe John Koethe's yawp echoes eternally through North Point North. A near prerequisite for any poet, the mourning squawk grieves the passing to never be experienced again. In Koethe's world, elapsed time leaves one longing. Sadness becomes a most potent color for any poetic work, and Koethe employs well his palette of blues. For what more do the majority of poems say other than 'my heart aches'? Koethe's poems grow into longer meditations with his age. He muses on a canyon, on Hollywood Boulevard, and most often on American suburbia. Like the Romantic temperament itself, Koethe's poetry resists defining. He focuses much of his poetic attentions on the abstract, his boundless visions, and the unanswerable. He laments a world that has lost its references for him. In "Contemporaries and Ancestors," Koethe writes: "And though I realize that none of this is true,/ The motives seem ingenuous enough:/ To place an incoherent dream of aspiration/ In the context of an argument I thought I'd understood--/ As though the reasoning I'd sought lay dormant/ In the dark recesses of some half-forgotten books,/ Whose premises were residues of feeling/ Tracing out the movements of the intricate/ Detritus of a spent imagination, until the clouds lift,/ And the sunlight filters through the thin venetian blinds,/ And narrows to this small, irreferential space." A professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Koethe, throughout his book, asks the Platonic questions about existence, place, mind/body, experience/knowledge, etc. He equally considers the more contemporary postmodern conundrums. Koethe questions reality and plays with the illusory truth. For instance, "Hackett Avenue" begins, innocently enough, on a Milwaukee Street, turns into a holocaust landscape, and ends with Cecil B. DeMille's Sunset Boulevard. Koethe's meditations supply the reader with memories and topographies that allow him to enter his own domains and fictions. "And waiting, and still waiting, for the sun to come up./ Tell them I've had a wonderful life./ Tell Mr. DeMille I'm ready for my close up." "Hackett Avenue" closes with the old philosopher morphed into Norma Desmond dying, and theirs is a life of celluloid, partitioned in tiny cells or frames, whose words hold little meaning. The words, like the film stills, are "just fragments really,/ No more than that." Like the majority of the poems in North Point North, the poet of "Hackett Avenue" tirelessly pursues a logic in an existence that lacks any. Philosophically abstract, he utilizes straightforward language with an unusual clarity for a poetry dealing with such subject matter. He does not play the syntax game. No mysteries hide behind his sentence structure, but Koethe's ideas domino atop one another and cascade his readers down his poems. His strength appears at these moments when he hurdles his reader through time and images only to be told at the end that the end is all there is.
Let me try once more. I think the saddest moments Though he writes the majority of his poems in a freely
constructed verse, Koethe's poetic temperament mirrors the ode. He tips
us off with "Dellius' Boat." Koethe uses an Horatian epigraph from the
Latin poet to introduce his readers to the poems' first world. Whether
in stanzaic form or not, the poet addresses the subject of the real and
not so real world in which we live through a heightened lyric mourning
a passing beauty that he will never see again. His sensitivity for the
ephemeral charges his lament with great value. Indeed, time, the great
equalizer; runs our experiences into the red, and with each passing day,
we run a greater deficit. Poets concern themselves with the times in which
they live. As Koethe says in "Some," "Time is what they [poets] do." And
for the time, Koethe clamors.
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