1.

What is originality? As heirs to the tradition of romantic individualism, we may think of originality in art as the emergence of a style or voice so distinct from its predecessors as to seem previously unheard and unheard of. If we follow that line of thought, we may regard originality in poetry as marked by a style which seems to distinguish itself so dramatically from poets who have come before as to seem utterly new, and thus to come out of nowhere (as if that were possible). But there is another way of thinking about originality, which discovers the original less in a radical departure from precedents and norms, and more in the way an artist accepts and puts to use a set of important and even inevitable influences, acknowledging that without them, the new work could scarcely have come into being. In this view, originality emerges from a discernible process, in which influences are accepted and used, absorbed and altered. An illustration of this concept of originality, which I would like to develop here, is found in the work of John Koethe, a poet who for the past quarter-century has been quietly but inexorably bringing himself to the attention of serious students of American poetry.

Koethe's first volume of poetry, Blue Vents, appeared in 1968, followed by Domes in 1973, and The Late Wisconsin Spring in 1984. After a publishing pause of more than a decade, two acclaimed volumes appeared in rapid succession, Falling Water in 1997 and The Constructor in 1999. Now we have North Point North, a collection of new and selected poems, which opens with sixty pages of recent work and follows with selections from the previous books. For some readers, North Point North may be an introduction, while for others it is a chance to be brought up to date on Koethe, but for all it offers an opportunity for an overview and assessment of his career to this point. One outcome of such an assessment, I believe, should be the recognition that Koethe has become a poet of striking and significant originality.

But originality is a problematic notion in the first place, if reasonable people can disagree on its definition, and if the concept remains relative and subjective. In the case of Koethe, the claim may seem not only problematic but peculiar, since he is a poet who can be labeled as derivative, which conventional wisdom would take to be the opposite of original. And indeed, Koethe is derivative, in the sense of coming directly out of influences which are immediately identifiable in his work, notably Stevens and Ashbery. Further, while some writers put distance between themselves and their sources, Koethe advertises his, as in "Sunday Evening," where the title announces Stevens and where the poem itself reads (as Willard Spiegelman notes) like a "pastiche of Stevens, Eliot, and Yeats."

But even without the explicit homage of "Sunday Evening," the attentive listener will hear the background music of Stevens, and the strains of Ashbery, repeatedly in Koethe. For instance, here is an Ashbery note struck at the opening of Koethe's "Un Autre Monde":

The nervous style and faintly reassuring
Tone of voice concealed inside the meanings
Incompletely grasped and constantly disappearing
As the isolated moments burst against each other
And subside — (164)

When a mature, established poet continues to foreground his influences, what should we make of it? And further, if this poet has found an original voice, notwithstanding the influences from which it obviously derives, what accounts for the originality (since it is born of a practice which in another poet might produce mere pastiche or weak imitation)?

As a way of approaching these questions about Koethe, I want to draw a comparison with another original artist who wore his influences on his sleeve, long after he was well-established, long after the originality of his own accomplishments was acknowledged. My example, admittedly oblique, is the sixteenth-century Venetian painter Tintoretto.

                                                    2.

Tintoretto kept a sign over the door of his studio which said "Drawing by Michelangelo, Color by Titian," a startling and disarming proclamation of homage to his two great masters. And as original as Tintoretto is, we can see his point. We can say that his swirls and contortions, his neck-craning viewpoints, and his strong outline are mannerist and so derive from Michelangelo. We can agree that the heroic staging, the brilliant costuming, and the emotional glow of his drama depend in part on Titian's example. But there are gondola-loads of painters with a similar lineage who don't achieve Tintoretto's power and authority. Lorenzo Lotto, Palma il Vecchio, and Veronese are all fine painters from the same background, but when we stand in front of their paintings we don't enter a radically different world, strangely like our own (or what it would be if we lived in sixteenth-century Venice), but rethought and reexamined, more intensely imagined and more deeply seen. Tintoretto may be exploiting received techniques, but he uses them in the service of a vision all his own.

