The Swimmer

by John Koethe

Overview

A searching new collection from America’s philosopher-poet

John Koethe, in his tenth volume of poetry, investigates the capricious nature of everyday life, “the late-night jazz, great sex and all / The human shit defining what we are.” His poems—always dynamic and in process, never static or complete—luxuriate in the questions that punctuate the most humdrum of routines, rendering a robust portrait of an individual: complicated, quotidian, and resounding with truth. The Swimmer argues that this “energizes everything”: life’s trivialities, surprises, and disappointments, and the “terrible feeling of being just about to fall.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374536855
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	03/14/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.39(w) x 8.06(h) x 0.23(d)

About the Author

John Koethe has published several books of poetry, and has received the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, and the Frank O’Hara Award. He has also published books on Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosophical skepticism, and poetry, and is the Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Editorial Reviews

01/18/2016
Philosopher-poet Koethe (ROTC Kills) “meanders on/ Like a country road” through the minutes and details of daily life in his 10th collection of verse: “I dwell instead/ On minutiae, on little highs defining days/ In need of definition.” His poems demonstrate particular fascinations with age, friendship, the narrative self, mathematics, and music, among other themes. Koethe continues to show the deft technical touch that has brought him such renown, but too often his poems feel comfortable and easy, like they have little at stake or are slightly out of touch with the politics and movements of the present. Other poems offer lines that feel overly clever, as if the poet is more concerned with amusing himself than engaging his reader in new ways of thinking: “I’m witness to my life, but as for/ Participating in it, I’ll take the Fifth.” Yet Koethe’s moments of self-reflexivity also present insight into his process (“I like to get drunk and I like to write”), including the creation of his speakers: “I (whichever I this is) saw Follies last year.” What feel like the book’s shortcomings, however, may be coping mechanisms for dealing with the anxiety of mortality. Koethe’s poems are able to offer the kind of idiosyncratic musings that will keep the reader thinking beyond the confines of the page: “The world never ends—what ends are explanations of the way it is.” (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"Koethe is a beautiful writer, one whose subtle inventiveness can give new life to persistent images, nail a complex feeling in just a few words, or make the basic tools of the poetic trade into sources of pleasure and persuasion." —Jonathan Farmer, Slate

"These poems won't shatter the universe, but that's precisely their point, the tragedy they lament: that as individuals we are small and the universe pays our seemingly vast inner lives no mind. Koethe seeks to ease his mounting fear by talking—by writing—himself through it, and listening in is a perverse pleasure, and a palpable comfort." —Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR


“Koethe’s poems are able to offer the kind of idiosyncratic musings that will keep the reader thinking beyond the confines of the page.” —Publishers Weekly

“A welcome new book from an important voice.” —Library Journal

From the Publisher

12/01/2015
In his tenth volume of poems, Koethe (ROTC Kills) explores the changeable landscape of daily life and his place in the universe, especially as poet and philosopher. "Are you just going to go on writing poems like this,/ Writing for posterity? Posterity isn't interested…." He wonders if his early poems suffered from a "madness to explain" that now feels "quaint/ As though there were nothing to explain anymore." Though writing from the trope of the ordinary, Koethe intersperses moments of humor and language play—internal rhyme and rhythm—as well as deep philosophical questioning through abstract meditions on time ("La Durée") and Manifest Destiny ("Tulsa"), for example. Some might call his poems pessimistic; Koethe refers to them, more often than not, as disillusioned. "Poetry is stylized indifference, a drawing back/ From the divide between my life and its negation—/ Not because it's empty, but because it's full, too full." VERDICT A welcome new book from an important voice.—Karla Huston, Appleton, WI

Library Journal