Having devoted the previous post to poets writing about Theodore Roethke, I found yet another poem. Richard Murphy’s ‘The Poet on the Island’ is dedicated to him:
‘On a wet night, laden with books for luggage,
And stumbling under the burden of himself,
He reached the pier, looking for a refuge.
……………….
Safety on water, he rocked with a new theme:
And in the warmth of his mind’s greenhouse bloomed
A poem nurtured like a chrysanthemum.’
I decided it was time to read a book that has been sitting on the shelf for several years, ‘On the poet and his craft: selected prose of Theodore Roethke’, University of Washington press, 1965. The provenance of this one is unusual. The sticker on the back, in Japanese, indicates that it’s come from the library of Notre Dame Seishin Women’s University, Okinawa. It’s one of those times when I wish secondhand books had owner’s signatures in them, like a logbook. How did it get to an Oxfam shop in London?
Roethke was not a great poet/critic like Eliot, Auden or, I’d argue, Louise Gluck, but there are a good number of passages here worth noticing. He was a teacher at Washington University for many years, where he had a ‘legendary reputation’ (according to the introduction). His students must have been exposed to contradictory impulses; he writes that ‘Most teaching is visceral, and the genial uproar that constitutes a verse class, especially so. It is as ephemeral as the dance, and as hard to localize or define. It is what is left after all the reading and thinking and reciting: the residue, the illumination.’ Feeling is paramount. He wrote of his own early reading ‘Most scholarship seemed irrelevant rubbish; most teachers seemed lacking in wisdom, in knowledge they had proved on their pulses. Certain writers called out to me: I believed them implicitly. I still do’ Many students of poetry have a similar romantic notion of unfiltered response somewhere at the back of their heads. Yet the poet James Wright, one of his students, remembered a homework assignment: ‘he wanted us to go to the library and find ten or maybe even twenty iambic trimester lines that had a caesura after the first syllable’ (!)
Some of his most interesting passages are teacher’s ideas – what he wants his students to do, what he wishes he’d done when he was young. Here he is on the making of commonplace books (a bit like this blog): ‘(Each student) includes the results of his reading in a selective anthology of his own making – somewhat on the order of Edith Sitwell’s Notebooks – consisting of remarks on craft, good lines, poems, anything that has been genuinely pertinent to his development. This is not a mere scrapbook or piece of intellectual window-dressing, but a highly personal compilation, often showing that the anthology can be a creative act’
On the subject of anthologies (in this case one called Twelve Poets): ‘No text, no anthology, can be the answer to everything…..(but) there is enough here to engage the brightest: to give any young person a sense of what tradition is in the English language. It can stand being embraced, or resisted. I only wish that, in September 1925, someone had thrust such a book upon me. And saw to it that I read it closely, and knew slugs of it by heart.’
An unexpected traditionalist, with the perennial teacher’s complaint about lack of rigour (so perhaps it can’t just be that certain writers call out to you?). But note ‘embraced, or resisted’. He said something similar about Dylan Thomas, ‘someone to be proud of, to rejoice in, to be irritated with, or even jealous of’. And Thomas used the most old-fashioned method of all: ‘I noticed one day a big pile of poems, – Edward Thomas, Hardy, Ransom, Housman and others, – all copied out in his careful hand. He said he never felt he knew a poem, what was in it, until he had done this. His taste was exact and specific; he was loyal to the poem, not the poet.’ Good idea – I do it myself.
In case I’m making him sound too teacherly, he could also be winningly vulnerable, ‘I am perfectly willing to appear ridiculous, absurd, if a real point can be established’. He could be self-deprecating – ‘It took me ten years to complete one little book, and now some of the things in it seem to creak. Still, I like about ten pieces in it’. He could quote Jung against himself, or any poet – ‘The truth is that poets are human beings, and that what a poet has to say about his work is far from being the most illuminating word on the subject’.
The flip-side to the vulnerability was what Ian Hamilton calls his ‘creeping megalomania…. Rival poets mown down like Chicago hoods’. Some of the most perversely enjoyable pages of the book, tucked away at the end, give full vent to his tirades:
’I think of my more tedious contemporaries: Roaring asses, hysterics, sweet-myself beatniks, earless wonders happy with effects a child of two could improve on: verbal delinquents; sniggering, mildly obscene souser-wousers, this one writing as if only he had a penis, that one bleeding, but always in waltz-time………..whole schools of verbalizers, nerveless, slick and often macabre; squeezers of the obvious, vulgar jostlers with words; cerebral gibberers and wild-eyed affirmers …. Etc etc’
Souser-wousers? A bad day at the poetry office….
the word-road home 