Poetry Bookclub 2

[quasimodo1]

In an attempt to bring this discussion group back to life, let me start with some suggestions. If anyone interested has any others, please post them. The choices are Billy Collins (The Trouble with Poetry, 2005), Sylvia Plath (Crossing the Water, 1971, Theodore Roethke (Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical Poems, 1963), Langston Hughes (The Panther & the Lash, 1992), and Marianne Moore (Illusion is More Precise than Precision: The Poetry of Marianne Moore, 1992). If this shows any signs of life, there will be a vote/poll.

[Dark Muse]

I would love to do Sylvia Plath

[JBI]

I would love to do Roethke, and perhaps Collins, but not crazy about the others. Maybe we can add a few more multicultural ones for the final poll? I think the only one I haven't read in collected works is Collins.

[Jozanny]

Billy Collins? Isn't that just a shade on this side of pandering? ;)

[stlukesguild]

I could go for Roethke... perhaps Marianne Moore (although Elizabeth Bishop would be better...:D)

[JBI]

How about adding Octavio Paz, Giussepe Ungaretti, and Anna Akhmatova to the list, or some other voices? It seems blasphemous to have a list of all Americans.

[Jozanny]

I would not want to turn this into a free for all, of course, but in my limited aesthetic opinion, Judith Johnson (http://www.biggerbooks.com/bk_detail.aspx?isbn=9781878818171) is more interesting than Collins, fresher than Plath, and more undervalued.

Ice Lizards is not easy to get ones hands on, however.

[Dark Muse]

I could go for Roethke... perhaps Marianne Moore (although Elizabeth Bishop would be better...:D)

Bishop would be my second choice to Plath

[quasimodo1]

Seems like we are adding Octavio Paz, Giussepe Ungaretti, Anna Akhmatova and Judith Johnson to the preliminary list. If anyone has specific collections in mind, please post them. Let me post some collections by these poets. q1

[quasimodo1]

And Elizabeth Bishop...also in preliminary list.

[JBI]

http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Poems-Bilingual-Giuseppe-Ungaretti/dp/0374528926/ref=pd_sim_b_1

http://www.amazon.com/Tale-Two-Gardens-Poems-1952-1995/dp/0811213498/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219874502&sr=8-13

http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Poems-Penguin-Classics-Akhmatova/dp/0140424644/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219874698&sr=1-4

All those are within modest lengths, the longest being Ungaretti, though he is cut in half because it is a bilingual edition.

[quasimodo1]

Poetry Bookclub 2

Wednesday, August 27, 2008
6:57 PM

Authors and collections

Billy Collins THE TROUBLE WITH POETRY 2005

Sylvia Plath CROSSING THE WATER 1971

Theodore Roethke SEQUENCE: SOMETIMES METAPHYSICAL POEMS 1963

Langston Hughes THE PANTHER & THE LASH 1992

Marianne Moore ILLUSION IS MORE PRECISE THAN PRECISION: THE POETRY OF MARIANNE MOORE 1992

Giusseppe Ungaretti SELECTED POEMS: A BILINGUAL EDITION 2002

THE PROMISED LAND 1950

Octavio Paz A TALE OF TWO GARDENS: POEMS FROM INDIA 1952-1995 (last copyright by Octavio Paz and Elizabeth Bishop, 1972)

ARBOL ADENTRO (A Tree Within) 1987

Anna Akhmatova SELECTED POEMS (Penquin Classics) 1985

TWENTY POEMS (translated by Jane Keynon) 1985

Judith Johnson THE ICE LIZARD: POEMS, 1977-1988 1992

Elizabeth Bishop POEMS: NORTH AND SOUTH- A COLD SPRING 1955

[Virgil]

Quasi, I forget how this works. Wll we be voting for one of those books?

As a side note, I think Theodore Roethke is so under rated. I will vote for him. :)

[quasimodo1]

hey Virgil, I think we have to reduce this list to five for a vote. Roethke is great but so are all of these. Akhmatova has my vote, followed by Marianne Moore and Ungaretti.

[Virgil]

hey Virgil, I think we have to reduce this list to five for a vote. Roethke is great but so are all of these. Akhmatova has my vote, followed by Marianne Moore and Ungaretti.

So what am I supposed to do, pick two others? I'll go with Eizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore.

