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John Koethe
is one of the small number of prominent American poets who does not make a
living by teaching creative writing. A philosopher by profession, he has
written a book on Ludwig Wittgenstein. However, his output as a poet has
been more substantial: The Constructor is his fifth collection of
poems since 1968, and his book of essays, Poetry at One Remove, is
first and foremost for those whose primary interest is poetry not
philosophy. He is preoccupied most of all, both in his poetry and his
critical prose, with the American romantic tradition of Stevens, Ashbery,
and, hovering behind them unmentioned, Emerson. His work explores the
implications of this poetry for the relations between the self and the
world. He is suspicious of ethnic and social demands upon poets,
considering that such engagements “can be an evasion of one’s basic
practical identity as a member of the party of humanity”. Poetry,
emptied of such matters, is for Koethe “an enactment of pure
subjectivity”, an unwavering attention to the actions of
“self-reflective consciousness”. He inveighs against “an overly
narrow view of [poetry’s] range and possibilities, one that insists on
the concrete and particular and proscribes the abstract and discursive”.
What this leaves us with is then hard to
say, but this very question becomes an animating force in the poetry, one
that is woven into a somewhat etiolated autobiography, and by times
contested and asserted. Thus the latter:
I tried to dream away my life, to
Pare the skin away and then, like
something undefined,
Float free from circumstance,
then down these narrow
Passageways and alleys, moving
through them with an
Ambling gait whose tempo varied
with my mood. Beyond
My dream the world unrolled as
usual, distantly.
(“The Advent of the Ordinary”)
And then the
former:
I
Think that I was
wrong to see my body as a kind of place
From which the
soul, as entropy increases, migrates
In an
upward-moving spiral of completion, a defining state
--But
a subtractive one--that brings relief from hope
And freedom from
complexity […]
(“‘I Heard a Fly Buzz…’”)
Even as he
longs, as in the first passage, for some realm away from mundane life, he
registers its faint hum in the distance, and such a tension is articulated
in his prose: “Romanticism, as I have tried to understand it, is
similarly torn between a vision of subjectivity as completely other
than the world and a vision of subjectivity as invested with and
constituted by subjectivity”. That is, the world unrolled without being
informed by his own subjectivity. This tension rarely finds dramatic form
in Koethe’s poetry but rather is expressed by statements of various
realisations that occurred to the subject in the past.
This subject does not do much in
the line of physical action (the most strenuous operation is sipping
coffee), but rather thinks, remembers, recalls, resolves, feels, and
“sees now”--all,
one supposes, while sitting quite still in a well-appointed house. One
exception to this is “Threnody for Two Voices” in which the speaker of
the poems is directly challenged by his wife for his endless havering:
Your maddening
inability to see; your breathless concentration
And these
rambling explanations filled with a grandiose
Self-pity and a
sadness on the scale of the universe.
What’s missing
is the dailiness, the commonplace
Engagements that
could make this formal universe a home.
Well, yes, but
the wife here does not really move beyond Koethe’s own parameters when
criticising the speaker. For if anything is missing from this volume of
poems it is not “dailiness”--the
tone of The Constructor is suffused by the ennui of the everyday,
of the bland eventless afternoons of middle-class existence. What is
missing is a conception of the poetry that is beyond the narrow tradition
of American romanticism.
By this I mean that in Koethe’s
conception, the fundamental opposition is between the individual self and
world--sometimes
there is détente, sometimes not. The world is conceived of as the realm
of the social which threatens the creating self. Discussing the role of
poets as teachers of creative writing, he becomes dogmatic on the point:
It is essential
that the relation between the poet and his work be an internal one between
a freely adopted authorial self and a poetry that enacts that self’s
subjective consciousness--for
only in that that way can conformity to the obligations that relation
engenders manifest the sense of freedom that lies at the heart of the
romantic imagination of the self. But if one’s poetic identity is in
part a matter of an institutional role one occupies, there is always a
danger that one will come to see it as externally imposed--in
which case the relation between the authorial self and the work that flows
from it will be altered. The work will no longer seem to be created in
conformity to a self-imposed obligation but in conformity to a duty
imposed from the outside.
(“Poetry
at One Remove”)
This Emersonian
opposition between the creating self and the entanglements of society
glosses over the ways in which Koethe’s “self-reflective
consciousness” itself is formed by one particular historico-cultural
tradition. The tone here suggests that “conformity to a duty imposed
from the outside” will somehow contaminate the poetry of “the romantic
imagination of self”, but refuses to entertain the idea that the
contamination might have been there from the start. After all, selves are
in part created by particular parents, particular educational
institutions, and so forth. Koethe qualifies this position later in the same essay
(“The problem is that there is really no such thing as a self that is
simply a locus of pure subjectivity simpliciter; yet there is
a poetry that is animated [by] the idea of this kind of self”), but
essentially it informs the whole book. Koethe’s critical frame cannot
account for poetry that acknowledges and then actively rejects the poetry
of “self-reflective consciousness” in order to conform to the demands
of history. And here I do not mean the type of poetry that falls under the
rubric of multiculturalism, but rather of, for instance, Geoffrey Hill.
The poetry snags against nothing but the
speaker’s own small realisations: he leaves the mundane world or he
returns to it, happy or sad, and that is more or less the extent of the
subject matter. In itself that would be more than enough to occupy a poet
of rich rhetorical talents, but these Koethe signally lacks. For the most
part he employs a seven-stress line that drifts into prose: insert a few simpliciters
and semi-colons and The Constructor could be smoothly
cut-&-pasted into Poetry at One Remove (though I should note
that there might be a problem due to the slapdash copy-editing the book of
essays received). The names of Ashbery and Stevens, so often mentioned in
the pages of Poetry at One Remove, mark the height to which Koethe comes nowhere
near.
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