His originality is the more apparent because his subjects are familiar — the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, the Wedding at Cana. Or his Susanna and the Elders, with its ominous lighting, disorienting angles, and counterpoint of desire and disgust, or his Annunciation, where a squadron of angels boils down with menacing urgency as Mary shrinks back appalled. We acknowledge that this work could not have been conceived without the models of Michelangelo and Titian. But these paintings could be by no one but Tintoretto.

There is an analogous interplay in John Koethe's poetry, distinctly his own and yet unimaginable without his avowed influences. These influences are in fact numerous, and the list could begin with Wordsworth and continue with Yeats, Eliot, and Auden. And Jarrell, whose importance for Koethe rivals that of Stevens and Ashbery (Jarrell's "90 Degrees North" seems to be recalled in the title, North Point North, even if the latter refers to the neighborhood where Koethe lives). Others, who might not leap to mind if Koethe had not written about them, include Robert Duncan and, possibly, Elizabeth Bishop, James Schuyler, and Alan Grossman. Readers will hear these sources to varying degrees, although the philosophical Eliot and the discursive Auden are quite audible, and the voice of Jarrell comes through strongly. But the two great sources are Stevens and Ashbery, who are to Koethe what Michelangelo and Titian were to Tintoretto.

If there were a sign over the door to Koethe's study it might read: "Weather by Stevens, Time by Ashbery." Or depending on what part of the relationship one wanted to emphasize, it might say: "Symbolism by Stevens, Surrealism by Ashbery." Or, "From Stevens, Abstract Music. From Ashbery, Dissonance." And the presence of the two masters is as pronounced in Koethe's new poems as it ever was. We hear Ashbery, for instance, in "Aus Einem April":

Spring arrived again, with puzzles in the air,
And mysteries being debated by the breeze.
I felt the season fold around me like a glove,
As line by line the familiar trance took hold. . . . (33)

And Stevens, in the opening lines of "Songs of the Valley":

There are two choirs, one poised in space,
Compelled by summer and the noise of cars
Obscured behind the green abundance of the leaves.
The other one is abstract, kept alive by words. . . (10)

. . . and in the opening poem of North Point North:

Inhabiting a realm of fabulous constructions
Made entirely of words, all words
I should have known, and should have connected
Until they meant whatever I might mean. (3)

Ashbery again in "A Perfume":

There were mice, and even
Smaller creatures holed up in the rafters. (31)

. . . and beginning "Y2K (1933)" (which has as its epigraph "The age demanded..."):

Some of us were tempted to oblige,
Until the aesthetics got so complicated:
Private, yes, but at the same time
Sculpted as from stone and freighted with the
Weight and shape of history, each one
Part of something bigger, something
No one could explain, or even describe. (40)

If originality is mysterious in the end, it begins with the way one differentiates oneself from one's models, and Koethe diverges from Ashbery and Stevens, and Jarrell as well, in fundamental ways. The similarities are formative, the differences, crucial. To notice the effect of these masters on Koethe's work is also to be struck forcibly by the ways he modifies their example, incorporating influence with a difference that makes the result his own.

                                                    3.

                                  Koethe and Stevens

In Koethe's work, the presence of Stevens is pervasive: his metaphors and moods; his Latinic abstractions; his phrase-laden sentences strung across stanzas, like strings of lights over bare branches; his intricate, opulent summers; his noodling oboes and brooding strings; his religious secularism; and his nostalgia for an imagined world — all are richly, deeply woven into Koethe's fabric. Stevens, however, despite a half century of devoted reading, remains for many a resistant, hermetic poet, a master of sumptuous but opaque surfaces, while Koethe, though not without his own difficulties, has adapted Stevens to a poetry which is open, candid, and lucid. And while Stevens is the bard of exotica and arcana found in one's backyard (or nearby in Hartford), Koethe makes a point of noting how little in Milwaukee seems remarkable.

This recognition of ordinariness finds an apt medium in Koethe's style, whose plainness seems not to be tempted by Stevens's spangled dandyism and lush orchestration. The general surface of Koethe's style is so neutral that it reads as transparent, an effect well-suited to his aim, which is to discern depths and complexity within the most ordinary subjects. Through the transparency of the style, the bland surfaces of our daily mental and emotional lives become transparent themselves.

