![]() In his latest book, Koethe even writes, “I think the truest thoughts are always second thoughts.” Koethe is a jazz lover, too, but unlike the Beats, he seems fully cognizant of just how many long hours of practice-all those second, third, even thirtieth thoughts-jazz musicians must endure, even embrace, to master their difficult art. ![]() Poetry, by contrast, is free to inhabit and explore ideas and themes without “worrying too much about their correctness, as long as they feel sufficiently powerful to move us.”Īnother poetic dictum Koethe actively disagrees with is Allen Ginsberg’s “first thought, best thought.” Despite that line’s koan-like flavor, it was probably more a reflection of the Beats’ admiration for bebop improvisation. Philosophy, he explained, is subject to severe constraints. “I don’t like poems that present themselves as vehicles for conveying or doing philosophy,” Koethe told one interviewer. Philosophy and poetry: For Koethe, never the twain shall meet. That’s about what you’d expect from a poet who, taking issue with William Carlos Williams’ famous dictum, “no ideas but in things,” uses his poems to explores ideas-both with and without “things.” Most of the poems are longish one runs to six pages, while hardly any fill less than a page. Released in late 2022 by FSG-among the last of the big-name poetry publishers-the book contains 25 poems arranged in three numbered but unnamed sections. He published his first book of poetry, Blue Vents, in 1968, and now his twelfth, Beyond Belief. The man does philosophy.īut simultaneously, Koethe has also maintained a lifelong career as a poet. And until his retirement in 2010, Koethe was a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. He’s published two books on the subject, including one on the notoriously difficult Wittgenstein, the other on forms of reasoning. Instead, this is a plainspoken poet eager to explore where an abstract thought could take him in this all-too-material world. John Koethe is both a philosopher and poet, yet he is neither a philosophical poet nor a poetic philosopher.
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