John Koethe

My Privilege

I remember having dinner with Jasper Johns
At Bill and Willy’s loft in Soho in the early eighties.
With Susan and John Ashbery. Ashbery and Johns
Weren’t supposed to be getting along, and yet they did
In what turned out to be a lovely evening that returned to me
Today while I was thinking about the exhibition at the Whitney
I saw in New York last week that covered all of Johns’s career:
His deflation of painting’s dramatization of interiority,
His obsession with the banal and everyday that anticipated . . .
What? All of that was true, and yet what moved me was his privacy:
A target was concentric paint, and yet it stood for something
He alone could understand, and the Savarin cans he kept repeating
Occupied a studio in his soul that lay behind the galleries of art.
I like to think that privacy is everything, and at the same time
That there’s nothing there to see: it’s everybody’s world,
Yet my perspective on it makes it mine alone, a world that ends with me.
Why is this so hard to express? Someone in the catalog complained
That Johns was raised in South Carolina yet ignored his privilege—
As of course he does, and so what? It isn’t what you say that makes you human;
It’s the life concealed behind the words that makes you what you are.

I wake each day to anybody’s poem, a poem that feels
So far away it might as well be no one’s. It’s odd how each of us
Is everything, and yet there’s nothing there for us to talk about
Beyond the things we share, which aren’t of any interest.
I realize that sounds inhuman, and yet the more I have to hear
About the things we have in common, the less I care—
Unless it’s just that each of us begins alone, and stays there.
Each of us is vast beyond comparison, a whole kingdom to itself,
And yet what makes it so is something no one else can see.
I miss the way poems sounded when I thought that they were mine,
Or the way a painting felt before it felt like someone else’s,
Since this public space we have to live in seems unreal.
This back-and-forth between yourself and what exists without you
Is the feeling of existence, the experience of “mild effects”
John wrote of in “The Skaters,” a poem I used to think of as my own.
I read it just the other day, for the first time in, oh, thirty years.
It reminded me how much I used to want to talk about those things
You weren’t supposed to talk about at all: the secret way it feels to be alive
With nothing to explain, despite “this madness to explain”; the reality
Of living in the moment, yet living alone; the fear of death.

These are thoughts I’ve had since going to that show.
I don’t know what to make of them, but the basic facts are true,
Maybe more so than I knew: I’ve often thought about that dinner
With those two paragons of privacy, Johns and John, but last week
John Yau told me Johns had heard about “The Skaters” and asked Ashbery
To read it to him in his studio—a perfect fly-on-the-wall scenario
If there’d been anything to see, which I can’t imagine there was.
That’s what privacy means: not an absence of people, but their presence
In the face of something they can’t recognize. I see it in my soul each day
And you in yours, and yet it’s nothing we can talk about or share,
Except by accident or indirection. Sometimes in the middle of the day
A poem comes over me, or I remember how a painting struck me
That I didn’t understand, and another life seems mine,  which doesn’t last.
I don't know what to make of them: I’m not sure you can even call them thoughts,
These fleeting states of mind that answer to each other as they come and go.
It doesn’t matter what, if anything, they say. I only know they’re mine,
And that they mean the world to me—and that’s it. Whether or not
They amount to anything at all, or even if I think they’re real,
The point is simply that I think they speak to me, and add up to a life
In which my comfort is their presence, and my privilege privacy.

Poetry and Fame

for Willard Spiegelman

I think I shall be among the English
Poets after my death.

—Keats

Even my love of literary fame, my
ruling passion, never soured my
temper, notwithstanding my
frequent disappointments.

—Hume

Poetry is about what no one else can understand,
Even though you wish they could, while fame is about, well,
Being famous, a way of being known without being understood.
Put another way, there's something only you can try to see
If you want to, and at the same time you're someone everyone can see
If they want to, though they usually don’t—and why should they,
With each of us locked in her own incommunicable privacy
And wanting to say the same thing? You may be wondering
What inspired these ruminations on celebrity and solitude,
And if you are, the answer is a book (a source of inspiration
More common than you think) about Amy Clampitt,
A poet who went from anonymity to fame and back again
In a little under fifty years, along with the poetry she aspired to
And which by now has almost disappeared. That poetry
Was a conversation with yourself, a soliloquy overheard in silence,
Written down and offered to an apathetic world that sometimes listened
For a little while, and then went away. Amy Clampitt’s version of it
Followed long and looping sentences composed in a Latinate vocabulary
To a not so logical conclusion written on her heart, if not the page.
I loved it at first, then started going back and forth about it for reasons
I don’t really remember. But I’m glad it’s there now, though it makes me sad.

That impulse is still there—it always was. The goal though
Isn’t something you’re compelled to say and can’t, but a diminished
Kind of fame—the celebrity of Poetry Daily or Poem-a-Day—
That doesn’t celebrate a sense of life that no one really understands
Or is able to explain, but offers instead examples of a genre
Anyone can master if he tries to, like bowls and vases at an art fair.
People think it’s everywhere, written on the heart or in the stars,
And yet the truth is there for anyone to see after the first few lines,
As someone tries to tell you who he is and why he matters—
As of course he does, not because he’s Keats or Hume or Amy Clampitt,
But because he’s anyone. Talking to yourself means talking to the poets of the past
As long as you can, before they vanish into history on the blowing of a horn,
But what kind of history is that? It’s not one anyone can read, but a community
Of one assembled in your head to keep you company as you listen to their
Echoes, and it doesn’t matter who believes you just as long as they do,
As you say whatever you believe you have to say.

        But see how convoluted

This homage has become, almost like one of Amy Clampitt’s sentences!
Sometimes I wonder why I do it, then I start to feel its force again
And go on anyway. Sometimes I dream of trying to remember something
I’d forgotten that had meant the world to me, and then wake up to this.
I don’t know why I miss those poets I took for granted at the time,
That have come to seem like an endangered species now. Poetry is dead
Until it actually is and you want it to come back, whether you liked it or not—
Like a dream of poetry no one cares about anymore, or Amy Clampitt.