ROTC Kills

by John Koethe

From award-winning poet John Koethe, a rich and resonant new collection that moves easily between autobiographical anecdote and philosophical reflection.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published August 28, 2012

About the author

John Koethe is an American poet, essayist and professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Koethe is originally from San Diego, California. He was educated at Princeton University and Harvard University.Koethe's published work includes Blue Vents (Audit/Poetry, 1969), Domes (Columbia University Press, 1973), The Late Wisconsin Spring (Princeton University Press, 1984), The Continuity of Wittgenstein's Thought (Cornell University Press, 1996), Falling Water (HarperPerennial, 1997), The Constructor, (HarperFlamingo, 1999), Poetry at One Remove (University of Michigan Press, 2000) and North Point North: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2002). His most recent books include Scepticism, Knowledge, and Forms of Reasoning (Cornell University Press, 2005), Sally's Hair (HarperCollins, 2006), Ninety-fifth Street (Harper Parennial, 2009) and ROTC Kills (Harper Perennial, 2012).

Koethe has also contributed poetry and essays to publications including Poetry, Paris Review, Quarterly Review of Literature, Parnassus, and Art News.His work has been included in anthologies of poetry, including The Best American Poetry (2003).Additionally, he was selected to contribute his views on contemporary poetry for the book Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, which billed him as one of "85 leading contemporary poets."

Reviews

[Bill Malone]

This is a great collection if you like philosophy intersecting with poetry. It talks of time and timelessness, also the future and what it means personally. What did the past mean and are we the same now as we were in the past? We change, but what changes about us and how we think and how we think about thinking. Some of the poems are sad and I liked that mix. Many were more akin to stories than poems, so prose poems.

[Leif]

Read this in the cool morning air before your coffee has startled your nerves into being, and trust me: Koethe knows what he's doing. Elegance, soft wit, and a quiet sense of philosophical depth – there's a lot here to love.

[Ethan]

I never read poetry outside of class when I was in school because English class made it feel like work so I'm just now discovering it. This collection was fantastic - the poems and essays stood alone as discrete entities but the whole book was more than the sum of its parts.

[T Fool]

This is the where the philosopher and the poet overlap terrain. Koethe (I want to pronounce his name alternately either like 'Goethe' or like 'Keith') has taught university philosophy courses, and that mental discipline shows itself. Some of the pieces in this do not look like, nor do they read like, poetry. They don’t shock with ‘surreality’, either, as prose poems aim to do.

The ones that don’t read as we might expect them to, read relaxed. Their writing doesn’t seem tailored in the way a luxuriant or even purposely aimed prose fashions sentence rhythm.

I say all this not to denigrate this writing. It’s good stuff. It achieves something that is a kind of confessional clumping of impressions and personal observations

Most philosophers, for me, are barely readable, the most recent hundred years or so of the Anglo-American ones barricading themselves largely into investigating the sciences, logic, or linguistics. The schools regularly, in academic fashion, crank out 'professionals' who handle human understanding often as technical problems to savor, if not solve. Anything concrete, anything tangible, is suspect, and is often handled with laboratory gloves as subjects of examination, examples to serve the press of an argument.

These philosophical takes Koethe is putting forward as poems among his poems more quickly identifiable as poems don’t resolve problems, they taste them. They're presented in a casual and existential way, unlike the formal technical manner philosophers commonly use. Actually, anything that can be labeled a ‘problem’ is raised only in the context of moments being shown as being experienced.

From four pages of straight writing forming the piece Like Gods:

“Philosophers tell stories, but they make them up, and what are they to me? Sometimes I think I’m humoring myself (a good thing I suppose) with an extended exercise in nonsense. Have breakfast, have a cup of strong black common sense, get over it, I tell myself, refuting Berkeley with my foot.”

From three pages of straight writing, also a philosophical musing, forming this time Book X:

“What are the facts of consciousness? . . . They’re all appearances, but appearances of what? Something that wanders up your limbs and nerves and blossoms in your brain? They’re all just figments of perspective, of a point of view from which the time is always now, the place is always here, and thought of something hiding underneath the surface a seductive spell.” [sic?]

Philosophers do deal with matters of certainty and truth, and for millennia have been grinding out a lens with which to witness them. Working at it, some of them conclude their instruments cannot cope with the task. Maybe that’s why Koethe finds poetic expression worthy and why his very intelligent questions lope around any answer rather than maneuver stiffly like a lunar module.

The less expectable parts of this book, then, should reward readers who have recognized the poetry in Plato, Nietszche, and Heidegger. The remaining poems – a majority, and also relaxed – show an insight into personal life as it’s meshed with the America of NPR, Psycho, student protests, For Sale signs, LL Bean, and so on.