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    Sally's Hair: Poems
    Sally's Hair: Poems
    Sally's Hair: Poems
    Ebook113 pages1 hour

    Sally's Hair: Poems

    By John Koethe

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    Let me stay there for a while, while evening

    Gathers in the sky and daylight lingers on the hills.

    There's something in the air, something I can't quite see,

    Hiding behind this stock of images, this language

    Culled from all the poems I've ever loved.

    John Koethe's remarkable gift to readers is an elegiac poetry that explores the transitory nature of ordinary human experience. The beautiful poems in this new collection celebrate the creative power of human beings, the only weapon we possess against time's relentless "slow approach to anonymity and death."

    Of all Koethe's books, SALLY'S HAIR is probably his most human and various. He is well known for his meditative lyrics and this volume begins with a brilliant series of such poems, among them "Eros and the Everyday." This is followed by "The Unlasting," a long poem devoted to time and experience, and a third section comprised of more public poems, some of them political, such as "The Maquiladoras" and "Poetry and the War." This perceptive, luminescent collection concludes with a group of vivid and conversational poems, recollections, including the gems "Proust" and "HAMLET."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 6, 2009
    ISBN9780061979910
    Sally's Hair: Poems
    Author

    John Koethe

    John Koethe is distinguished professor of philosophy emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the first Poet Laureate of Milwaukee. His collections include Falling Water, which won the Kingsley-Tufts Award, North Point North, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Ninety-fifth Street, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2011, he received a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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    • 5/5
      The annual Beall Poetry Festival at Baylor University has become an event I eagerly await as each spring rolls around. This year was no exception, despite the fact I had only the slightest familiarity with only one of the three poets, Carol Frost. However, the poet that impressed and inspired me the most was John Koethe.His poems tell stories, in plain language, with gentle strokes of humor, pathos, and intelligence -- all with profound insights into human nature and the creative mind. I even found an epithet for my own thesis, which Prof. Koethe enthusiastically gave me permission to use.The epithet comes from the opening lines of the title poem of Ninety-Fifth Street. Koethe wrote,“Words can bang around in your headForever, if you let them and you give them room.I used to love poetry, and mostly I still do, Though sometimes ‘I, too, dislike it.’ There mustbe something real beyond the fiddle and perfunctoryConsolations and the quarrels -- as of courseThere is, though what it is is difficult to say.” (72)I was thrilled to recognize the interior quote as the words of Marianne Moore, the eccentric 20th century poet, editor, librarian, and teacher. Her apartment was moved from New York City -- following her death in 1972 -- and reassembled at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. So, I have a close personal connection to her work.Like Moore, Koethe’s poetry is simple, yet profound with wit and irony. He tells stories and -- in the telling -- reveals philosophy and the inner workings of the human psyche.Furthermore, a measure of irony lay in my selection of this epithet. To paraphrase Koethe, “I used to hate poetry, but now I mostly love it, although some I still dislike.”The title poem from Sally’s Hair is a good example of the story-telling talent of Koethe. He writes,“I took the train back from Poughkeepsie to New YorkAnd in the Port Authority, there at the Suburban Transit window,She asked, ‘Is this the bus to Princeton?’ -- which it was.‘Do you know Geoffrey Love?’ I said I did. She had the blondest hair,Which fell across her shoulders, and a dress of almost phosphorescent blue.She liked Ayn Rand. We went to the Village for a drink, Where I contrived to miss the last bus to New Jersey, and at 3 a.m. weWalked around and found a cheap motel I hadn’t enough money forAnd fooled around on the dilapidated couch. An early morning bus(She’d come to see her brother), dinner plans and missed connectionsAnd a message on his door about the Jersey shore. Next dayA summer dormitory room, my roommates gone: ‘Are you,’ she asked,‘A hedonist?’ I guessed so. Then she had to catch her plane.Sally -- Sally Roche. She called that night from Florida,And I never heard from her again…” (69-70)Hearing the poet read this poem impressed me with the power of his words, and his voice reinforced the story-telling nature of his work. I can only begin to hope to write something as touching, sincere, and emotional in my own workLastly, a poignant piece from North Point North, “The Little Boy.”“I want to stay here awhile, now that there came to meThis other version of what passes in my life for time.The little boy is in his sandbox. Mom and DadAre puttering around in the backyard.” (116)I have to stop here, because memories of my own childhood are welling up inside, and I have gone on long enough. If these three samples don’t tempt you, you have not discovered the depth, the breath, the beauty of well-crafted poetry. 15 stars -- 5 each!--Jim, 4/3/10

