{"id":10430,"date":"2019-03-27T23:11:48","date_gmt":"2019-03-27T22:11:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10430"},"modified":"2019-03-28T22:08:34","modified_gmt":"2019-03-28T21:08:34","slug":"john-koethe-walking-backwards-poems-1966-2016-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10430","title":{"rendered":"John Koethe | Walking Backwards: Poems 1966-2016<\/em><\/strong> | reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Koethe | Walking Backwards: Poems 1966-2016<\/em> | FSG: $40.00<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In a characteristically pellucid essay, \u2018The Pyrrhic Measure in American Poetry\u2019, John Koethe\u2019s friend and fellow poet, Douglas Crase, sets out to analyse a particular characteristic of the American poetic voice. Crase links the vistas of the American landscape with a particular type of American poetry, \u2018big blocks of words, prosy chunks that in their sequential and cumulative effects can be sized up as kin to paragraphs.\u2019 When William Carlos Williams published In the American Grain<\/em> in 1925, he was attempting to see what made certain American figures \u2018American\u2019. In his Autobiography<\/em>, Williams commented on this attempt, \u2018I want to make it clear that they are us, the American make-up, that we are what we have made up by their deeds and so remain in the American [Grain].\u2019 <\/p>\n

Crase is, perhaps, making a similar connection between the American landscape and the American voice. Crase goes on to write, \u2018Like the American drawl itself, the lines of American poetry could be lengthened, flattened, and expanded in scale to replace the name of just about anything.\u2019 Technically, Crase associates this lengthening and flattening with the classic pyrrhic measure in poetry; that Crase calls \u2018the unstressed platform of the poem, the opposite of the spondee\u2019. What I take it that Crase is suggesting is that fully stressed syllables, measured in spondees, are reduced in the American voice; that, perhaps, there is a quietness, an unstressed quality to a certain type of American poetry. For Crase, the ultimate exemplar of that kind of writing is Ashbery, \u2018Many of Ashbery\u2019s finest lines seem to echo a distant alexandrine or sometimes tetrameter that has relaxed into an abundance of unaccented, pyrrhic feet.\u2019 The alexandrine, a line measured in twelve syllables, is one of the most favoured of measures in French poetry, because the accenting of syllables in French is much more equal than in English. Thus, the line is measured in the number of syllables, rather than the number of stresses as in the iambic pentameter, say. <\/p>\n

I have spent some time on the prosody because of the next move in Crase\u2019s argument, that this kind of American poetry can be \u2018measured\u2019 in paragraphs; and here Crase repeats Gertrude Stein\u2019s dictum that \u2018Sentences are not emotional, paragraphs are.\u2019 Thus, if vistas are to be contained in paragraphs that delimit particular emotions, then those vistas are, to some extent, a kind of paysage moralis\u00e9<\/em>; the identification of the writer with the landscape. Such senses of the emotional paragraph may, of course, run counter to the poetic paragraph outlined by other American poets, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet, Ron Silliman, for example, states that the paragraph is a \u2018unit of quantity, not logic or argument.\u2019 <\/p>\n

Crase also links John Koethe\u2019s version of this prosody with his main employment as a professor of philosophy, and one who has written on Wittgenstein. And, to take another angle here, the form of Wittgenstein\u2019s Tractatus<\/em> has proved a fruitful textual model for a number of poets, including the British poet, Roy Fisher. Thus, one way into Koethe\u2019s writing is the sense that it is discursive; that it explores issues verbally. In Koethe\u2019s case this means, to some extent, moving away from description to an exploration of, particularly, relationships, emotions, inner states. Koethe, himself, in his book of essays on poetry, Poetry at One Remove<\/em>, published in 2000, comments, \u2018an overly narrow view of [poetry\u2019s] range and possibilities, one that insists on the concrete and particular and proscribes the abstract and discursive \u2026 strikes me as pernicious\u2026\u2019<\/p>\n

