Smugmush in the Art Bar, by Mark Halliday
from the current issue (36.2)
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When banality is pushed beyond the frontier of the digestible and flows like lava on across the tundra of the unbearable, it may ultimately reach the cliff of absurdity and pour stunningly over into the crevasse of the paradoxically marvelous. This feat was achieved, arguably, by John Koethe in his poem “Covers Band in a Small Bar” which appeared in The New Yorker, a weekly magazine published in New York City, in the issue of April 6, 2015. My assumption in the following essay is that the poem’s seamlessly total banality must have been intentionally crafted for the sake of that feat (frontier to tundra to cliff to crevasse), because otherwise the poem’s publication would be too irritating and we would all have to feel so sick about what goes on in the world of contemporary poetry publication. We don’t want to feel ill, so we need a mode of perception whereby banal nightsoil can seem to transvalue itself into something amusingly aromatic.
The key to Koethe’s strategy in “Covers Band in a Small Bar” is the utter purity of the poem’s banality. The banality is not intermittent; it is not interrupted or speckled with flecks of original thought or feeling; the poem sits with firm buttocks upon the donkey of the oppressively familiar, relaxed and steady in the soft saddle.
“Covers Band in a Small Bar” presents the thoughts of a person – we are all too confident that this person is John Koethe, born in 1945 – who is listening to a covers band in a small bar. Thus the poem’s title seems entirely reliable and helpful. The title makes no shadow of a gesture toward metaphor. I who have spent decades complaining to my friends and my students that their metaphors are too elusive and imprecise might be expected to praise the overwhelming straightforwardness of Koethe’s title. Yet I find that this title is so thoroughly in keeping with the poem’s lava-flow-of-banality strategy that such praise from me is less inevitable than my wildly lyrical detractors might have expected.
“I’m sitting in the Art Bar in Milwaukee” Koethe says (or his speaker says – but we cannot escape calling the speaker “Koethe”) in line 13 of the 21-line poem. Artfully, Koethe waits till past the middle of the poem to provide precise information as to where he is sitting, rather than letting “I’m sitting in the Art Bar in Milwaukee” be the poem’s opening line, as novice poets might have done. And yet, in a spiritual sense the reader comes to feel that the poem’s opening line really is “I’m sitting in the Art Bar in Milwaukee”. In fact, there is in some eerie way a radiating effect of this line such that every line of the poem seems to begin “I’m sitting here, I’m sitting here, I’m sitting here.” That’s how emphatically Koethe’s poem defines itself as an I sit here poem.
Must I now discuss the popular genre of the I sit here poem? I find this genre embarrassing; because I have written thirty or possibly fifty poems of this kind. One goes into the world, with a bit of leisure, and one sits down in a public place – often it is a café, where the caffeine stimulates one’s sense of creativity, though it may also be a tavern, where alcohol has that same effect also albeit with a somewhat more fuzzy furry quality to the inspiration. One sips, one reflects, one’s mind seems rather interesting. Indeed, one’s most casual, most stunningly ordinary thoughts suddenly seem worthy of the world’s attention and of savoring by posterity – or at least worthy of publication in The New Yorker.
One sits there. “I sit here” – and then, more often than not, one hears a song. It may come from the sound system in the café or tavern; or, more piquantly, it may come from the radio in a passing car, or from the lips of a barista or fellow customer; or it may come from someone’s cell phone; or it could come from living musicians, such as a covers band from southern Wisconsin. The song stirs a memory! You know it does. You have lived a life. You heard certain songs for the first time in certain places while your life effulged. I, for instance, heard “Paperback Writer” for the first time in the small parking lot outside a small clothing store (where my mother forced me to buy nice shirts) on the Post Road in Westport, Connecticut. I can supply more details about this if you wish. I was ravished by the magic of “Paperback Writer” and my soul quivered with new possibilities, etc. But our focus here is on John Koethe in Milwaukee hearing songs that were first performed by the Velvet Underground. When a person – a man, let us say – somehow it is usually a man – is this because women tend to be less blithely purely certain that their wispy flicks of nostalgia are important? – when a man hears an old song he flashes back so vividly to the times long ago . . . And he wants to tell you about it.