    Book preview

    Sally's Hair - John Koethe

    I

    The Perfect Life

    I have a perfect life. It isn’t much,

    But it’s enough for me. It keeps me alive

    And happy in a vague way: no disappointments

    On the near horizon, no pangs of doubt;

    Looking forward in anticipation, looking back

    In satisfaction at the conclusion of each day.

    I heed the promptings of my inner voice,

    And what I hear is comforting, full of reassurance

    For my own powers and innate superiority—the fake

    Security of someone in the grip of a delusion,

    In denial, climbing ever taller towers

    Like a tiny tyrant looking on his little kingdom

    With a secret smile, while all the while

    Time lies in wait. And what feels ample now

    Turns colorless and cold, and what seems beautiful

    And strong becomes an object of indifference

    Reaching out to no one, as later middle age

    Turns old, and the strength is gone.

    Right now the moments yield to me sweet

    Feelings of contentment, but the human

    Dies, and what I take for granted bears a name

    To be forgotten soon, as the things I know

    Turn into unfamiliar faces

    In a strange room, leaving merely

    A blank space, like a hole left in the wake

    Of a perfect life, which closes over.

    Eros and the Everyday

    as when emotion too far exceeds its cause

    ELIZABETH BISHOP

    A field of unreflecting things

    Time is passing by: inert,

    Anonymous beyond recall, the deflected

    Objects of a self-regarding gaze

    Untouched by the anxieties of proximity or love.

    I tried to find those passions in the sky,

    In moments when the heart surveys itself

    As if from above, and wonders at the

    Sight of something so particular and small.

    A day brings language and a hint of what it means,

    Of some presence waiting in the wings Beyond the stage, beyond the words that

    Gathered in the night and stayed

    And through whose grace I find, if not quite

    What I wanted, then everything else:

    The contentment of each morning’s

    Exercise in freedom, freedom like a wall

    Enclosing my heart; the disjunctive thoughts

    Gesturing at some half-imagined whole;

    A continuity that on the surface feels like love.

    What is this thing that feels at once so nebulous

    And so complete, living from day to day

    Unmindful of itself, oblivious of the future

    And the past, hovering like a judgment

    Above the future, the present, and the past,

    Floating in the distance like the eyes of love?

    Call it experience—that term of art For time in an inhuman world

    Indifferent to desire, the history

    Of one who one day wandered off from home

    Along a road that led from here to here:

    These sidewalks and these houses, city streets

    And suburbs and a highway flowing west

    Through fields and quiet streams, uncharted

    Trails descending to a farmhouse in a glen and

    Nothing in myheart or in the sky above my heart.

    And then from somewhere in that wilderness inside

    I hear the murmur of a low, transforming tone

    That fills the field of sight with feeling,

    And that makes of blind experience a kind of love.

    Let me stay there for a while, while evening

    Gathers in the sky and daylight lingers on the hills.

    There’s something in the air, something I can’t quite see,

    Hiding behind this stock of images, this language

    Culled from all the poems I’ve ever loved.

    I don’t believe a word they say, a word I say,

    But it isn’t really a matter of belief:

    As ordinary things make up the world,

    So life is purchased with the common coin of feeling,

    Feelings deferred, that flower for a day

    And then retreat into the language. And later,

    When the hours they’d filled are summoned by a name,

    It’s

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