[quasimodo1]

We need a first choice for the elimination. So you would go with Roethke, yes? Also, at this point, other collections can be added.

[stlukesguild]

Again... I would be in for Roethke. He was certainly a good choice and it has been a while since I've read him. Out of the list so far my second choice would be Paz and third Akhmatova.

[quasimodo1]

OK then, pick three in decending order and I'll do the handicapping. How about Sunday, 12 midnight for a cutoff on selections?

[Virgil]

Ok. Roethke, Bishop, Moore.

[quasimodo1]

Taking note of these choices... The others involved in first poetry bookclub were Quark, JBI, DARK MUSE, Dapper Drake, Il Penseroso and sofia 82. They will get a heads-up.

Scheherazade has informed me that we can vote on ten options. So, unless there is other input, we'll have that vote Monday.

[quasimodo1]

"The Lanyard" {from the collection, THE TROUBLE WITH POETRY, by Billy Collinns}

The other day as I was ricocheting slowly
off the pale blue walls of this room,
bouncing from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one more suddenly into the past --
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sickroom,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,
set cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Crossing the Water {from the collection of the same name by Sylvia Plath}
Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people.
Where do the black trees go that drink here?
Their shadows must cover Canada.

A little light is filtering from the water flowers.
Their leaves do not wish us to hurry:
They are round and flat and full of dark advice.

Cold worlds shake from the oar.
The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes.
A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand; ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://gawow.com/roethke/poems/32.html Some selections of Roethke's poetry, not necessarily from the collection mentioned above.

[Dark Muse]

Plath, Bishop, Akhmatova

[quasimodo1]

Thank you Muse. A sample of Langston Hughes... The Weary Blues



Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway. . . .
He did a lazy sway. . . .
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man’s soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—
“Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
And put ma troubles on the shelf.” ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Spenser's Ireland
by Marianne Moore


has not altered;--
a place as kind as it is green,
the greenest place I've never seen.
Every name is a tune.
Denunciations do not affect
the culprit; nor blows, but it
is torture to him to not be spoken to.
They're natural,--
the coat, like Venus'
mantle lined with stars,
buttoned close at the neck,-the sleeves new from disuse.

If in Ireland
they play the harp backward at need,
and gather at midday the seed
of the fern, eluding
their "giants all covered with iron," might
there be fern seed for unlearn-
ing obduracy and for reinstating
the enchantment?
Hindered characters
seldom have mothers
in Irish stories, but they all have grandmothers.

It was Irish;
a match not a marriage was made
when my great great grandmother'd said
with native genius for
disunion, "Although your suitor be
perfection, one objection
is enough; he is not
Irish." Outwitting
the fairies, befriending the furies,
whoever again
and again says, "I'll never give in," never sees

that you're not free
until you've been made captive by
supreme belief,--credulity ... {excerpt}

[Jozanny]

If I understand quasi correctly, this is my vote:

1.Roethke
2.Johnson
3.Ungaretti

I must say, I am a practitioner of the art quasi, and had something of a small press recognition in the 80's--but I tip my hat--the breadth and depth of your dedication is a shining example, even for a cynic like me.

[quasimodo1]

Gracias Jozanny (there's a title for something). A sampling of Ungaretti...
Variations On Nothing


That negligible bit of sand which slides
Without a sound and settles in the hourglass,
And the fleeting impressions on the fleshy-pink,
The perishable fleshy-pink, of a cloud...

Then a hand that turns over the hourglass,
The going back for flowing back, of sand,
The quiet silvering of a cloud
In the first few lead-gray seconds of dawn... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

"An enormous mass of liquid mercury, barely undulating; vague hills in the distance; flocks of birds; a pale sky and scraps of pink clouds... Little by little the white-and-blue architecture of the city sprouted up, a stream of smoke from a chimney, the ochre and green stains of a distant garden. An arch of stone appeared, planed on a dock and crowned with four little towers in the shape of pine trees. Someone leaning on the railing beside me exclaimed, 'The Gateway of India!'" Octavio Paz

[quasimodo1]

...waves of heat; huge gray and red buildings, a Victorian London growing among palm trees and banyans like a recurrent nightmare, leprous walls, wide and beautiful avenues, huge unfamiliar trees, stinking alleyways,... ...women in red, blue, yellow, deliriously colored saris, some solar, some nocturnal, dark-haired women with bracelets on their ankles and sandals made not for the burning asphalt but for fields... ...public gardens overwhelmed by the heat, monkeys in the cornices of the buildings, **** and jasmine, homeless boys.... Octavio Paz