Does he consider that he may be “too preoccupied with them,” with the old songs and the attached memories? Maybe he does. By considering this, does he transcend the banality of his preoccupation? I am terrified by this question. This question is my enemy. This question threatens to demolish some fifty or a hundred poems I have written. I want to skitter away from this question and its insidious hint that consciousness of banality does not in itself turn the banality into interestingness. But “Covers Band in a Small Bar” shoves this question into one’s mind as if with a bulldozer. If this shoving constitutes poetic power, then we must give Koethe the credit for such power.
Koethe sits there in the Art Bar in Milwaukee, hearing a covers band play oldies. If the covers band is in Milwaukee it couldn’t be from Trenton, New Jersey, could it? The poem produces a whiff of confusion about this. Good poems are sometimes a little confusing, right? Because of their compression, their loadedness, their compacting of metaphor . . . Then again, ten billion bad poems are also confusing. The relation between poeticality and clarity is itself a little confusing; or mysterious, rather. But “Covers Band in a Small Bar” definitely cannot be accused of being mysterious, yet it is a tad confusing, now that you force me to think about it.
Here is the first sentence of the poem:
They make it feel like yesterday,
Which is the whole idea: another dateless
Saturday in the basement of Charter Club,
Drinking beer and listening to a Trenton covers band
Play Four Tops songs: “Sugar Pie Honey Bunch,”
“It’s the Same Old Song.”
Koethe’s strategy of delivering banality more thoroughly and openly than you could have anticipated is there from the start, where he explains to us – apparently pretending not to know that we already are aware – that a covers band plays old songs so as to stimulate our memories of long-ago listening. Note how unshrinkingly Koethe arranges for the song title at the end of the poem’s first sentence to whack us with a reminder of his topic. This is artistic generosity, is it not?
Suddenly I shiver wondering if somewhere in my notebooks there may be a draft in which I cleverly mention “It’s the Same Old Song” by the Four Tops in the service of a feeling about, you know, time and echoes and time and loss. Good poems often do induce a kind of shiver. But the shiver Koethe has induced seems distinctive in its being a prelude to nausea.
Where is Charter Club, an attentive literal-minded reader may wonder, is it perhaps directly above the Art Bar in Milwaukee? Presuming that you care enough to ponder this, you google John Koethe and find that he was once an undergraduate at Princeton. Ah. Within seconds you have learned that there is a Charter Club at Princeton. Were you supposed to already know this? Well, certain readers would know it. Someone who teaches at Princeton like, say, Paul Muldoon, would know it. (Muldoon is an Irish poet who edits poetry for The New Yorker, a magazine published in New York City.) Princetonians can enjoy the reference to Charter Club in a special way, as it is nice to know some things not known by everyone. Koethe, born in 1945, would understandably have found himself in, say, 1965 (when the Four Tops had hits with the two songs he mentions), drinking beer at Princeton and listening to a covers band (from nearby Trenton, New Jersey) covering the Four Tops, on a Saturday night – “another dateless / Saturday”.
I feel sorry for myself whenever I remember particular occasions in my life when I was in a public place wishing for a female companion; and there have been hundreds – actually thousands of such occasions. Particular songs force me to remember these occasions. Why, why did I have to be alone in all those situations, alone or accompanied only by goofy raucous guys? I, with my sensitive spirit and vibrant intelligence at age twenty, age twenty-five, and other ages I prefer not to specify, why should I have been sitting there without a girlfriend? Something was way, way wrong with the world. Yeats knew this too. In fact 90% of the men in any generation who insist on being poets have recognized this world-wrongness vividly at the age of twenty.
