October 28, 2020
Walking Backwards
John Koethe
Poet
Lanny Jones, Introducer, and John Koethe
Minutes of the Eighth Meeting of the 79th Year
President Stephen Schreiber called the meeting to order at 10:17 AM. Owen Leach read the minutes of the previous week. Lanny Jones introduced guests Sarah Jones; John Koethe’s wife, Diana Bacha; Susan Wheeler; Susan Stewart; and John Kretzmann. John Cotton introduced Simon Murray. Priscilla Roosevelt introduced her brother, Bruce Reynolds. The attendance was 132.
Lanny Jones introduced John Koethe who spoke on the topic of his most recent book entitled Walking Backwards. John Koethe is a poet of recognized achievement who has garnered much critical acclaim. Of the 12 poems that he read at the Old Guard meeting, 11 are in his volume of selected poems, Walking Backwards. “The Day” will appear in his forthcoming book, Beyond Belief. Koethe’s poems display a conversational voice and a ruminative tone and he is very aware of the transitory nature of life.
Koethe began his reading with “English 206.” In his introductory comments, he mentioned that Professor Carlos Baker was the lecturer. The course focused on the High Modernist poets: W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore, and Professor Baker inspired him to write poetry. The “transitory nature of life” is referenced in “changing afternoon light” and made more explicit in the lines:
“then suddenly you’re old
With nothing to do and nothing stretching out before you
To infinity.”
“Your Day” follows: a poem that tries to evoke a day spent with a young woman. There are concrete details, but the poem concludes in a kind of blur, which may be the point.
Koethe then read “Picture of Little Letters.”
The next poem, “From the Porch,” has the quality of a reverie,
“Or a life traced back to its imaginary source
In an adolescent reverie,”
imagining “growing up in a small mid-western town”; whereas the poet grew up in San Diego.
“And children fell asleep
To the lullaby of people murmuring softly in the kitchen,”
It ends on a descriptive but, perhaps, symbolic note:
“And the wicker chairs stand empty on the screened-in porch”
“Gil’s Café” also shares a sense of wonder at the beauty of the world and the underlying reality of cessation.
“The world is like the fiction of a face,
Which tries to hide the emptiness behind a smile
Yet seems so beautiful – insignificant,
And like everything on which the sunlight falls
Impermanent, but enough for a while.”
Another poem that underlines how transience and chance rule so much of life is “Sally’s Hair.” The poem recounts a chance encounter (autobiographical) between the narrator and a young woman at the Port Authority bus station. They share a common destination, Princeton. They also share several names. After a brief interlude in his dorm room, she has to catch her plane. She called that night, “And then I never heard from her again. I wonder where she is now,
Who she is now. That was thirty-seven years ago…”
A poem of social criticism, “Eggheads”, followed:
“In the fifties people who were smart
And looked smart were called eggheads.”
“Egghead” was a derogatory term. John Koethe felt “That stupidity was in style again… or a style of seeing everything as style.” By contrast, he recalled reasonable conversations about politics in his youth. That age, the age that coined the term “egghead”, suffered from
“The complacency of an age that everyone thought would last forever - As indeed it has, but only in the imagination of a past that feels fainter And fainter as I write.”
“The Great Gatsby” was written for a poetry contest that the National Portrait Gallery and the Port Authority of New York had sponsored on the 500th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery of the Hudson River. A journey of discovery, “the something else that waits to take the place of what you have.” Not only Henry Hudson’s, but Koethe’s own:
“My ticket was an aptitude for SAT’s. My Half Moon
Was a Greyhound bus that found a passage to the East.”
“What I had in mind
When I set out from San Diego on that bus had as much to do
With the real world as Tomorrowland did with the real future,
Which is where I find myself today.”
“And when I try to think of what it meant,
I can’t remember – it was all so long ago, and it was new.”
“Covers Band in a Small Bar” is an evocation of time passing, as illustrated by the two bars invoked and the changing taste in “pop” songs.
“Poetry at Twenty-One”: a memory poem from his senior year at Princeton. Koethe had run up a bill at a local liquor shop that he could not pay. He could not graduate if he had any outstanding debts at local merchants. He was invited to participate in a poetry contest at Mount Holyoke. A few weeks later, with graduation not far off, he received a letter notifying him that he had won the prize and received check for $100.00, the exact amount that he owed the liquor store. “Who says
Poetry makes nothing happen? As Hilary Putnam once remarked
Of philosophy, it may be a backwater,
But it is still part of the stream of life.”
“The Swimmer” was the final poem John Koethe read. It referenced John Cheever’s short story of the same title, but it is very much the poet’s story and version of reality. In both poem and story, growing old is part of the narrative as is the role of “happiness.”
“A world I’d lived in and a world I never knew
Until I entered it, and made it mine.”
“The real world can never
Realize a fantasy lived in the imagination,
That only felt like heaven while it wasn’t there.”
“That’s the trouble with stories –
They need to come to a conclusion and to have a point,
Whereas the point of growing old is that it doesn’t have one.”
And he concluded, much as Cheever did,
“And finally arrives at home, and finds there’s nothing there.”
During the Q&A Koethe spoke in detail on how he writes. He typically composes parts of the poem in his head while in the shower. Then he writes those lines down during the day. He likes to see the “architecture” of the poem on the page. His sense of line-breaks is Intuitive. The visual appearance of a poem is important to him.
Koethe also discussed his central theme: the individual life is inconsequential. He is haunted by the notion that you disappear.
