The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Mon 3/17/2008)

[RetroLounge]

Hungers

This energy is pointed outwards
And spins away from us like a spool
Infecting the deadly air.
But you are as close to me as a day in a schoolroom.
You are the widow of cold leaves.

As love affairs want to nourish themselves
On letters and games, my simplest acts
Are suggestions - and you so sensitive to my errors!
You seem to be made out of children and hints!

For if innocence is the choir boy's
Small face in the presence of reasonable death
It follows that he cannot understand it,
As I cannot understand you. And your laughter
Is a sign of what you cannot understand

Which is for him to decide.
His sensitive music has covered the front
Of the stage - the actors, the lovers
Imagine his simplest decision.

John Koethe

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John Koethe was born in San Diego, California in 1945. He was educated at Princeton and Harvard Universities and is a Professor of Philosophy at UWM. His award-winning poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Brooklyn Review, Cream City Review, Epoch, The New Republic, Paris Review, Southwest Review, TriQuarterly, and The Yale Review. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Blue Vents (1969), The Late Wisconsin Spring (1984), and The Constructor (1999). His 1973 book of poems, Domes, won the 1973 Frank O'Hara Award for Poetry, and his 1997 collection, Falling Water, received the highly coveted 1998 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award from Claremont Graduate University. Additionally, the poem "A Pathetic Landscape" from Falling Water received the 1998 Elizabeth Machette Stover Award from Southwest Review. Prof. Koethe has received Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships and he is also author of the well-received scholarly study, The Continuity of Wittgenstein's Thought (1996). In presenting the Tufts Award to Falling Water, the award's panel of judges cited Prof. Koethe's "precise, unpedantic pavanes and sarabandes, written with a philosopher's ear for the spare beauty of abstraction ... They move the reader both as music and as meaning." On February 20, 2000, John Koethe was honored by being named Milwaukee's first poet laureate.

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:hi:

RL

[xchrom]

1. oooohh -- this is good.

His sensitive music has covered the front
Of the stage - the actors, the lovers
Imagine his simplest decision.

[RetroLounge]

3. Yeah, I just found an older book by him.

So far a good read. Challenging, but good.

:hi:

RL

[CaliforniaPeggy]

2. My dear Retro...

I do not understand this one...

But I feel the music of his words...

Thank you...