Falling Water

by John Koethe

"As a poet who is a teacher of philosophy, John Koethe knows better than most of us the uses and dissatisfactions of both disciplines, if indeed they are disciplines. In this ravishing and haunted book he comes face to face with the time when 'more than half my life is gone, ' and must try to find the meaning of 'a childish/dream of love, and then the loss of love, /and all the intricate years between.' As funny and fresh as it is tragic and undeceived, Falling Water ranks with Wallace Stevens' Auroras of Autumn as one of the profoundest meditations on existence ever formulated by an American Poet." --John Ashbery "To describe with unpromising candor the inner life of a man adrift in the waning of the 20th century is one thing, but to do it without a shred of self-pity is another. The poems of his new book, Falling Water, are like no one else's. In them, even the most extreme exertions of consciousness are transformed into the luminous measures of beautiful speech." --Mark Strand

"In this ambitious volume, the magnificent poet who gave us The Late Wisconsin Spring moves ever more swiftly and surefootedly into the deepest regions of self-invention: the past -- few poets write more accurately and painfully about that uncanny estranged place that never finds its way out of us; the present, or idea of the present, as mere projection, and yet a projection so poignantly, materially, tenderly touched it gleams with all its claustrophobic distances; and the future...'I wish that time could bring the future back again/And let me see things as they used to seem to me/Before I found myself alone, in an emancipated state--/Alone and free and filled...' With its low-key blank verse, its apparently casual manner of speech, its digressions, asides, recollections -- with all its taking its time -- this is a poetry of magnificent undertow, all proximity of thought, singularity of contemplation, protest, pretext, reflection -- all disenchantment and then, suddenly, blazing re-enchantment, with the newly, lovingly, seen-through real." --Jorie Graham

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

John Koethe is an American poet, essayist and professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Koethe is originally from San Diego, California. He was educated at Princeton University and Harvard University.Koethe's published work includes Blue Vents (Audit/Poetry, 1969), Domes (Columbia University Press, 1973), The Late Wisconsin Spring (Princeton University Press, 1984), The Continuity of Wittgenstein's Thought (Cornell University Press, 1996), Falling Water (HarperPerennial, 1997), The Constructor, (HarperFlamingo, 1999), Poetry at One Remove (University of Michigan Press, 2000) and North Point North: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2002). His most recent books include Scepticism, Knowledge, and Forms of Reasoning (Cornell University Press, 2005), Sally's Hair (HarperCollins, 2006), Ninety-fifth Street (Harper Parennial, 2009) and ROTC Kills (Harper Perennial, 2012).

Koethe has also contributed poetry and essays to publications including Poetry, Paris Review, Quarterly Review of Literature, Parnassus, and Art News.His work has been included in anthologies of poetry, including The Best American Poetry (2003).Additionally, he was selected to contribute his views on contemporary poetry for the book Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, which billed him as one of "85 leading contemporary poets."

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

The mind survives its disappointments
*

Yet people live in one another’s minds,
*

Perhaps the hardest feeling is the one
Of unrealized possibility:
Thoughts left unspoken, actions left undone

That seemed to be of little consequence
To things considered in totality;
And yet that might have made a difference.

Sometimes the thought of what one might have done
Starts to exhaust the life that it explains,
After so much of what one knew has gone.
*
Sometimes at night
The banished unrealities return,
as though a room
Suffused with light and poetry took shape around me.
*
It’s all memories now, and distance.

[Kasandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a volume of poetry I will read many times, due to the inner journeys Koethe invites the reader on, which are both personal and universal. His style reflects his life as a professor of philosophy -- many of these pieces leave questions only partially answered, raising further questions and sparking reflection. His long lines and a few of his long pieces seemed almost dreamlike. He has the ability to be clear in language but still intriguing and surprising in where his pieces are heading. His lines echo the pathways of thought, both direct and distracted, when it's followed in detail toward the human mysteries we share.

[Gabriel Congdon · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books of poetry I've ever read. Maybe its philosophical loftiness wont speak to all but, WHOOO, for moi, this bell had a clapper! Poetry, for me, expresses moods and states of beings that there are no words for, or rather, there are poems. At times I felt like theses poems were reading my mind, or reading my life. On a technical note, hardly any nouns in this book, its rather remarkable. Ashbery attains these heights, but he's still using stuff, Kothe is able to do as much without the simulacra. You'll probably want to get tattoos of many of the poems, I say go for it, the world would be better for it.
28 ratings so far. Can you fucking believe it?

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

[Bella Bankes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jaw-dropping cadence, seductively rhythmic, like classical music in the form of poetry. Koethe transforms melancholic reflections on existence, love, and loss into dreamscapes. Captivating, lucid, transcendent, truly a masterpiece collection.

[Tina Schumann · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you do not read any other poem in this collection, be sure to read the title poem. An amazing example of discursive poetry working. Self-exploration, honest langauge. What a ride!

[Margaret Adams]

I finished this collection wanting something more concrete, more experience and less abstraction, but also no longer convinced that such things existed. I'm not sure if that sense was a sign of dissatisfaction with what I'd just read, or a sign of the success of a collection that questions the verisimilitude of connection and conceives memory as a fictional construct. As reviewer Anne Doolittle wrote, "Koethe doesn’t believe in a common reality available to the artistic enterprise.  One could argue that he doesn’t believe in a common language either. Both beliefs seem reasonable enough, but ultimately self-defeating for any poet." Self-defeat here is not synonymous with bad-art--on the contrary, I thought this was excellent--just really affecting.

...What
Is plain language anyway? Is it the one you think,

Or hear, or one that you imagine? Can it incorporate

The numinous as well as the particular, and the ways

Ideas move, and the aftertaste that conviction leaves

Once its strength has faded? I don’t believe it anymore,

But I can hear it sighing in the wind, and feel it in the

Movement of the leaves outside my window…

[Corin · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Annie · Rating 1 out of 5]

boring nah i am not sure if it is this one i just know that it is called falling water