[quasimodo1]

It rained, the earth dressed and became naked, snakes left their holes, the moon was made of water, the sun was water, the sky took out its braids and its braids were unraveled rivers, the rivers swallowed villages, death and life were jumbled, dough of mud and sun, season of lust and plague, season of lightning on a sandalwood tree, mutilated genital stars rotting, reviving in your womb, mother India, girl India, drenched in semen, sap, poisons, juices.
({from A Tale of Two Gardens, by Octavio Paz}

[quasimodo1]

My breast grew helplessly cold,
But my steps were light.
I pulled the glove from my left hand
Mistakenly onto my right.

It seemed there were so many steps,
But I knew there were only three!
Amidst the maples an autumn whisper
Pleaded: "Die with me!

I'm led astray by evil
Fate, so black and so untrue."
I answered: "I, too, dear one!
I, too, will die with you..." {by Anna Akhmatova, excerpt from Song of the Final Meeting}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.albany.edu/~jej84/Rune/runeline1.htm Judith Johnson, poet and performance artist, has created an unusual, digital poetry format.

[quasimodo1]

Visits to St. Elizabeths
by Elizabeth Bishop


[1950]

This is the house of Bedlam.

This is the man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.

This is the time
of the tragic man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.

This is a wristwatch
telling the time
of the talkative man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.

This is a sailor
wearing the watch
that tells the time
of the honored man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.

This is the roadstead all of board
reached by the sailor
wearing the watch
that tells the time
of the old, brave man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.

These are the years and the walls of the ward,
the winds and clouds of the sea of board
sailed by the sailor
wearing the watch
that tells the time
of the cranky man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.

This is a Jew in a newspaper hat
that dances weeping down the ward
over the creaking sea of board
beyond the sailor
winding his watch
that tells the time
of the cruel man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.

This is a world of books gone flat.
This is a Jew in a newspaper hat
that dances weeping down the ward
over the creaking sea of board
of the batty sailor
that winds his watch
that tells the time
of the busy man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.

This is a boy that pats the floor
to see if the world is there, is flat,
for the widowed Jew in the newspaper hat
that dances weeping down the ward
waltzing the length of a weaving board
by the silent sailor
that hears his watch
that ticks the time
of the tedious man
that lies in the house of Bedlam. {excerpt...St. Eliziabeths refers to a psychiatric hospital in Washington, DC}

[Jozanny]

Mmm, quasi, I tried to pm you and cannot...if it is a glitch or your preferences, I am leaving now and will try to respond at another time. Good evening to you.

[Il Penseroso]

I won't vote because I'm really not sure how much I'll be able to participate, and I wouldn't want to skew the results without including myself in the discussions. But I'll do my best to get my hands on whatever is selected to at least be able to read along with the group.

[quasimodo1]

To Il Penseroso: I don't think it would alter the results and if I might dare to speak for some others...we'd love to have your input.

[Il Penseroso]

Alright, if you insist. :)

1. Octavio Paz
2. Theodore Roethke
3. Elizabeth Bishop

[JBI]

Ungaretti
Paz
Bishop

[Jozanny]

I hate to come off as a dunce, but the discussion will start after Sunday? I'd have to depend on my free library to be able to join in faster than deploying Amazon, but the library has a deplorable poetry collection, and uses some kind of color dot system for which can be checked out and which cannot.

I have no ideal why, since all fiction is available--but they are more restrictive with research material, and maybe poets fall under that category.

[quasimodo1]

To Jozanny and others: Since acquiring the text might take some time, after one is selected...we will probably begin some days after Monday. I might be able to post one or two poems, depending on the text, and that could get us started.

[quasimodo1]

Using a peculiar handicapping formula, these are the ratings for the selected poets: 0 for Hughes/ 1 for Johnson/ 3 for Collins/ 4 for Moore/ 5 for Ungaretti and Akhmatova/ 6 for Paz/ 7 for Bishop/ 8 for Plath/ and 9 for Roethke. Just a preminary evaluation which might stand until the real vote.

[Jozanny]

Thank you quasi.