But both the blandness and the transparency are strategic devices for Koethe — the blandness, a way of saying "conscious life is really like this, there may be less to it than you think, or more, let's take a look," and the transparency, a way of allowing one surface to sink into another, so we can descend through stages of recognition, toward familiar realities seen differently, because seen more thoroughly, and seen through.

Koethe is a poet who explores the inner life and all that is found there. He does this most movingly in the extended meditations and mental excursions of his longer, darker poems, of which "The Secret Amplitude," "The Constructor," and "Mistral" are excellent examples (while the more accessible "Falling Water" and "North Point North" belong on this list as well). But he is not a chronicler of extreme mental states or disturbance. The inward life he explores is the "normal" life most of us lead, year after year; his contribution is to probe it to an unusual depth, to track it relentlessly (though this relentlessness can meander as the mind can), to follow a line of thought beyond the places where we usually leave it, to show where it might lead if we went there. Such exploration — its harrowing intensity and its psychological depth — distinguishes Koethe from Stevens and sets him apart from other poets as well. It can make his poems disturbing and strange, though they unfold in familiar scenes and are cloaked in the nostalgic lights of passing hours, days, and seasons, thus retaining their outward resemblance to Stevens.

                                  Koethe and Ashbery

Though John Ashbery is widely regarded as a serious poet beneath his diversionary antics, for some he remains an enchanter who evades the serious and deflects (even mocks) our desire to confront it (though his dazzling feints within feints and brilliant virtuoso switchbacks always entertain). But Koethe uses Ashbery's digressive, deflective methods in the service of a poetry which is direct, serious, and earnest in its readiness to engage major topics, including the hoary Big Questions of philosophy and religion, and the related question of what it feels like, and what it might mean, to be conscious and passing through time.

The strategy Koethe uses for this inquiry is derived from Ashbery, but the difference in intention is pivotal. Ashbery specializes in disorienting surprises and deflations, and the misdirections of his longer poems lead to points of disenchantment, where, at times, the poet seems to condescend to his reader (as if to say: you were looking for a good time but you got something else, not what you expected, well, maybe it will be a different kind of good time, one you never expected, though you might expect it now, if it hadn't already happened). But in Koethe's long, unwinding poems, the inner logic is one of patient pursuit; when the points of disenchantment are reached, bleak as they sometimes are, they are offered as moments of shared recognition (this isn't much fun, but it seems to be what our conscious lives come down to, in the end, if you think about it).

The strategy Koethe borrows from Ashbery is that of an intricately unraveling poem which looks genial and harmless on the surface, but which sinks beneath you, changing course and form as it sinks. In Ashbery, the strategy entails a dissolving of the conventional "I" into multiple, rippling fragments or recombinations of identity (one, you, we, they, and so on); Koethe adapts this strategy to suit his calm but persistent examination of what "the personal" means in poetry, and in life. Along with his own version of Ashbery's mental-excursion strategy, Koethe develops a variant of Ashbery's long-poem style — not the language as such, but the mix of technique and tone: the wrap-around lines and the prolonged, lingering sentences, with their conversational rhythms, their languid unspooling over stanzas, paragraphs, pages. But this style comes partly from Jarrell as well.

                                  Koethe and Jarrell

As a source, Jarrell may be less essential than Stevens and Ashbery, but his voice is clearly heard in these poems; in this case also, Koethe distinguishes himself from an influence in ways which are defining and characteristic. Though we can hear Jarrell's notes of nostalgia, sadness, and resignation, Koethe's poetry is more cerebral, and its emotive tones are more like calculated strategies in a larger scheme. In this scheme, affective language is only one of several ways to represent states of consciousness and probe their meanings. A candid expression of pain or sorrow, confusion or anguish, or recalled elation (all common in Koethe) is one of the options at the poet's disposal, but only one. It may be used without apology, irony, or disclaimer, on the assumption that it is no less and no more authentic than other types of language in use. (In Koethe, these include: descriptive and explanatory; imagistic and metaphoric; conversational and demotic; philosophical and propositional; surreal, satiric, and parodic.) Koethe's cry is no less heartbroken than Jarrell's, but we can discern weights and balances within the emotive declarations, and a more analytic attitude behind the feelings. In these lines from "The Other Side of the Canyon" we hear both Jarrell and Koethe:

