The Day,

Abstract

The Day, John Koethe (bio) as in "back in," which was never really there.I dislike the myth of the exceptional past,Since everyone has one, but let's face it: the sixtiesReally were exceptional, though no one cared at the time,And they could seem silly (remember bell-bottoms?).Art, politics and music were aligned for a while,Not so much in agreement as in clarity, and thoughEven poetry seemed part of it, that wasn't true,Since poetry is never really part of anything,Though it wants to be. I discovered New York PoetsIn 1965, when Lewis brought Peter SchjeldahlAnd Kenward Elmslie to campus to read, and afterwardsWe went to a bar off Witherspoon Street, where some guysFrom my eating club yelled, "Close the door Hairpiece"At Peter as we stumbled in from the cold. It's all jumbled now: the poems we read,The poems we wrote, the poems we talked aboutFor hours and then forgot. I remember Peter saying,"Clepsydra" is the poem of our time, on the wayTo a party at Jane Freilicher's after a reading of John'sIn New York, and he was right. "You'll be so greatWhen you move to New York," Linda told meWhen I said something catty, though I never did move—I just circled around it as though it were the sun, and still do.I haven't seen Peter in almost twenty years, And now he's dying in The New Yorker."Everybody dies," as Stephen Sondheim says [End Page 43] In Company, and yet it still seems so unreal.We're going to see Company in New York in April,But it won't be the same. Peter brought New York backTo me as it probably never was, the way it was to me.Reading him that life returned, though nothing in particularReturned, since life isn't particulars but possibilitiesAnd ideas of particulars, more real in the abstractAnd in memory than they were when they were just alive.He said that there's no yellow patch in View of Delft,Yet there are three, though there was only one when Bergotte died.It made me feel nineteen again, and also on the vergeOf death, as though inhabiting an imaginary state of mindWhen poetry and the possibility of poetry, New YorkAnd the idea of New York were both the same, instead ofDisparate and real. But that was back in the day. [End Page 44] John Koethe john koethe is the author of several collections of poetry, including Beyond Belief and Walking Backwards: Poems, 1966–2016. He has received the Lenore Marshall, Kingsley Tufts, and Frank O'Hara awards, and teaches at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Copyright © 2022 Yale University