Prairie Lights Books will hold its first “Live from Prairie Lights” poetry reading without the help of longtime moderator Julie Englander today. Stepping into her place will be Sarah Fay, advisory editor for the Paris Review.

Fay will introduce John Koethe, the distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who will read from his latest collection of poetry, Ninety Fifth Street. The reading will start at 7 p.m. at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St.

Koethe, who will retire in December, was planning on becoming a mathematical physicist until he took a contemporary poetry class while an undergraduate at Princeton University.

Critics say his poetry is heavily influenced by John Ashbery and that his longer poems resemble the romantic style of Elizabeth Bishop and have moments that make the reader recall Marcel Proust.

“John Koethe views philosophy through a narrative lens,” Fay said. “[Poetry and philosophy are both] assertions in the face of futility.”

In that way, Koethe captures the realms of poetry and philosophy. The poet’s work focuses predominantly on the here and now and romantic realism. He conveys this through abstraction, based in moments past, and does not stray into worlds untraveled. His forte, epistemology — the analysis of knowledge — is an important part of his work. In the first few poems of Ninety Fifth Street, he jumps straight into metaphysical questions while meandering through a narrative about a lath house.

Koethe is moving toward larger questions in contemporary poetry by focusing and writing about the particular and not being influenced by bizarre abstraction. His poems have a biological sense of progression and an important human view on daily life.

He has been the recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Award for his book Falling Water and has been granted fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and by the National Endowment for the Arts.

— by Colin Doherty