And yet sometimes late at night I think about that voice
Still floating like the moon above the rooftops
And calling me home. My life seems drained,
As though it came to nothing but a catalogue of incidents
To be contained between the covers of a book
And then abandoned, installed in someone's library
On a shelf behind a pane of glass.

I wonder if I ever really heard that voice.
A thought creates the settings where it feels at home,
And the facts are less important than the feeling of the
     words
That spell the future, and that wrote the past. (13)

Jarrell's lonely, wistful voice, whether sentimental ("calling me home") or resigned ("My life seems drained") is blended with tones distinctly Koethe's, whether more reserved and clinical ("nothing but a catalogue of incidents") or more complicating ("A thought creates the settings where it feels at home"). At moments, the sound of Jarrell seems fully assimilated into Koethe, as in the line "I wonder if I ever really heard that voice."

                                  Koethe and the Choir

In the title poem "North Point North," we hear Jarrell again, but as one among several voices in a quiet choir of influences:

There may be nothing for a poem to change
But an atmosphere: conventional or strange,
Its meaning is enclosed by the perception
— Better, by the misperception —

Of what time held and what the future knew;
Which is to say this very moment.
And yet the promise of a distant
Purpose is what makes each moment new. (51)

We hear Stevens, fretting about the relation of the poem's imaginative-reality to the "reality" of which it is a part; echoes of Auden, direct, in "what time held and what the future knew," and indirect ("poetry makes nothing happen"); the Ashbery-note of the ungraspable shaping flow of time, in which neither past nor present is quite what we thought; and the Jarrell-note of wistfulness, with its undercurrent of longing and loss. These strands are woven into a characteristically smooth surface, whose diction is plain to the point of being threadbare. Although the formal sections of "North Point North" play complex variations on traditional patterns, the rhyme-scheme in these two stanzas restricts itself to a deliberately simple set of sounds (change/strange, knew/new), emphasizing shades of meaning within repetitions. The interplay of elements, and their subordination to a surface so uninflected as to appear transparent, produces an austere, echoing music (whose repetitions are variations), in which the motion of thought and the play of emotions are given equal weight, equal time. This total effect is Koethe's alone.

                                                    4.

Toward a fuller accounting of what I judge to be the originality of Koethe's work, I want to take a closer look at those elements which are its most distinctive and defining attributes, beginning with his use of language.

Koethe's language can be so flat as to strike some readers as singularly unpoetic. But it is the neutrality of the language which gives it its range, even if paradoxically the range is masked by the seemingly untroubled blandness of its surface. (James Longenbach, commenting on a particular shift of mood in "The Constructor," says that while "Koethe retains the placid, determined syntax... the shift in diction is breathtaking... because the syntax helps to occlude the fact that... we have entered a radically new linguistic realm" [30].) Koethe shifts with deceptive ease among different types of language, from the emotive ("... why can't you feel the / Emptiness I see reflected in your face...") to the expository ("... further proof / That all that lies between the poles of solitude and death / Is the rhetoric of loss"), from the tersely idiomatic ("I feel it in my bones.") to the archly pedagogical ("You mean a style of contemplation, / Or a monument encapsulating everything you cling to / Like a first certainty—") — examples all from one poem, "Threnody for Two Voices" (160). Such language-types are asked to live comfortably with one another, without calling attention to their differences, accepting that the way they interact is more important than how they sound alone.