But our focus here is on John Koethe who did not have a date on those beer-drinking Saturdays at Princeton’s Charter Club. Should we pause to notice how the adjective “dateless” floats out there at the end of line 2, in a poem that will turn out to be about how occasions far apart in time blur together, as if all time is simultaneous? Should we quote Shakespeare’s line about “precious friends hid in death’s dateless night”? We could do that. But so far we have only looked at the first of the five rather long sentences that comprise “Covers Band in a Small Bar”.
What does Koethe have to share with us in the second sentence of his poem, having established that he remembers “yesterday” listening to versions of “Sugar Pie Honey Bunch” (actual main title “I Can’t Help Myself” – a title remarkably pertinent to the way I, for instance, have compulsively written the “I sit here” poem and the “I remember this song from long ago” poem over and over) and “It’s the Same Old Song” on lonesome Saturdays?
They occupied my mind
In 1966 through dinner with Robbie at Del Pezzo, later
In the Vassar Club and on a cruise around Manhattan
For Peter Mahony’s parents’ wedding anniversary.
It is in this second sentence of Koethe’s poem that his strategy of maximizing banality so blithely as to attain an absurd sublime of Ultra Smugmush (a term coined here at this instant) strides forth like a – um, like a marching band at a pep rally? He wants to tell us where he was when the Four Tops songs “occupied” his mind. How do we feel about that verb “occupied”, by the way? Did the songs really occupy his mind? Did they not merely float around the edges of his thoughts, did they not merely provide a gauzy melodic background for whatever he was thinking about? Did he in fact really think about those songs? If he did, he does not even gesture toward showing this in the poem. If Koethe actually had thoughts about the songs, that might be seriously interesting; but to include anything seriously interesting would violate the poem’s over-all strategy.
Koethe wants to use poetry as his diary, and we readers serve to help him maintain the diary in a profitable way. (To help us recognize that what we are reading is not merely a diary entry, Koethe starts each line with a capital letter.) He is prudent enough to be rather thrifty with his diary details – he only tells us about three occasions (apart from his Charter Club evenings) when the Four Tops songs filled his head; whereas, presumably there were various other occasions, and so the poem could have provided a more cornucopic set of instances. (I myself could rather easily write a book-length poem specifying where I was when I thought about – or, inwardly helplessly re-heard – songs from the Sixties. I would do this for just $1500 if any publisher wants to get in touch.) Koethe had dinner with Robbie at Del Pezzo and for some reason (Why? Could the answer be interesting?) remembered the Four Tops songs. Who was Robbie? Do you wish to know? We may presume that “Robbie” stands for “my old pal”. What was Del Pezzo? Googling indicates that it was a restaurant frequented by artists and musicians in Manhattan, located successively on West 34th, 40th, and 47th. One has a faintly nauseous sensation that Koethe would be very ready to tell us where Del Pezzo was located when he had dinner with Robbie. Later, Koethe was at the Vassar Club when he thought of the songs. Notice the confidence with which the poet elects not to tell us anything about the Vassar Club occasion; his making no effort to interest us in this particular memory is firmly, indeed sort of suavely in keeping with the poem’s governing “shoot the moon” approach to the banality of his subject. He knows why he was at the Vassar Club; our task is to watch him savoring the memory we know nothing about. And when we are told, with more detail, that Koethe’s Motown tunes “occupied” his mind “on a cruise around Manhattan / For Peter Mahony’s parents’ wedding anniversary” there is (again) such relaxed aplomb in the absence of any effort to consider why certain songs might relate to the particular experience. Indeed, Koethe doesn’t even worry about explaining what it would mean to “cruise around Manhattan” for someone’s parents’ anniversary. It’s a diary entry, and the diarist knows what was what. Why should we know?
