Of Quirks and Quarks

Heather Treseler reviews John Koethe’s new collection “Cemeteries and Galaxies.”

By Heather TreselerApril 8, 2025

• Poetry

MY GRANDFATHER READ the newspaper in reverse, starting with the obituaries, and on weekends he often took me, his eldest grandchild, on tours of graveyards in Metro Boston: we would study lichened headstones of Fords, Kellys, and McCarthys—persons I knew only as names, mythologies, or the occasional dim photograph. At times, we came across a freshly dug grave, covered with wooden planks. Or a new burial, the raw earth not yet grassed over.

I thought of those trips, visiting dead people I’d otherwise never met, while reading John Koethe’s Cemeteries and Galaxies (2025), a collection that brought back warm memories of riding shotgun in my grandfather’s Buick, listening to big band, and wondering about the good fortune of being born, of being alive, while taking in what I could see from my seat, often just a slice of sky—birds, treetops, traffic lights. Or cloud cover, sunlight, a day moon.

Koethe’s new collection looks upward at the most distant galaxies and downward at the inarticulate dead, continuing the central quest of his poetic work, which is examining—between the certainty of death and the unknowability of the universe—the nature of human selfhood, shorn of superstition. As “someone whose only heaven is here,” the poet-philosopher has long preferred “axioms” to “angels” and is interested in how we answer our essential human questions with reason and imagination, apart from religious orthodoxy.

The poems in this volume work best when Koethe’s reflections entwine with narrative, giving the reader concrete footholds for their cosmic ruminations. In the poem “My Privilege,” the poet-narrator recounts visiting an exhibition of Jasper Johns’s work at the Whitney Museum, which brings back memories of a Soho dinner party he attended in the 1980s with Johns and John Ashbery, when the two reportedly weren’t on good terms, although they seemed friendly that evening. The anecdote enables Koethe to meditate on artists’ prickliness, the appeal of Johns’s artwork over 40 years, and the ways in which Johns and Ashbery established their aesthetics in defiance of prevailing trends. At the Whitney exhibit, the narrator admires Johns’s oeuvre:

His deflation of painting’s dramatization of interiority,
His obsession with the banal and everyday that anticipated …
What? All of that was true, and yet what moved me was his privacy:
A target was concentric paint, and yet it stood for something
He alone could understand, and the Savarin cans he kept repeating
Occupied a studio in his soul that lay behind the galleries of art.

For Koethe, Johns’s symbology lends the work its emotive power: whatever the Savarin coffee cans and brightly painted bull’s-eyes might have meant to the painter, as he sought to get beyond the tropes of abstract expressionism. In the poem, the narrator reports that Johns asked Ashbery to read aloud his 739-line poem “The Skaters” in the artist’s studio; this poem, which Ashbery said was inspired by the “boredom” of his childhood, makes ample, even dizzying use of pastiche, passages of ars poetica, fragments, and found objects. Johns’s request for a private performance suggests the affinity that he felt for Ashbery’s work, although artistic camaraderie can be fueled by competition as much as recognition or homage. Indeed, Koethe uses this instance to assert that the ways in which art (and poetry) engage us are more subtle and profound than these processes—almost beyond the reach of commonplace language.

“That’s what privacy means,” he writes: “not an absence of people, but their presence / In the face of something they can’t recognize. I see it in my soul each day / And you in yours, and yet it’s nothing we can talk about or share, / Except by accident or indirection.” In the modernist tradition, Koethe wants to reclaim the experience of art as something that is not straightforward or programmatic, liberating the aesthetic encounter from the bossy museum tour guide, critics’ commentary, and even political causes. To borrow from Wallace Stevens’s phrasing, Koethe would like us to consider “the planet on the table,” and poems as “makings” of the “self and the sun,” disconnected from the explanatory take-away. In other words, he is interested in poems that don’t conclude in the gift shop—on tchotchkes or bumper stickers.

In “Poetry and Fame,” an homage to Amy Clampitt (1920–94) that doubles as an ars poetica, Koethe meditates on the experiences that her poems, in attaining their own stylistic signature, offer readers. He praises Clampitt’s “long and looping sentences composed in a Latinate vocabulary,” which she follows “to a not-so-logical conclusion”; more generally, he admires her poetics, which manifests as “a conversation with yourself, a soliloquy overheard in silence, / Written down and offered to an apathetic world that sometimes listened.” This formulation of poems as inherently private acts, which a readership might or might not appreciate, is contrary to the populist mission of many poetry organizations and writing programs.

