Böcker av John Koethe

Addressing objective and subjective views of the self and the world in philosophy and poetry, this collection brings together a chronology of John Koethe's thoughts on the connections between the two forms and makes a significant contribution to unsettling the oppositions that separate them. The essays traverse the philosophical conception of the self in modern poetry and locate connections between poets including William Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery alongside philosophers including Kant, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein. Koethe pays special attention to romantic poetry and notions of the sublime, which he maps onto subjective individual experience and the objective perspective on the natural world. Koethe further explores this theme in a new essay on romanticism and the sublime in relation to the mind-body problem. Using an associative and impressionistic style to write philosophically about poetry, Koethe defends his own approach that such writing cannot and should not aim for the rigor of philosophical argumentation.

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

Let me stay there for a while, while evening Gathers in the sky and daylight lingers on the hills. There's something in the air, something I can't quite see, Hiding behind this stock of images, this language Culled from all the poems I've ever loved. John Koethe's remarkable gift to readers is an elegiac poetry that explores the transitory nature of ordinary human experience. The beautiful poems in this new collection celebrate the creative power of human beings, the only weapon we possess against time's relentless "e;slow approach to anonymity and death."e; Of all Koethe's books, SALLY'S HAIR is probably his most human and various. He is well known for his meditative lyrics and this volume begins with a brilliant series of such poems, among them "e;Eros and the Everyday."e; This is followed by "e;The Unlasting,"e; a long poem devoted to time and experience, and a third section comprised of more public poems, some of them political, such as "e;The Maquiladoras"e; and "e;Poetry and the War."e; This perceptive, luminescent collection concludes with a group of vivid and conversational poems, recollections, including the gems "e;Proust"e; and "e;HAMLET."e;

"John Koethe's The Constructor is a scrupulous, elegant account of the meditative intellect as an instrument continually registering the passage of time. Exquisitely modulated and brutally honest, these poems would be harrowing were they not so seductively beautiful. No one writing in this country today sees as deeply as Koethe into the tears that lie at the heart of things, and no contemporary investigation of the life of the mind may be called complete that does not accommodate the lush intricacy of his terrifying recognitions."-- George Bradley"I prize John Koethe's intimate expanses and unsettling reveries, his tender contemplations and odd mental landscapes. He is an heir to Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery and, like them, he gives us the sensation of thinking itself, of a certain fleeting, daily, solitary consciousness rescued from oblivion and held aloft."-- Edward Hirsch

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Literary Criticism. Including selected poems from Charles North, Tony Towle and Paul Violi. Edited and with commentary by Andrew McCarron. With a foreword by John Koethe. What is the shape of a life dedicated to poetry--and how, and from where, does such a dedication take hold? Moreover is that foundation a matter of decision, necessity and/or "grace"--or all three to degrees--and what are its costs? Combined with a selection of poems from these three distinguished poets, who together form a core of the Second Generation of New York School poets, Andrew McCarron pursues these questions, and more, through a series of biographical essays addressing each poet's life story and psychological complexion-and what critical insights such gleanings might lead. The poetry alone of North, Towle and Violi--exact in its execution and wide in its--is of enduring value and utility; juxtaposed with and in part seen through McCarron's exegeses, these qualities assume a poignancy that seems to lead us further into an examination of our human fate and of what it's all about: or as Towle writes, "in between the great saga of America, / lying like a lost nickel in New York's platonic gutter." As long as interest in the New York School holds--and in fact continues to grow--THREE NEW YORK POETS will remain an essential guide.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical work is informed throughout by a particular broad theme: that the semantic and mentalistic attributes of language and human life are shown by verbal and nonverbal conduct, but that they resist incorporation into the...

Essays by a prize-winning poet that explore the intersection of poetry and philosophy

"The problem of philosophical scepticism is not so much what to say about the view itself (there being a consensus that it should be rejected), but rather what to say about the arguments that purport to yield it. And since these arguments involve...