That said, in some Koethe poems the dominant language-type can be remarkably dry, flat, and abstract, a mixture that is not everyone's cup of tea. Consider, for example, the opening lines from "Mistral":

There seems to be, about certain lives,
A vague, violent frame, an imperceptible
Halo of uncertainty, diffidence, and taste . . . (147)

. . . these lines from "The Waiting Game":

It is another form of play, one based on partially
Forgotten moods with names that whisper their designs
Until the outside world assumes an air of unreality
That makes it hard to concentrate . . . (158)

Or these from "A Parking Lot with Trees":

Sometimes a life comes true in unexpected ways.
The face that it exhibits to the world appears no different,
While its voice remains essentially the same, and inside
     even feels the same. (188)

When we have read enough Koethe, we realize that the drained deliberation of this language, with its air of cautious argumentation and its taste for elusive distinctions, is only one of the strategies he employs. It coexists with other modes, some conventionally poetic and quite gorgeous ("one or two ideas, / In unadorned, discursive terms and cadences that / Seem to be inspired by the breath of God, by waves / Of silent, urgent sound proliferating through and / All around me"); some precisely delicate ("like a shifting pattern / Drifting through a filagree of flimsy clouds / Above the massive, slowly turning globe"); some unadorned ("I hadn't been to Paris in six years"); some heartfelt ("I wish there were an answer to that wish"); and some as notational as journal entries ("I drove to Oak Park, took two tours / And looked at some of the houses").

Koethe's great distinction as a stylist is his ability to blend these elements into a level, revealing surface, an ideal medium for a poetry of consciousness. Although I think this achieved style is a key aspect of his originality, I suppose some might see it as quite the opposite, if they associate originality with more marked or mannered effects, like the baroque early Lowell, the breathless minimalism of Creeley, or the peacock-gold glitter of Merrill. Or to take more current examples, the stand-up pratfalls of James Tate, the flying-trapeze airs of Jorie Graham's long poems, or the over-stressed syntax of Anne Lauterbach. Or the lugubrious languors of Charles Wright, a style as instantly identifiable as a saxophone ballad in the hands of Ben Webster.

Koethe's style is none-of-the-above, which is like answering "nothing" in the blank for religion. Just as that answer conceals a range of alternatives, Koethe's neutral style is a supple instrument capable of wide but quiet variation in its music, changing voices and tones unobtrusively and almost imperceptibly. In his essay "Poetry and the Experience of Experience," (from his prose collection, Poetry at One Remove), Koethe writes that poetry has resources "which it doesn't always draw on," including "the imagistic and metaphoric potential to evoke perception and sensation; the discursive capacity of language to express states of propositional awareness and reflexive consciousness; the rhythmic ability to simulate the movement of thought across time; and a lyric density that can tolerate abrupt shifts in perspective and tone without losing coherence" (82). Koethe's style aspires to draw on this full range of linguistic resources, meeting the challenge of his own prescription.

But style never exists alone. Its power rises from the synergy with substance, in which a style is seen as particularly suited to a certain task. The task for Koethe is his psychological and philosophical probing, and his inquiries into the nature of consciousness. This originality of these inquiries lies in their depth, not their raw material, which is the materia poetica of Everyone: games one played as a kid; books one read in college; places one has lived; marriage, divorce, affairs; kids growing up and moving away; travel, restaurants, movies.

The substance is ordinary. What makes the poetry extraordinary is the strenuousness of its examinations, as he pursues the thoughts and feelings to which our life's passages give rise, and inquires rigorously into their meaning. The poems are exercises of expanding awareness, enacting what Mark Strand calls "the most extreme exertions of consciousness." But Koethe's polar expeditions start and end at home, and their scripts are never far from the plotlines of Days of Our Lives. The radicalism of the poems lies in the depths they open within and below our familiar scenes, in their spiraling plunges into the mental life unique to a human being, the animal who knows it is born to die. The descent doesn't exactly beckon, as Williams claimed, and in fact it doesn't bear much looking into. But Koethe does look into it, with an integrity that makes the self-critical inventories of other poets seem self-congratulatory by contrast.

A method central to Koethe's inquiries is the projection of self as objective figure, his version of the poet as painter in the mirror, behind the easel but also a character, with a reflexive relation to the spectator/reader. His take on this device can make the poems seem at times as disembodied as a hovering ghostly thought, and at other times as intimate as someone across the table baring his soul. He addresses this apparent contradiction in "North Point North," as he recounts a conversation with a reader.

