ROTC Kills: Poems
By John Koethe 
(Harper Perennial)

In his new collection, John Koethe opens by contemplating “the impossible world from which I’m absent” with a “sudden stab of fear,” aware that the “never-ending sentences” he creates will one day actually end.

At 66, Koethe has earned his moments of dread, as well as his right to look back in anger, disappointment and bitterness. “ROTC Kills” takes its provocative title from a Harvard student strike poster of 1969, whose countercultural idealism Koethe now finds a “brief, imaginary time,” “as money / Quietly wraps its hands around the country’s throat.”

“Eggheads” sends Koethe on a “memory trip” to the ‘50s of Adlai Stevenson and Dave Brubeck, Jacob Javits and Charles Percy, fueled by “the realization / That stupidity was in style again.” Not just in style, he continues, “it is a style, a style of seeing everything as style,/ like Diesel jeans, or glasses and T-shirts, or a way of talking on TV.” He describes a “diminutive senator” on a Sunday morning talk show as “resembling a small, furious gerbil.”

Don’t get the idea, though, that Koethe’s ninth collection is simply a rantalogue of complaints. A retired University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor of philosophy and a former Milwaukee poet laureate, Koethe is preoccupied with consciousness and its attendant questions and problems, finding himself “a cipher at the center of the story,” “both the author and the captive of my world.”

In “The Specious Present,” he declares “The I that stares out through my eyes/ Isn’t the same as yesterday’s or tomorrow’s I, / A virtual, transitory thing without a permanent existence.” In “Analogies and Metaphors,” he laments “I wear each moment like a hat.”

“Like the hedgehog, each of us knows just one big thing, a thing philosophy can’t capture and that poetry can at best remind us of or intimate, but can’t describe,” Koethe writes in the prose-poem “Book X,” his meditation on Plato’s “Republic.” After Koethe grapples for several pages with “the fruitless quarrel between philosophy and poetry” and with what consciousness and knowledge truly are, it is moving to read his poem’s conclusion, a direct quotation (in translation) of Plato’s description of the death of Socrates.

“I love the past tense, but you can’t live there,” Koethe writes in “Stele.” In “The Reality of the Past,” he complains that there’s “something fishy about memory and time,” which he realized when he could remember details of youthful track meets but never the pain in his thighs from running them. “What matters isn’t what time is, but how it feels in passing,” he appears to decide.

“Unchecked memories carry you away, like the shoes/ In The Red Shoes ,” he writes in a poem about his boyhood, his mother and the movies. Old movies are one of Koethe’s touchstones: “Alfred Hitchcock” is basically a walk through four Hitchcock films Koethe saw as a youth.

Of this volume’s occasional road trips, I most enjoyed “The Emergence of the Human,” which begins with the poet in Florence at the Uffizi Gallery, gazing at “Gold leaf, egg tempera, gold halos on the flat saints,” and ends at La Specola, the anatomical museum, considering “the finally human body, open for the world to see,/ Like David flayed, or St. Sebastian disemboweled,” as though, Koethe writes, “the history of art were the story of its own disappearance.” (MCT)