John Koethe

poet laureate icon
1945 –
Poet Laureate of Milwaukee, 2000–2002
Read poems by this poet

Originally from San Diego, John Koethe was born on December 25, 1945. He began writing poetry in 1964 during his undergraduate years at Princeton University and went on to receive a PhD in philosophy from Harvard University.

Koethe’s Ninety-fifth Street (Harper Perennial, 2009) won the 2010 Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. He has published numerous other books of poetry, including Cemeteries and Galaxies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025); Walking Backwards: Poems 1966–2016 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018); The Swimmer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016); North Point North: New and Selected Poems (Harper Perennial, 2003), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; The Constructor (Harper Perennial, 1999); Falling Water (Harper Perennial, 1997), which won the Kingsley Tufts Award; Domes (Columbia University Press, 1974), which won the Frank O’Hara Award for Poetry; and Blue Vents (Audit/Poetry, 1968). 

Critic Robert Hahn has said the following about his work:

Koethe’s poetry is ultimately lyrical, and its claim on us comes not from philosophy’s dream of precision but from the common human dream that our lives make some kind of sense. What Koethe offers is not ideas but a weave of reflection, emotion, and music; what he creates is art—a bleak, harrowing art in all it chooses to confront, but one whose rituals and repetitions contain the hope of renewal.

Koethe is also the author of three collections of essays: Skepticism, Knowledge, and Forms of Reasoning (Cornell University Press, 2005); Poetry at One Remove (University of Michigan Press, 2000); and the scholarly work The Continuity of Wittgenstein’s Thought (Cornell University Press, 1996).

Koethe is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin and received a lifetime achievement award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. From 2000 through 2002, he served as Milwaukee’s first poet laureate.

Koethe was the George Elliston Poet-in-Residence at the University of Cincinnati and the Bain-Swiggett Professor of Poetry at Princeton University. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.