The Poet's Name

I have learned recently not speculate on the letters that make up a person’s name, that literary musings do not amuse when they are about your proper name. If I imagine some one speculating about my name, it instantly brings back vicious childhood teasing, and why would that be different for anyone else?

Still what a boon for the imagination when in the midst of a noisy Dionysian party a quiet friend slipped me a copy of John Koethe. What’s a German professor to do, but become intrigued? Is there some secret connection that the letters of the poet’s name spell out? An affinity affirmed, a lineage that requires the adjustment of just one letter?

Well, it’s not that simple. John Koethe is his own very serious poet, not someone swiftly tucked into a familiar envelope of literary history. If anything, reading Koethe reminds me of first encountering John Ashbury in the New Yorker, and wondering how to decipher the lines.

Goethe was not often turned around to contemplate memory. In that sense he was Classical –always facing the horizon ahead, anticipating more knowledge, yet unfamiliar treasures on the next island. His moodiness came in youth, so that when he yearned, it was for what he could not now have, as opposed to what was lost in recollection. The opening to Faust 2 was the one connection I could find between Goethe and Koethe.

Really there is more K in Koethe than Goethe.

He writes as an American who has read so much philosophy that his intimate feelings speak as theory. No romantic language of simplicity, no turning the speech of the ordinary farmer into self-revery. His introspection sounds not just like someone who has read Proust, but who has also absorbed the last forty years of Proust criticism. Koethe’s poem seem to have internalized the grammar of literary criticism, so that they speak the voice of a professor recollecting his life.

Falling Water, the poem I was assigned, and the one that produces the most Google hits, has the private voice of an academic. It recounts taking a trip, getting divorced, raising children with self-conscious turns. He moves directly from a personal thought to a general statement, as if abstracting quickly away from himself, a move that a therapist once pointed out to me.

So Koethe is not a poet who speaks from another time and place, he belongs very much to our own. He is the intensely learned middle American university professor, and not the alienated cliché who's grumbling that he should be teaching back East. Koethe seems too Buddhist for such resentment. His poems describe intellectual thought in place, where he now lives, so that the distances he contemplates are temporal, his own life, but not the lures of an island off on a distant shore.