As an esteemed poet and a retired professor of philosophy at UW-Milwaukee, John Koethe kept those two worlds separate. “I used to make a point of saying I don’t write philosophical poems,” he says.
That hard line dissipates in his new anthology, Cemeteries and Galaxies. There are poems about philosophy, mathematics, astrophysics and other obsessions he’s held during his decades-long career.
Like Koethe’s previous work, they’re written as meditative exercises, using clear language to guide readers into esoteric ideas. What ties these subjects together for Koethe is their sense of the unknown, making “the world out to be much stranger and much harder to understand than we thought.”
The book released on April 1, and Koethe will speak at Boswell Book Co. on April 4. MilMag spoke to Koethe about the inspiration behind the book.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
What was your approach to this new book?
It didn’t have one initially, but it turned out to be rather different from my other books – and different from most poetry books – because there are a lot of poems about things poetry isn’t usually about. Namely, mathematics, physics, philosophy, astrophysics, and some things about religion. I realized as I was writing it that it’s about all of my various obsessions I’ve been interested in in life.
I had a very religious upbringing, and then that completely fell away. By the time I was in high school, I was completely devoted to mathematics and physics. I was dead set on becoming a theoretical physicist. And at the beginning of college, that all just dropped away, and I started writing poetry and switched to philosophy.
In your work, you have these deep meditations on life and death and meaning and reality, but the way that they’re presented, they feel accessible to me. Your words aren’t like a puzzle but rather a conduit for deeper thinking. Is that your goal?
I think that’s probably right. Sometimes I like my poems to be locally clear – so that line by line they make sense and you can understand them – but globally somewhat obscure and out of focus So it’s easy enough to see what each line means, but when you look at the poem as a whole, it’s very hard to pin down exactly what it is. It’s a meditative exercise. When I write, I usually have some idea of what the architecture of the poem is going to be – roughly how long and what kind of cadences and rhythms and so on. But I don’t have a clear idea of what it’s going to be about, except in a very broad sense, and it’s something I enjoy discovering.
How has your work changed over your career?
It has the same radical impulses I started out with. Back in the ’60s, there used to be a real dichotomy between poetry that was academic and polished – and appreciated by universities – and then poetry that was somewhat wilder. I’ve never particularly liked the beats, but they were an early example of extremely nonacademic poetry, people like Robert Lowell.
I started out drawn to the nonacademic poetry, first the Black Mountain School and then the New York School. … My work started out extremely fragmentary and became clearer and clearer. But I think overall that global obscurity and elusiveness has continued.
You mentioned that you view poetry and philosophy as separate interests. Why is that?
There’s always been a sense of real tension between them. Plato in The Republic, in which he tries to lay out an ideal society, banishes poets from it because he thinks poetry and philosophy are incompatible. And usually there’s the stereotypical sense of the difference between poetry, which is feeling and emotion, and philosophy, which is supposed to be all about reason. Those are silly, but there’s something broadly to them.
My main work in philosophy has had nothing to do with poetry. The areas I worked in were philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and theory of knowledge. … I wrote (poetry and philosophy) at different times of the year. I worked on philosophy in the fall and the spring, then in the summer and winter, I turned to poetry.
In the last several years, I’ve come to feel less of a sharp difference between philosophy and poetry. … Just as in poetry, the things that appeal to me in philosophy are questions that, to my mind, remain unsettled in all of these areas in science, mathematics, and philosophy and poetry. What really appeals to me are things I don’t think we understand. There’s something puzzling going on that we don’t quite know how to make sense of. I guess that’s sort of what’s appealed to me throughout my whole life.