Koethe\u2019s poetry is not always discursive. The poems selected from across his books, collected in this semi \u2018collected\u2019 poems, show a range of formal experimentation. The poems from Koethe\u2019s first book Vents<\/em>, are often short, first-person lyrics, which some times chop up syntax and have a restless, searching feel to them. Koethe\u2019s second volume, Domes<\/em>, from 1973 shows a more complicated approach; in most of the poems the lines are longer, the \u2018thought units\u2019 are longer and more likely to burrow away at ideas and issues. However, there are also poems in this book in what are quite clearly iambic pentameters; take these lines from part of the title poem, \u2018Green lichen fastened to a blue rock \/ Like a map of the spot; cobwebs crowded with stars \/ of water\u2026\u2019 But it has to be said that this kind of versifying is unusual in Koethe\u2019s writing, and was another possible experiment in form which he subsequently abandoned. And where this book pays real attention to the narrator\u2019s environment, which it does quite a lot, there is more sense of the \u2018thought units\u2019 and the verse paragraphs being coterminous, in Crase\u2019s terms. Sometimes, here, the poems smack of Robert Lowell; there are autobiographical poems which take Lowell\u2019s Life Studies as a clear model. In these poems, we see how Koethe\u2019s work is moving towards a much more staged, philosophical if you like, reflection; introspection but introspection pegged on the reach towards greater truths. And if that sounds like a grand statement of the obvious, i.e., Koethe is now engaged in his own exploration of \u2018the growth of the poet\u2019s mind\u2019, one wonders how many of Koethe\u2019s contemporaries have really engaged in that Wordsworthian project. <\/p>\n

Koethe gifts the reviewer with a short manifesto in the poem \u2018Picture of Little Letters\u2019, \u2018What I want in poetry is a kind of abstract photography \/ Of the nerves, but what I like in photography \/ Is the poetry of literal pictures of the neighbourhood.\u2019 Of course, by contrasting \u2018abstract\u2019 with \u2018literal\u2019, and \u2018nerves\u2019 with \u2018neighbourhood\u2019, Koethe attempts to muddy his own waters, to overlay the abstract on the literal. Koethe is also painting himself into his own corner, although his ambition, as I understand it, to be both physically precise but intellectually wide ranging, seems noble enough. Koethe himself understand the kind of contradictions much poetry entertains. In his own book of essays, Poetry at One Remove<\/em>, he comments, <\/p>\n

          \u2026 in the course of the poem\u2019s elaboration one may entertain and essay notions of           whose untenability one is perfectly aware \u2013 an untenability one may even           acknowledge \u2013 without being led to abandon them. Indeed the awareness of the           futility of a conception may even lead to an even greater insistence on it, because           the animating force of poetic speculation is always desire<\/em>, rather than an ideal of           impersonal accuracy. <\/p>\n

As Koethe acknowledges, this idea of \u2018desire\u2019 comes from Wallace Stevens, which Koethe paraphrases as, \u2018this theme of assertion in the face of futility.\u2019 So, although Koethe has written on Wittgenstein, the central feeling that arises from these poems is much less a sense of \u2018language games\u2019 than an exploration of a much more Heideggerean idea of \u2018poetic truth\u2019; what Heidegger elsewhere calls \u2018thinking listening\u2019. <\/p>\n

Thinking listening in Koethe\u2019s poetry takes varying forms. Listening, as opposed to hearing, can be musical as in \u2018Songs my mother taught me\u2019, which riffs on the Dvorak song of the same name. Such music an arouse in Koethe, \u2018a story \/ set entirely in the kingdom of appearance\u2019 which might morph into a \u2018Face that floats above a background made of \/ Words that someone spoke, from which the human \/ Figure gradually emerges, like a shifting pattern \/ Drifting through a filigree of flimsy clouds \/ Above the massive, slowly turning globe.\u2019 This sense of stories spinning out, one from another is characteristic of Koethe\u2019s method. The poems, themselves, emerge within and from shifting patterns. Koethe muses on a way of thinking\/perceiving out of which an image of the human condition arises. And yet, the image itself may be based on false perceptions, even where the image itself is relocated within concretions which, in turn, may be evanescent like the clouds or massive and finite such as the globe. And Koethe, too, is conscious, even self-conscious of the dilemmas he evokes. Later in this same poem, he comments, \u2018I wish there were an answer to that wish. \/ Why can\u2019t the unseen world \u2013 the real world – \/ Be like an aspect of a place that one remembers?\u2019<\/p>\n

