'The Swimmer' Stylized But Empty

“The Swimmer” is the tenth volume of poetry from University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee Philosophy professor John Koethe, otherwise commonly known as the "Philosopher poet.” Alternately wry and somber, colloquial and lyrical, moving and purposefully vain, the collection can be read on the whole as a portrait of Koethe’s loss of belief in the effectiveness of poetic representation. This argument ultimately highlights for the reader an emptiness that lurks behind Koethe’s highly stylized poetics and profoundly anti-philosophical philosophizing.

In three successive sections that move from the figurative to the directly philosophical, Koethe’s collection demonstrates a gradual shift away from representative poetry. The first part of “The Swimmer” is riddled with image and allegory—Frank Sinatra's childhood train set, a Japanese pot, and household cats. In the last poem of the section, "Dorothy Dean," Koethe presents the literal destruction of representation, with the image of a painting in magic marker that gradually fades to nothing. In the brief second section of “The Swimmer,” there is a further remove from the figurative: Two poems detail historical events, and one, "In the Louvre," rejects the representational paintings displayed at the museum as "strange icons/Of a 'madness to explain' an unfamiliar world that passeth understanding." In the third part, Koethe finally moves almost entirely out of the realm of imagery and towards philosophy describing the poetic process. This shift would be more interesting if it included the presentation of some problem or failure of representation; instead[COMMA] Koethe’s central “philosophical” argument appears to be that there is nothing to represent. In "Early April in the Country," Koethe looks at "indifferent cows" in the distance and thinks back ironically on his "first 'grand' poem," in which he described " '. . . the copper-, cream-, and chocolate-colored/Cows." "[The poems] flowed," he remembers, "they had too many words, they were/Driven by a ‘madness to explain’ that feels quaint now,/As though there were nothing to explain anymore."

For a poet who seems to argue the pointlessness of representation, Koethe is fastidious in his presentation of his unique style and voice. He writes, with one or two exceptions, in long-line free form verse with a strong rhetorical force that propels the reader forward—even through moments of poignancy or abstraction where he or she may want to slow down. There are instances of almost Keatsian spontaneity and comfortable lack of clarity, as Koethe simultaneously develops and formulates his thoughts: "it's written in a different idiom, full of sound and fury,/Signifying—what? It can't be nothing, though it might as well be/If it can't be rendered in the language of the stars." Unlike Keats, however, Koethe seems to incorporate this technique consciously as an element of his style. Koethe’s poems are further crowded with encoded and explicit references to other works, from Wordsworth to Keats to Shakespeare to Jack Nicholson in "Chinatown;" he even begins many poems with a citation. These references inform the reader of the history of artistic creation that inspires and replaces Koethe’s own poetic voice and provide refreshing and rich material, but are finally superficial.

“The Swimmer” additionally calls attention to its form by way of an overwhelming self-consciousness that finally distances both Koethe’s own poetic voice and the reader from his work. The frequency with which the poet comments on his own style ("insouciance with a slight/Heightening at the end, as if Thomas Hardy were sipping a Martini") and content ("The beauty is what's left. It doesn't make any sense, but there it is.") give the sense that as it is being created, his poetry is under constant and careful observation. This built-in distance from the work results in a sense of emptiness throughout that Koethe himself, unsurprisingly, comments on: It is "imagination/Anchored in style"—"What isn't/There is the life between the words, the life that existed/Beyond the words." Koethe's self-diagnosis rings true: While the poems in “The Swimmer” are beautifully crafted, like all six of the navy blue Brooks Brothers suits that the speaker in one poem admits to having bought, at times the reader is hard-pressed to find "life between [or even within] the words."