[quasimodo1]

Don't mean to imply that the discussion is closed to just members; it will not be. The members participating so far are Stlukesguild, JBI, Quark, Dark Muse, Dapper Drake, Virgil, Il Penseroso, Sofia 82, Jozanny, myself and ANYONE ELSE. Looking for more imput on the selected authors and collections...

[quasimodo1]

Moving along at this dizzying pace...it apparently is Roethke that will be discussed. The original collection, Sequence: Sometimes Metaphysical Poems (1963) is the topic. Unless there is a move to chose any of the following:

Poetry Open House, Knopf, 1941.

The Lost Son and Other Poems, Doubleday, 1948.

Praise to the End!, Doubleday, 1951.

The Waking: Poems 1933-1953, Doubleday, 1953.

Words for the Wind: The Collected Verse of Theodore Roethke, Secker & Warburg, 1957, Doubleday, 1958.

I Am! Says the Lamb, Doubleday, 1961.



The Far Field, Doubleday, 1964.

The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, Doubleday, 1966.

[Dark Muse]

Roethke is a new one to me, so I will try and see if I can get a hold of some of his stuff to look at.

[stlukesguild]

I have Words for the Wind which is a volume of Roethke's collected poems through 1958. It appears I'll need to get an updated collected works to include those of Sometimes Metaphysical Poems. I am not at all against that. I like what I've read by Roethke and would certainly not be adverse to reading more. One problem, Quasi. I just checked into Amazon and the volume, Sometimes Metaphysical Poems is currently unavailable (out of print?). The Collected Poems, which runs around $10 may be the best alternative... or the library... but I prefer my own books so that I can jot notes, highlight, etc...

[quasimodo1]

As Stlukesguild has posted, Sometimes Metaphysical Poems is not available so another text which is available could be the text to be discussed. http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Poems-Theodore-Roethke/dp/0385086016/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220482229&sr=8-1 Anyone interested in the Poetry Bookclub...please advise if this is satisfactory. Obviously, a purchase might be required. Anyone interested in a final vote for the top five poets can make that happen as well. They are in descending order...Roethke, Plath, Bishop, Paz and Ungaretti tied with Akhmatova.

[quasimodo1]

IN A DARK TIME

In a dark time, eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks-- is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire. ...


{excerpt, 1964}

[quasimodo1]

Open House


My secrets cry aloud.
I have no need for tongue.
My heart keeps open house,
My doors are widely swung.
An epic of the eyes
My love, with no disguise.


My truths are all foreknown,
This anguish self-revealed.
I’m naked to the bone,
With nakedness my shield.
Myself is what I wear:
I keep the spirit spare. ... {excerpt}





{Theodore Roethke, “Open House” from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Copyright 1941 by Theodore Roethke.}

[stlukesguild]

Quasi... I have no problem with using Roethke's Collected Poems. If it's all agreed I'll put in an order to Amazon immediately and until it arrives I can utilize Words for the Wind which covers the collected poems up to 1958. I also have the collected works of Paz and Bishop and a collection of Akhmatova. I thought I had something by Ungaretti... but actually don't. As for Plath... well let's just say I'm not all that fond of the confessional poets and leave it at that.:D

[Jozanny]

I will not be joining in. I just ordered a substantial scholarly work, and on a personal level I have too much going on, sorry. If the selected text is unavailable, my branch isn't likely to have it.

[quasimodo1]

Infirmity


In purest song one plays the constant fool
As changes shimmer in the inner eye.
I stare and stare into a deepening pool
And tell myself my image cannot die.
I love myself: that’s my one constancy.
Oh, to be something else, yet still to be!


Sweet Christ, rejoice in my infirmity;
There’s little left I care to call my own.
Today they drained the fluid from a knee
And pumped a shoulder full of cortisone;
Thus I conform to my divinity
By dying inward, like an aging tree.


The instant ages on the living eye;
Light on its rounds, a pure extreme of light
Breaks on me as my meager flesh breaks down—
The soul delights in that extremity.
Blessed the meek; they shall inherit wrath;
I’m son and father of my only death.