These ambivalences in Koethe\u2019s writing exist in both the life described and the techniques used to describe the life. There is quite a lot of the \u2018what-might-have-been\u2019 kind in Koethe\u2019s middle period writing; the best of these poems moving outside that kind of introspection, to meditate on other propositions. In \u2018Falling Water\u2019, the major poem of this middle period, Koethe meditates on a comment of Freud \u2018That space is the projection of a \u201cpsychic apparatus\u201d \/ Which remains almost entirely oblivious to itself;\u2019 And while, initially, this sounds unbearably precious, Koethe takes this and uses it to discuss what is the relationship between the house and the home, particularly in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, in ways which are deft and poignant, \u2018embodying a milder, \/ More domestic notion of perfection, on a human scale.\u2019 Koethe often remarks on the necessity of \u2018a human scale\u2019 in poetry, and yet this clearly causes tensions for him. In the title poem from his 2002 volume, North Point North, he comments, \u2018A poem can seize and hold a moment fast, yet it can \/ Limit what there is to feel, and stake a distance from the world.\u2019 <\/p>\n

In many ways, the rest of Koethe\u2019s writing to date has been an exploration of that sense of both intimacy and distance, which is not to reduce his poetry to a single trajectory. Koethe is never afraid to use the first person \u2018I\u2019, and it is clear that the \u2018I\u2019 is the \u2018empirical\u2019 Koethe. These poems explore that sense of the first person without quite expanding into the confessional, particularly not in the sense of the confession in, say, the poetry of Frank Bidart. Koethe\u2019s poetry is almost memoirist, a kind of poetic, creative non-fiction. The come-and-go of relationships is remarked on in this book, but Koethe refuses to dwell on it. High points later in this book include the title poem from his 2009 book, Ninety-Fifth Street, a self-deprecating reminiscence of time spent with John Ashbery in New York. And Koethe writes wonderful travel poems, too; about Lagos, or visiting the Uffizi in Florence and that same sensibility pervades his later poems about New York. In the final, \u2018New Poems\u2019 section, there is a very fine riffing on Larkin\u2019s \u2018Church Going\u2019 in the poem \u2018Rural Churches\u2019. These are poems in which intimacy and distance in a particular locale are expertly balanced, and where there is a real sense of a personality expanding with and into a certain place. <\/p>\n

As Koethe remarks, quoting Yeats approvingly, this is poetry as \u2018a silent quarrel with yourself,\u2019 and, although the emphasis is the \u2018quiet\u2019, it is certainly the \u2018quarrel\u2019 which drives the poems. Koethe has consistently winnowed his poetry over the years, and he has taken out poems which even made it into his North Point North selected. The net effect is that Walking Backwards<\/em> shows that Wordsworthian \u2018growth of the poet\u2019s mind\u2019 with an unaffected clarity. <\/p>\n

by Ian Pople<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Koethe | Walking Backwards: Poems 1966-2016 | FSG: $40.00 In a characteristically pellucid essay, \u2018The Pyrrhic Measure in American Poetry\u2019, John Koethe\u2019s friend and fellow poet, Douglas Crase, sets out to analyse a particular characteristic of the American poetic voice. Crase links the vistas of the American landscape with a particular type of American […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nJohn Koethe | Walking Backwards: Poems 1966-2016 | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10430\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"John Koethe | Walking Backwards: Poems 1966-2016 | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"John Koethe | Walking Backwards: Poems 1966-2016 | FSG: $40.00 In a characteristically pellucid essay, \u2018The Pyrrhic Measure in American Poetry\u2019, John Koethe\u2019s friend and fellow poet, Douglas Crase, sets out to analyse a particular characteristic of the American poetic voice. 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