Through his first three books, which appeared in 1968, 1973 and 1984, John Koethe wrote poems. Good poems, quiet poems, a little dry, but assured – the poems of a poet going his own way. In 1997, after thirteen years, Koethe published Falling Water. He had found his subject, time, and had begun to write poetry. He has since published The Constructor (1999), North Point North: New and Selected Poems (2002) and now Sally’s Hair. He has joined the first rank of poets of his generation—he is 61 years old—and although his poetry is too deliberate and philosophical (more on this later) to shout its name in the street, Koethe’s voice, once heard, sticks in the mind.

Koethe began Falling Water with “From the Porch,” a poem that remembers his childhood home in San Diego:

“And children fell asleep
To the lullaby of people murmuring softly in the kitchen,
While a breeze rustled the pages of Life magazine,
And the wicker chairs stood empty on the screened-in porch.”

This long, masculine and sonorous like is what I mean by poetry. Koethe continues to write poems, the last section of Sally’s Hair contains several superb ones, but the poetry in the book’s first three sections unrolls like a horizon line between present and past. He is “preoccupied with time.” His autobiographical approach is clear form the books first poem “The Perfect Life”:

“I have a perfect life. It isn’t much
But it’s enough for me. It keeps me alive
And happy in a vague way: no disappointments
On the near horizon, no pangs of doubt;
Looking forward in anticipation, looking back
In satisfaction at the conclusion of the day.”

But Koethe keeps the facts of his life to himself. We learn that he is a middle class, once married teacher of philosophy living and working in Milwaukee where he rises early to take his morning jog. Oh, we learn more than this but Koethe is never exactly intimate. One effect of his tone and innate discretion is that his ruminations on life can be entered into like those of a poet he resembles, Walt Whitman. Or like the poetry of a poet he greatly admires about whom he has written with intelligence and insight, John Ashbery. Ashbery’s great subject is also time, and if his poetry is more abstract than Koethe’s they both write what Gertrude Stein called “Everybody’s Autobiography”.  

By philosophical I mean that Koethe is a man like the rest of us, “inhabiting/ A kind of no-man’s-land between the thoughts / Of earth and heaven…Between a once and future life, between / The passive and the possible…” Koethe returns both to what this feels like and how we think our way through the days we have. He quotes Wittgenstein, about whom he has written a book, “Running against the walls of our cage is perfectly hopeless.” His poetry does not run but walks or jogs, clear-eyed, deliberate, refusing to dramatize in hopes “to walk as one / into the light of ordinary day.” Koethe’s voice is comforting, but he knows that life has a way of “making the commonplace seem strange.” He understands that this is renewal, that in the ordinary light of day things are the same only different. His poetry ponders life’s common rhythms without recourse to big subjects or big statements. His modesty is genuine and refreshing. His refusal of what Robert Lowell described as “a snapshot / lurid, rapid, garish, grouped / heightened from life” tones down his rhetoric. He really means “ordinary day,” the hours in which living takes place no more meaningfully than when we are joyous or in despair. For Koethe like Wallace Stevens imagination is our chance at redemption, but the poets he most resembles are Elizabeth Bishop, whose line “as when emotion far exceeds its cause” as an epigram, and James Schuyler.   

Pick up Sally’s Hair and read the book’s four last poems, “Sally’s Hair,” “Proust,” “16:A” and “Hamlet.” You will know soon enough if this excellent poet is for you. If he is you will continue to encounter a poet of clear surface and uncommon, life and thought-charging, depth.