Reader, I am the author of a beloved (by me) essay (in Literary Imagination, V.13 No.2) entitled “Poetry and the Rescue of Particulars”. In this essay I labor to explain my love of the notion that a deep purpose of poems – poems that include very specific details – yet also in a sense all poems – is to “rescue” the granular facts from oblivion, from the constant tidal wave of forgetting, and (moreover) from insignificance; if the poem is good enough, I argue, the particulars (names of persons, of places, of products, specifics of remembered events) shed their triviality and become luminous, cherishable, as inextricable elements of an artistic effect. In my excellent essay I constantly fend off the suspicion that my argument is sentimental and is too similar to softheaded fetishizing of your collection of baseball cards or your photos of your undergraduate friends. Deploying examples from Herrick, Wordsworth, Arnold, Hardy, Yeats, Lowell, O’Hara, Bidart, Pinsky, and others, I fight heroically for the claim that a detail in a poem need not be justified only by its service as metaphor but may be justified as an irreducible quiddity felt by the reader to be suggestively true.
Then along comes someone like John Koethe and drives his Volvo straight through my beloved argument and leaves it in shreds and drives on without even noticing and parks at the Art Bar in Milwaukee and orders a beer and jots down stunningly ordinary memories and sends them to Paul Mulldoof who publishes them as if a work of art is nothing more special than a beer at the Art Bar.
We could not care less about Peter Mahony’s parents’ wedding anniversary. Ah yes, don’t you see, that’s the point!
“Covers Band in a Small Bar” consists of five sentences. So far, I’ve quoted the first two. The third sentence is the shortest but its blithe egotism makes it almost too embarrassing to quote:
My tastes “evolved”: more Stax, less Motown,
Then the Velvet Underground and I.Q. rock –
God, I was a snob.
John, John, the reader cries, how did you feel about Pink Floyd? And Steely Dan? And Roxy Music? There is so much more you could share!
What the hell is I.Q. rock? I am not familiar with the term. Koethe would love to explain – except not in the poem. He is rueful, ostensibly, about having come to prefer music less conventional and more intellectual (or something) than the Four Tops. Of course we all developed somewhat more sophisticated musical taste during our twenties, didn’t we? I guess I did. Though I don’t think I was ever a snob about it. But we can take Koethe’s word for it that he was a music snob. Are we interested in this confession? We could be interested if he were to explore the snobbery – its motives, its interpersonal effects, perhaps its political implications – though admittedly this starts to sound more like essay material than poem material. But, again, to be interesting would betray Koethe’s artistic design in “Covers Band in a Small Bar”. What he wants to do is what each of us often wants to do when we confess to a foible or a past failure: he simply wants to establish that now he has a clear and morally sound and rather charming perspective on such failure.
Having paused to confess his long-ago snobbery, Koethe gives us the fourth sentence of his poem:
And now Lou Reed is dead
And I’m sitting in the Art Bar in Milwaukee,
Long past my usual bedtime – I don’t stay out late,
Don’t care to go / I’m home about eight, just me
And my radio – listening to my favorite songs again,
Hearing them as though for the first time?
Apparently the poet wants us to be aware that this band in the Art Bar in Milwaukee is playing quite late at night. The lateness of the hour makes the whole experience more – more something, more adventurous? More psychically unsettling? In any case, Koethe mentions it, and prompts us to wonder what time he goes to bed nowadays, so as to set up the quotation from a song – what song?
You expect it to be a song by the Velvet Underground, probably, since Koethe has mentioned Lou Reed’s death, but instead the quoted lines turn out to be from “Ain’t Misbehavin’” by Fats Waller, a song that dates back to 1929 and was later a hit for Nat King Cole among others. Are we intrigued by this surprise? Not especially. If we were, a faint odor of poetic depth might creep into the poem’s air, which is what Koethe so studiously avoids. Sitting in the Art Bar, he is up past his bedtime, which reminds him of the Fats Waller lines, but luckily there’s nothing witty in the reference, it’s just one of those itsy-bitsy links that come uselessly to mind. Also, we are so certain that Koethe is not misbehaving in the Art Bar that there’s no kick to remembering (if we do) the title of the song from which he quotes.