Someone asked about the aura of regret
And disappointment that surrounds these poems,
About the private facts those feelings might conceal,
And what their source was in my life.

I said that none of it was personal . . . (53)

On the surface this means just what it says: There is no key in the poet's life history, no buried disaster to account for the melancholy airs. Hear them, rather, as the music of existence and time. But on a lower level we can see the gliding shadows of conceptual questions about what person and personal might still mean, after the concepts have been atomized by psychology, biology, and physics. It isn't personal. Perhaps nothing is, in the postmodern age of socially constructed selves and blurring, all-purpose pronouns.

And yet, Koethe ends the new poem "Crain Street" in this way:

I wish I could retrieve the texture
Of those nights and days whose shapes remain
Alive in my imagination and desire,
And through the dispensation of their grace
Reclaim the realm of possibility,
And return some day to that preserve
We inhabited for a few years
— Half language half the feeling of your skin —
And live there again. I wish you would too. (23)

Koethe can speak from a distant place where abstract thought makes beautiful music, but he can be unabashedly direct and present, as in that last line. He can seem personal in the old-fashioned sense that the poet, the speaker, and the man who drives to Oak Park, watches the movie, takes a shower, and sees himself in the mirror are more or less the same, a guy who lives in Milwaukee and teaches philosophy there. But this sense of "the personal" is a strategy, like his transparency and his blandness. It is so far from the convention of first-person lyric ("I'm looking out of my window this morning and feeling intense" or "I felt better after I told my mother to go to hell") that it may seem apparitional, compared with the palpable autobiographies of Sharon Olds or Marilyn Hacker, or the true-life tales of Gerald Stem or Stephen Dunn. In Koethe's self-scrutiny, subjective and objective fade into each other, while the self dissolves into earlier and later incarnations, into other people, into the environment.

Ashbery perfected this representation of a protean self, sifting through time, dissolving and reforming. Koethe adapts the method to his own ends and plays it off against more ingenuous, artless versions of the personal ("I like to think back on my schooldays. / We built castles with blocks and made pictures with powdery paint," or "Through the hot summer air / I walk to a building where / I give a lecture on philosophy / In the strict sense; then go home to the cat"). Koethe's viewpoint can shift from disembodied to down-home and back again, from what sounds personal enough ("But still my pleasure is to wait") to the decidedly impersonal ("The casuistry is all in the event, / Contingent on what someone might have meant / Or might still mean").

                                                    5.

Readers unfamiliar with Koethe could suspect that such a subtle, often austere poetry is more to be admired than enjoyed, and might object that a harrowing inquiry into the nature of consciousness is not their idea of a good time. But before anyone heads off to buy the latest book by Billy Collins, I should say that although I have emphasized the elements of Koethe which make him most radical, his poetry offers traditional pleasures as well — of sight and sound, place and setting, character and story; a restrained, lovely music in its traditional verse forms; a dry, off-beat humor; and shards of popular culture unearthed for our enjoyment.

Others may be put off by placid sentences larded with the language of "propositional awareness," unpersuaded that such diction can yield as much poetry as the storms and pangs of lyric verse. Skepticism on this point is not unreasonable. One doesn't find every pleasure of poetry in Koethe — the loamy pungencies of Seamus Heany, the snarling neo-Miltonics of Geoffrey Hill, the searing demotic drama of Louise Glück, for instance. Fair enough. But there is a greater range in Koethe than I may have suggested here.

