A story of serendipity; of poems that seem to talk to each other across decades. Two weeks ago I bought ‘Modern Poetry’ by Diane Seuss (lovely cover by Fitzcarraldo – the texture of it in the hand) and picked up ‘Conjurors’ by Julian Orde from the Greenwich Oxfam shop. With the Orde I must confess I succumbed to wives and girlfriends syndrome. She lived for a summer in wartime with W.S.Graham, and I’m interested in anything to do with him. But she’s far better than just an adjunct to Sidney. This is a richly deserved reclamation job by Carcanet (and the editor James Keery) of a major 1940s voice. Unfortunately only 20 of her poems were published at the time, there was never a volume, and she wrote almost no poetry after that decade. She disappeared almost completely from the anthologies.
The best thing here is the long title poem ‘Conjurors’, about (unpromising as it may seem) the life of a caterpillar. A lot of nature description, but sharp-eyed, unsentimental:
‘She walks like a boat on the beach
Dragging her drying sails,
While the last
Memory of her past
Shakes from her tail: a bead
Of amber dew, unnoticed as the shell
That husked and housed her in its brittle walls.
Two poems later this caught my eye-
‘I like Roethke (pronounced Retke)
I don’t know him; I like his poems;
I like the poet who wrote them. He
Moves among his poems as familiarly
And as gracefully, as in his greenhouse:
Watches his poems grow admiringly
As his bulbs and orchids.’
I like the poet that wrote that, unafraid to be direct and simple. She’s referring to the American poet Theodore Roethke (and I’m grateful for that Retke note – for years I’ve been pronouncing his name as if it was a variant on Rothko). His father owned a 25 acre greenhouse and specialised in orchids and roses; Roethke spent his childhood watching plants grow. The best of his ‘greenhouse poems’ are in the 1948 volume ‘The Lost Son’ – short, sharp, vivid lines (a big influence on James Wright and Sylvia Plath, amongst others) which now seem proto- ecological, now that everyone wants an allotment. This is ‘Cuttings’.
’Sticks-in-a-drowse droop over sugary loam,
Their intricate stem-fur dries;
But still the delicate slips keep coaxing up water;
The small cells bulge;
One nub of growth
Nudges a sand-crumb loose,
Pokes through a musty sheath
Its pale tendrilous horn.’
Orde’s poem about Roethke strikes me as something unexpected but obvious, a poem as criticism, as enthusiasm for another poet. So seldom done but why not? Poets spend (or should spend) a lot of their time reading other poets. Why shouldn’t that experience give rise to poems, like any other experience?
I then took a look at Diane Seuss, and did what I usually do with a new book of poetry – open it in the middle and read a few lines at random to get a sense of the voice and tone. And this is what my eye fell upon (I’m not making this up..)
’It was what I’d been waiting for my whole life,
but I wasn’t ready for poetry. I didn’t have
the tools. Roethke—
I appreciated the greenhouse poems,
and decades later saw his bed, toilet, upright
piano in that desolate town where he was raised,
not unlike the desolate town where I was raised.’
She then goes on to mention about ten other poets in the poem (‘Modern Poetry’). But she begins with Roethke. Which then reminded me that a decade ago, when I asked Sarah Howe to sign a copy of ‘Loop of Jade’, I told her I particularly liked her poem, Sirens, that references Roethke’s ‘Elegy for Jane’. This is the start of Howe’s poem.
I see it clearly, as though I’d known it myself,
the ‘quick look’ of Jane in the poem by Roethke —.
that delicate elegy, for a student of his thrown
from a horse. My favourite line was always ‘her
sidelong pickerel smile.’
I have the sense that Roethke is not thought of as quite in the same league as Bishop, Lowell or Berryman. In my view his later, longer-lined poems declined. His reputation rests on the poems of the late 40s and early 50s. But a good number of poets want to talk about Roethke, want Roethke in their poems. It’s one of the ways a poet’s reputation rises, or re-emerges. They become a poets’ poet.
the word-road home 