Do you suppose The New Yanker paid real cash to some company that owns the rights to the lyrics of “Ain’t Misbehavin’”? That would be – well, would it be funny? Or grotesque?
“Hearing them as though for the first time?” Koethe implies that someone, some imagined interlocutor, has suggested that to hear his favorite oldies now, in late middle age, played by a covers band in a small bar, is to hear them in a fresh way uninflected by memories. What interlocutor would suggest this? Would you? Such an interlocutor would have to be astonishingly clueless about the way memories get glued to songs. But just in case we might pause to entertain the interlocutor’s notion, Koethe firmly discards it, as he proceeds into the final sentence of “Covers Band in a Small Bar”.
Not at all:
They’re too familiar, I’m too preoccupied with them,
Even though the flesh is still willing – swaying
Slightly at the table, nodding up and down
To the memory of “Pale Blue Eyes.”
Since I’ve been praising the consistency of Koethe’s banality, I hesitate to admit this, but there is almost something interesting in the hinted logic of “Even though the flesh is still willing” – the implication seems to be that Koethe feels a willingness of the flesh which would tend to make the old songs (as covered by a local band) hit him as new experiences, but this effect is not attained, because his mind is so beclouded with memories as to overcome the willing flesh. What is this willingness of the flesh? Is it that Koethe still wants sex, almost as much as he did when he first heard the songs? If so, would that be interesting? Oh god, I have written more than ten poems about desire in midlife – more than fifteen – but who is counting? Can the topic be interesting to anyone besides the desirer? Please do not answer this question if you are under forty. I find the topic painfully interesting even if my own poems about it are not entirely un-banal despite their intelligent irony!
But wait – probably we need not worry about Koethe’s poem having lurched an inch toward interestingness here – “the flesh is willing – swaying / Slightly at the table, nodding up and down . . .” This willingness of the flesh is not especially about desire, that was just my own embarrassing hypothesis; Koethe’s sentence simply refers to the way his body is willing to go along with the music. This is an extremely mild form of willingness, to be sure – swaying slightly – no one is falling out of a chair; unless perhaps the reader crashes to the floor in a swoon of supreme boredom, asked to imagine the poet swaying slightly in a Milwaukee bar; swaying and what? Swaying and nodding up and down. Note how painstakingly Koethe specifies the direction of his nodding, lest we mistakenly speculate that he might be nodding sideways (not easy) or at a 45-degree angle. The phrase “nodding up and down” is the maraschino cherry atop the vanilla-to-the-Nth sundae of the poem.
Unless that distinction should be reserved for the song title “Pale Blue Eyes”? It is a Velvet Underground song. Not a Four Tops song. Koethe’s tastes evolved. We should note that in the last line of the poem, Koethe is swaying and nodding (up and down) not simply to the song “Pale Blue Eyes” (as covered by the covers band) but to the memory of “Pale Blue Eyes”. Ah! Perhaps that particular song once meant – meant – meant a lot to him? Let’s think. It is a song about being in love with a married woman. Interesting! Or, it would be interesting if, you know, someone were to write interestingly about being in love with a married woman (other than one’s own wife, I need hardly add). Does Koethe have a story to tell, involving a woman whose eyes were pale blue? If so, it must remain a story untold, for the sake of the dedicated pure banality of “Covers Band in a Small Bar”. Though I suspect we – or Paul Mulldoof – could get him to tell the story in another poem.
And I have stories, myself. Have I made that clear? Maybe not good stories, as such, but full of feelings! I have had strong feelings about numerous women, and I am thinking right now about one who had pale blue eyes in 1978. We could go to a small bar, preferably one without live music, and if you would buy the beers, I would provide details. God is in the details, correct? I guarantee references to several songs. I love my life, I love my memories – they might seem small to you, but not to me and God. Remind me to send clumps of them to some good literary magazine.
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