David Koehn had great hair.
It’s not the only thing I remember about him. We were in a fiction workshop together in college (Carnegie Mellon, in Pittsburgh). He was a year older. David was a sharp writer, and was helpful, thoughtful, and supportive in regards to other people’s work. (I am now thinking of one jerk in class, a tweed-jacket, Lennon-glasses sort, who was not so supportive, just for comparison’s sake.)
One night some of us went to a poetry reading by David and I recall
LIKING
how his voice would go UP
a little
at the end of LINES.
He was a cool dude. And oh man, that hair. It was thick; strong. It swooped.
A quarter century has gone by, as time tends to do, and now I hold in my hand a copy of Twine, a book of poems by David Koehn. The front tells me it was the winner of the 2013 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. So that sounds pretty good. (Note to self: Google May Sarton.) Then I flip it over and hey, there’s a photo of David. A touch of grey, and that swoop is gone, but there’s still something going on up there.
And then I read the book. Definitely still something going on up there.
Now, “Jack,” you might be thinking, “No offense, but what do you know about poetry?” A fair question, but I’ve been dabbling all these years. Back in school, I did work at the University Press, and part of the job was weeding through the piles and piles of submitted manuscripts. At first I felt woefully under-qualified: Who was I to determine what was worthy of publication? But soon enough, I realized I could certainly tell the difference between crummy poetry (which was most of it), the halfway decent stuff, and every once and again, the really strong poems that we’d happen upon. Those had great word choices, smart turns of phrase, images that stuck with you, and ideas that could stop you in your tracks, if only for a moment.
It was rare, and impressive, when it all came together in an individual poem. So to do it over and over again over the course of an entire book, that is something special, and that’s what David Koehn has done in Twine. Though the poems within are culled from a wide variety of publications, they hang together very nicely here.
Koehn has crafted his own distinctive world, where night has just fallen, and we’re outside, near water. Some of the poems are hyper-aware snapshots of life, the here and now or there and then. Others are less grounded, more dreamlike. (“Le Palais du Cheval” circles back upon itself, with repetition of stones, letters, blood, towers, birds.) Each time I read the poems in Twine, different lines, glimpses, and thoughts jump out at me. A man meticulously surveying the body of a tattooed woman. Kids secretly hanging out under a front porch. (Elsewhere, older kids in a forgotten mineshaft, still hiding from the world.) A Klee painting comes to life, containing all of history. Backyards and streetlights, an abandoned plow on the beach, flower in the desert, a bug and a girl on a pond, an auctioneer, fame and death, chronicling the contents of a random suitcase.
In the middle of it all, a meta moment (in “The Attempted Assassination of Jules Verne”):
…I work on poems for years on end. Time, a filter.
How else do I know if I really care
About the piece unless it manages
To persist?
No such worries here, David; this collection is built to last.
Jack Silbert, curator