For a sense of Koethe's variety, one might start with the real-life excursion of "Falling Water," which offers an engaging mix of narrative and memory, of simple outings and complex life-stories, and a rapt meditation on place, space, and architecture; continue with the accessible and entertaining "North Point North"; look back at poems in the early books which consist of single moments or scenes (in Domes, "Mission Bay" and "Copley Square"; in The Late Wisconsin Spring, "Partial Clearance" and "Picture of Little Letters"); and look ahead to the shorter new poems where other charms are in store: the images and voices floating up with cinematic clarity in "The Other Side of the Canyon" ("a sky stretched out above a vacant lot / On the other side of the canyon, where a bunch of guys / Keep yelling to each other as the baseball game wears on"); the cameo memoir with its economically realized scenes in "Dellius' Boat"; the love affair movingly recounted in "Crain Street," almost a compressed novella; the language-comedy of "Contemporaries and Ancestors" ("Maybe some of the pets were different too / — The polecat-ferret, the parakeet —"); the up-to-the-minute pertinence of "Life under Conditions of Uncertainty" ("Think about the war of words that rages / Like a fire across the surface of the national mind."); the laid-back ambiance of "Gil's Cafe" (not quite the Chatterbox Café but a nice place to pass the afternoon); the resurrection of the sci-fi classic The Thing (the remake actually) in "North Point North"; and the drop-dead Billy Wilder punch line of "Hackett Avenue": "Tell Mr. DeMille I'm ready for my close-up."

With this reference to Sunset Boulevard, Koethe encapsulates his complex, distinctive approach to the personal. For the more familiar conceit of Ashbery/Parmigianino in a convex mirror, and of Velázquez depicting himself painting Las Meninas, Koethe substitutes a clip from the film archives. Though the line he borrows ("Tell Mr. DeMille I'm ready...") is spoken by Gloria Swanson at the end of the movie, we may recall the beginning, where the recently dead William Holden previews all that will happen (the past for him, but for us, the future) in the disembodied voiceover of someone as yet unseen (shortly to be presented as a character), looking down with the camera on a swimming pool where a body floats, which we will learn is his own. As this irreverent substitution of low for high art suggests, Koethe can be droll while dead serious, and in the new poems of North Point North, he unveils (or shifts into the foreground) a lighter side — or at least, a hipper, lighter sort of darkness, a rueful human comedy.

The Koethe I have focused on here is best experienced in his long poems — "The Secret Amplitude," "Falling Water," "Mistral," "The Constructor," "Crain Street," and "North Point North." But all of the Koethes are well-represented in this ample collection, where first-time readers can get acquainted, and where veterans can catch up on the new work, recall the early books, and make an assessment of his career to date. In my view, North Point North provides compelling evidence that Koethe is not only one of the finest poets to come from these particular influences, but a powerful and important poet in his own right. He has accomplished an original poetry, through a process of working with his major influences, a process which entails deep acceptance and continuous alteration.

To conclude by stressing the originality of Koethe returns me to my original comparison with Tintoretto, and the question I posed: What are we to make of it, when a mature, accomplished, and original poet foregrounds his influences, as Koethe does? If his poetry continues to assert the importance of (above all) Stevens and Ashbery as shaping sources, as openly as Tintoretto advertised his "Drawing from Michelangelo and Color from Titian"?

I suggest two explanations. First, that these are both artists (if I can make a comparison, for a moment, which ignores differences of centuries and mediums) who are unencumbered by a romantic (or proto-romantic) notion of originality born of inspired but inexplicable frenzy, or of coming out of nowhere. Rather, these are artists who conform to my second definition of the original: those who define and discover originality in terms of the way they work with their influences, incorporating, modifying, and converting them to their own uses, in the service of a personal vision, and the achievement of a style which eventually is all their own. Second, that artists who call our attention this overtly to their sources can afford to do so because they are sufficiently confident of their own intentions, their identities, and their mastery.

                                             Works Cited

Koethe, John. North Paint North: New and Selected Poems.
     New York: HarperCollins, 2002.
- - -. Poetry at One Remove: Essays. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1999.
Longenbach, James. "Forms of Disjunction in Poetry." Raritan 20
     (Spring 2001): 20-36.
Spiegelman, Willard. "Wallace Stevens' 'Second Selves' and the Nostalgia of Discursiveness." The Wallace Stevens Journal, 24.2
     (Fall 2000): 176-86.

The Kenyon Review

Kenyon College

Editor: David H. Lynn
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