Milwaukee Poet Takes On the Universe

Poet and retired philosophy professor John Koethe was chosen as the first Milwaukee “Poet Laureate,” in 2000, a prize that is bestowed every two years by the Milwaukee Public Library. He was the obvious choice given his national stature.

Koethe has been publishing poetry since 1969, for decades by major publishers like Harper Collins and Farrar, Straus and Giroux and has received numerous awards and accolades. He has won the Frank O’Hara Award for Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Bernard F. Connors Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, and has been nominated for the New Yorker Book Award, the Boston Book Review Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is even a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, no doubt building bridges between historically German Milwaukee and its European relative.

Indeed, Koethe has referenced Milwaukee in a number of poems, even naming several of his poems after local places, including “Hackett Avenue.” And that poetry has been widely published, in Poetry, Paris Review, the Quarterly Review of Literature and Parnassus, but also in more general interest publications like New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. His poems have also been included in several anthologies, including Best American Poetry. He has just published a new book, entitled Cemeteries and Galaxies, and will be doing a reading from it on Friday night.

Critic Andrew Yaphe has called Koethe “one of our foremost Romantic poets, an inheritor of the tradition of Stevens and Ashbery.” (Koethe knew John Ashbery, who was perhaps an influence though Koethe’s poems are far less abstruse.)

Whatever his early influences, Koethe is very much his own man, a poet of “striking and significant originality,” as Robert Hahn wrote in The Kenyan Review. His poems combine his interest in philosophy with everyday musings and memories that make it all mysterious yet accessible.

Of his latest volume of poems, Koethe tells me, “It’s different from my other books. There are a lot of poems about physics, astrophysics, philosophy and mathematics.” Koethe, you see, originally planned to become a mathematical physicist before changing to philosophy, serving as a UW-Milwaukee professor for decades, while creating a side career as a poet.

If that sounds like heady stuff — and Koethe often seems like a man who walks his mind through life — he has a way of bringing his airy thoughts down to earth. As Prof. Bill Olsen of Western Michigan University once put it, “Reading or hearing a John Koethe poem is like listening to yourself – like hearing parts of your own consciousness for the first time.”

Koethe has said that the inspiration for many of his poems comes “in the shower, and while I’m shaving.” I can attest that he always looks very clean-shaven at his poetry readings. In celebration of his lucky 13th book of poetry, he will be reading from it at Boswell Book Store on Friday, April 4, at 6:30 p.m.