But Koethe is not interested in a communitarian version of poetry as a “genre / Anyone can master if he tries to, like bowls and vases at an art fair. […] As someone tries to tell you who he is and why he matters.” Poems as vehicles for self-discovery and aggrandizement—the aesthetic equivalents of New Age retreats, athletic boot camps, or confidence seminars—are anathema in his schema of poems that are primarily about ideas, the play of language, and the literary tradition. Advocating for poems of “fleeting states of mind,” divorced from the tiring ethics of self-proclamation, Koethe’s work reflects influences from poets as different as Ashbery and W. H. Auden, George Oppen and Stevens, Clampitt and Elizabeth Bishop, Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed: linguistic musicians who could hardly be expected to play in the same room together—except in Koethe’s poems, where he recombines their rhythms in his own mode and to suit his own purposes. These include confronting the concerns often hovering at the edge of our consciousnesses, such as what constitutes kinship, justice, morality, and the scope of human knowledge.

One bracing question posed by Cemeteries and Galaxies is what, if anything, we owe our biological kin who chronically make poor choices and, reciprocally, how we can acknowledge our debts to those who may have passed only briefly through our lives or reached us primarily through their work. I was riveted by the poem “Passing Away” as the narrator resists the verbal cosmetics applied to death, including the ready-made sympathies from the “banks / And the mortuaries and insurance companies” that he encounters following his sister’s demise. Hearing the rote line “sorry for the loss,” he silently observes that he’s not sorry, given that “The last twenty years of her life were an unremitting hell” ending “in a small, anonymous house / In Aurora, Colorado, with no one to keep her company but her dog.” While the poem does not reveal the reason for his sister’s prolonged unhappiness and isolation, this glossed anecdote prepares the reader for his assertion, at the poem’s end: “no matter whose [life] it is or how long it’s going to last / It’s everything there is and all it can remember. Then it’s gone.” He states not only that each of us occupies “an individual world that no one else can see” but also that the world of a person concludes—sharply, utterly—with the end of biological life. There is, for Koethe, no afterlife or afterword except, perhaps, in the gifts we might unwittingly bequeath.

In the jaunty poem “John Rawls et al.,” the speaker describes receiving such a bequest. The poem recounts how Rawls, author of A Theory of Justice (1971), stepped in to fill an absence on the poet-speaker’s dissertation committee. When a cantankerous colleague, in a fit of academic pique during the dissertation defense, strenuously objected (for an hour) to “something [the dissertation] said about Quine,” Rawls intervened: “C’mon, Burt—it’s not for publication.” Rawls got Koethe’s dissertation to pass and offered the newly hazed PhD “a drink at the faculty club.” Many of us owe our careers to similarly well-timed acts of professional kindness in the face of bureaucratic mechanisms or capricious supervisors. Koethe situates this anecdote in the broader scope of Rawls’s biography: the young “Jack” played football at Princeton and planned to become an Episcopalian minister before a trench conversion, during World War II, to atheism and a subsequent career as “the greatest moral philosopher since Kant,” developing ideas about the just allocation of resources that provide a recipe for human happiness (were human nature not reflexively jealous and appetitive).

What accounts, Koethe inquires in his poetic consideration of Rawls’s life, for the painful gap between what we can imagine and what we can enact? Why is justice so often delayed or thwarted, he asks with philosophical rigor and the worldliness of a person entering his eighties. “Maybe,” he writes, “what seems compelling in the abstract doesn’t speak to us / Unless we see each other face-to-face […] Though empathy has its limits and proximity can drive you crazy too, / Like a domestic argument.” As a thinker, he focuses on where the rubber meets the road, where praxis tests theory, where poems illustrate complexities that philosophy (and physics) can’t solve.

Congenially, he cloaks this intensity of looking, which borders on ferocity, in meticulous plainspoken language, investigating the limits of our knowledge of the material world and our inner nature—our quirks and quarks, supreme fictions and secular facts. And he’s obsessed with the ways in which a chronological story-of-self both does and doesn’t add up to the person (or persons) we might feel, in any one discrete moment, ourselves to be. In the poem “The Divinity Within,” which challenges an Emersonian idea of God, Koethe observes that “what makes a life divine isn’t its perfection or its power, but its estrangement / From the world and the reflection of itself in all it sees,” a formula that elevates human loneliness (and solipsism) to a cosmic predicament. We are each a world unto ourselves: every cemetery holds the remains of lives’ inner galaxies. And, while alive, we are afflicted with too much contingency and privacy to be wholly knowable to ourselves or each other.

We can, however, turn to the “accident or indirection” of poems to witness, as Koethe writes, “bodies hiding lives / As real as yours and as impossible to see.” Here, I think of my grandfather’s half-told tales of relatives as we drove potholed lanes through graveyards, each lurch of his Buick giving me a new take on the half-glimpsed, half-imagined landscape passing outside the window. We never get the full account of a person, however many facts or images we assemble. But we get enough to continue these rituals of visitation, in language, which give us a provisional sense of a cosmic home.