A mind too active is no mind at all;
The deep eye sees the shimmer on the stone;
The eternal seeks, and finds, the temporal,
The change from dark to light of the slow moon,
Dead to myself, and all I hold most dear,
I move beyond the reach of wind and fire. ... {four of six stanzas}



Theodore Roethke, “Infirmity” from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Copyright © 1963 by Beatrice Roethke

[quasimodo1]

To get this discussion started, before it needs CPR, we will use a website and perhaps even eliminate the need of purchasing a text...perhaps. The link, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html/?id=172122 will have the rest of this poem by Roethke...Big Wind

BIG WIND

Where were the greenhouses going,
Lunging into the lashing
Wind driving water
So far down the river
All the faucets stopped?—
So we drained the manure-machine
For the steam plant,
Pumping the stale mixture
Into the rusty boilers,
Watching the pressure gauge
Waver over to red,
As the seams hissed
And the live steam
Drove to the far
End of the rose-house,
Where the worst wind was,
Creaking the cypress window-frames,
Cracking so much thin glass
We stayed all night,
Stuffing the holes with burlap; .....

[quasimodo1]

From The Oxford Book of American Poetry
(edited by David Lehman)

Theodore Roethke was born in Saginaw, Michigan. His father owned what one visitor from Holland
Called "the finest greenhouse in America." When Roethke was fourteen, the greenhouse--Roethke's
"symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth" --was sold after a bitter dispute between
Otto, the poet's father, and Otto's brother Charles. In the aftermath, Charles committed suicide; Otto
Died of cancer mere months later. Roethke, who had a history of mental breakdowns, taught for many
Years at the University of Washington, where his devoted students included Richard Hugo, Carolyn Kizer, David Wagoner, and James Wright. "Write like someone else" was Roethke's best pedagogic
Advice. Of his 1948 book THE LOST SON, the author said, "In spite of all the muck and welter, the dark, thee dreck of these poems, I count myself among the happy poets." He suffered a fatal hear attack in a
Friend's swimming pool in 1963.

{This brief bio of Roethke is, I assume, David Lehman's way of engaging the reader for the poems to follow in this anthology. I am quoting it here because of the greenhouse reference.}

[quasimodo1]

The second poem from this website... http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=172123 is "Child on top of a Greenhouse" and ought to be included in any discussion of the first poem.

[quasimodo1]

Book to be the topic: The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, Doubleday, 1966. One outlet for purchase= http://www.alibris.com/search/books/qwork/1171529/used/The%20Collected%20Poems%20of%20Theodore%20Roethke

[Virgil]

Book to be the topic: The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, Doubleday, 1966. One outlet for purchase= http://www.alibris.com/search/books/qwork/1171529/used/The%20Collected%20Poems%20of%20Theodore%20Roethke

Oh great, Roethke was selected and I actually have that book. I will have to find it.

[quasimodo1]

Thanks Virgil. Anybody having difficulty finding/acquiring the text? I have an extra and can ship it anywhere USA. q1

[JBI]

I'm still waiting on my copy from the library - I can't buy it because I just dropped 700$ for school books, and I am broke beyond belief.

[Jozanny]

Perhaps in the future we can check which collections are available in libraries or in print at a large distributor? I know with poetry collections this is chancy, but I didn't know when the nominating process was ongoing that the edition of Roethke selected was out of print.

[JBI]

Perhaps in the future we can check which collections are available in libraries or in print at a large distributor? I know with poetry collections this is chancy, but I didn't know when the nominating process was ongoing that the edition of Roethke selected was out of print.

It wouldn't matter; the collected Roethke is hardly more expensive than the anthology would have been anyway; in truth, you get more Roethke for your buck this way.

[Dark Muse]

Thanks Virgil. Anybody having difficulty finding/acquiring the text? I have an extra and can ship it anywhere USA. q1

If it would not be too much trouble, I would take you up on that. I don't really like to buy things online, so I don't if I will be able to get a hold of a copy of the book.

[quasimodo1]

Anyone wanting the text of the first poem, please speak up.

[Virgil]

Quasi, how are going to go through the book? Last time we went poem by poem and it was grueling and tiring and we never got through it. I think it would be too much to discuss every poem in the collection. I wish there was an easier way. One thought would be that each of us took turns selecting a poem.

[quasimodo1]

Virgil, Your way sounds perfect. As you might have noticed, I sent the text of the first poem to all the players, at least those expressing interest so far. At this point, the method of approaching the book is open. I'm just trying to keep this thread from malingering...a project I'm quite fond of.

[Dark Muse]

Yes I agree Virgil's idea does sound interesting

[quasimodo1]

To awassini: Professor, if your comment is on topic and since very few here speak either Farsi or Arabic, perhaps you could translate.