As a poet, Koethe tries to use concrete details to counteract his penchant for abstractions.
When asked whether he goes back to a poem written a while ago and revises, he commented, “Once a poem is written, I can’t get back into it.” He continues “When its on the page, it takes on a life of its own.”
Respectfully submitted,
Andrew Littauer
Lanny Jones introduced John Koethe who spoke on the topic of his most recent book entitled Walking Backwards. John Koethe is a poet of recognized achievement who has garnered much critical acclaim. Of the 12 poems that he read at the Old Guard meeting, 11 are in his volume of selected poems, Walking Backwards. “The Day” will appear in his forthcoming book, Beyond Belief. Koethe’s poems display a conversational voice and a ruminative tone and he is very aware of the transitory nature of life.
Koethe began his reading with “English 206.” In his introductory comments, he mentioned that Professor Carlos Baker was the lecturer. The course focused on the High Modernist poets: W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore, and Professor Baker inspired him to write poetry. The “transitory nature of life” is referenced in “changing afternoon light” and made more explicit in the lines:
“then suddenly you’re old
With nothing to do and nothing stretching out before you
To infinity.”
“Your Day” follows: a poem that tries to evoke a day spent with a young woman. There are concrete details, but the poem concludes in a kind of blur, which may be the point.
Koethe then read “Picture of Little Letters.”
The next poem, “From the Porch,” has the quality of a reverie,
“Or a life traced back to its imaginary source
In an adolescent reverie,”
imagining “growing up in a small mid-western town”; whereas the poet grew up in San Diego.
“And children fell asleep
To the lullaby of people murmuring softly in the kitchen,”
It ends on a descriptive but, perhaps, symbolic note:
“And the wicker chairs stand empty on the screened-in porch”
“Gil’s Café” also shares a sense of wonder at the beauty of the world and the underlying reality of cessation.
“The world is like the fiction of a face,
Which tries to hide the emptiness behind a smile
Yet seems so beautiful – insignificant,
And like everything on which the sunlight falls
Impermanent, but enough for a while.”
Another poem that underlines how transience and chance rule so much of life is “Sally’s Hair.” The poem recounts a chance encounter (autobiographical) between the narrator and a young woman at the Port Authority bus station. They share a common destination, Princeton. They also share several names. After a brief interlude in his dorm room, she has to catch her plane. She called that night, “And then I never heard from her again. I wonder where she is now,
Who she is now. That was thirty-seven years ago…”
A poem of social criticism, “Eggheads”, followed:
“In the fifties people who were smart
And looked smart were called eggheads.”
“Egghead” was a derogatory term. John Koethe felt “That stupidity was in style again… or a style of seeing everything as style.” By contrast, he recalled reasonable conversations about politics in his youth. That age, the age that coined the term “egghead”, suffered from
“The complacency of an age that everyone thought would last forever - As indeed it has, but only in the imagination of a past that feels fainter And fainter as I write.”
“The Great Gatsby” was written for a poetry contest that the National Portrait Gallery and the Port Authority of New York had sponsored on the 500th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery of the Hudson River. A journey of discovery, “the something else that waits to take the place of what you have.” Not only Henry Hudson’s, but Koethe’s own:
“My ticket was an aptitude for SAT’s. My Half Moon
Was a Greyhound bus that found a passage to the East.”
“What I had in mind
When I set out from San Diego on that bus had as much to do
With the real world as Tomorrowland did with the real future,
Which is where I find myself today.”
“And when I try to think of what it meant,
I can’t remember – it was all so long ago, and it was new.”
“Covers Band in a Small Bar” is an evocation of time passing, as illustrated by the two bars invoked and the changing taste in “pop” songs.
“Poetry at Twenty-One”: a memory poem from his senior year at Princeton. Koethe had run up a bill at a local liquor shop that he could not pay. He could not graduate if he had any outstanding debts at local merchants. He was invited to participate in a poetry contest at Mount Holyoke. A few weeks later, with graduation not far off, he received a letter notifying him that he had won the prize and received check for $100.00, the exact amount that he owed the liquor store. “Who says
Poetry makes nothing happen? As Hilary Putnam once remarked
Of philosophy, it may be a backwater,
But it is still part of the stream of life.”
“The Swimmer” was the final poem John Koethe read. It referenced John Cheever’s short story of the same title, but it is very much the poet’s story and version of reality. In both poem and story, growing old is part of the narrative as is the role of “happiness.”
“A world I’d lived in and a world I never knew
Until I entered it, and made it mine.”
“The real world can never
Realize a fantasy lived in the imagination,
That only felt like heaven while it wasn’t there.”
“That’s the trouble with stories –
They need to come to a conclusion and to have a point,
Whereas the point of growing old is that it doesn’t have one.”
And he concluded, much as Cheever did,
“And finally arrives at home, and finds there’s nothing there.”
During the Q&A Koethe spoke in detail on how he writes. He typically composes parts of the poem in his head while in the shower. Then he writes those lines down during the day. He likes to see the “architecture” of the poem on the page. His sense of line-breaks is Intuitive. The visual appearance of a poem is important to him.
Koethe also discussed his central theme: the individual life is inconsequential. He is haunted by the notion that you disappear.
As a poet, Koethe tries to use concrete details to counteract his penchant for abstractions.
When asked whether he goes back to a poem written a while ago and revises, he commented, “Once a poem is written, I can’t get back into it.” He continues “When its on the page, it takes on a life of its own.”
Respectfully submitted,
Andrew Littauer