[quasimodo1]

Virgil and Dark Muse, Having each "member" choose a poem for discussion will be the loose rule. We could start with a look at "Feud" if there is any interest in the poem. Also, and please add to this if possible, the current group is composed of Dark Muse, Dapper Drake, Il Penseroso, JBI, Jozanny, Quark, myself, Sofia 82, Stlukesguild and Virgil.

[stlukesguild]

Since the Rothke is agreed upon I'll pick up a copy of the Collected Poems at my local Borders (I saw it there last week). I like the idea of picking a specific poem each... perhaps as a starting point... for discussion. So how does this discussion work beyond that?

[quasimodo1]

Stlukes: You ask a question that you are better suited to answer. A free-for-all approach to discussion rarely works as well as some format whether parliamentary or a template.

[quasimodo1]

There are so many possibilities for an easy choice but I wanted a poem at once representatve and challenging, and THE SHAPE OF FIRE (pp 61--63) is clearly both. At this point, after one reading...I can't say I have much of an idea about its meaning. Let the speeches begin.

[quasimodo1]

From The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke {FIRST POEM FOR DISCUSSION}
PP 61-63

THE SHAPE OF THE FIRE

I

What's this? A dish for at lips
Who says? A nameless stranger.
Is he a bird or a tree? Not everyone can tell.

Water recedes to the crying of spiders.
An old scow bumps over black rocks.
A cracked pod calls.

Mother me out of here. What more will the bones allow?
Will the sea give the wind suck? A toad folds into a stone.
These flowers are all fangs. Comfort me, fury.
Wake me, witch, we'll do the dance of rotten sticks.

Shale loosens. Marl reaches into the field. Small birds pass over water.
Spirit, come near. This is only the edge of whiteness.
I can't laugh at a procession of dogs.

In the hour of ripeness the tree is barren.
The she-bear mopes under the hill.
Mother, mother, stir from your cave of sorrow.

A low mouth laps water. Weeds, weeds, how I love you.
The arbor is cooler. Farewell, farewell, fond worm.
The warm comes without sound.

II

Where's the eye?
The eye's in the sty.
The ear's not here
Beneath the hair.
When I took off my clothes
To find a nose,
There was only one shoe
For the waltz of To,
The pinch of Where.

Time for the flat-headed man. I recognize that listener,
Him with the platitudes and rubber doughnuts,
Melting a the knees a varicose horror.
Hello, hello. My nerves knew you, dear boy.
Have you come to unhinge my shadow?
Last night I slept in the pits of a tongue.
The silver fish ran in and out of my special bindings;
I grew tired of the ritual of names and the assistant keeper of the
Mollusks:
Up over a viaduct I came, to the snakes and sticks of another winter,
A two-legged dog hunting a new horizon of howls.
The wind sharpened itself on a rock;
A voice sang:

Pleasure on ground
Has no sound,
Easily maddens
The uneasy man.

Who, careless, slips
In coiling ooze
Is trapped to the lips,
Leaves mare than shoes;



Must pull off clothes
To jerk like a frog
On belly and nose
From the sucking bog.

My meat eats me. Who waits at the gate?
Mother of quartz, your words writhe into my ear.
Renew the light, lewd whisper.
{two of five parts}

[Dark Muse]

I will have to wait untill I can read the whole poem, but so far, I have no idea what it is about. It just sounds like a random collection of images, though some of them are kind of cool, they make no acutal sense.

[quasimodo1]

After some research and because this poem seems so inaccessible, here are a few ideas about its makeup: The poems in this series, including "The Lost Son" are psychological comparisons, similar to what the German poets used to call a "bildungsroman" but also quite different because the poems don't show a linear progression from innocence to ethical strength. Also relative to the psychological factor is this quote from "Madness in the New Poetry" by Peter Davison..."Is madness a conflict between imagination and reality? (Theodore Roethke would call it "nobility of soul at odds with circumstance.") Perhaps, but what else but that very conflict gives rise to poetry? Where madness enters in we may expect incoherence; but let us take care to discriminate between the incoherence of not knowing how, and the incoherence of reaching beyond. Madness without poetry can sometimes, through the excitement that rises from it, arouse in the reader feelings much like those that would be aroused by poetry without madness. Longinus defined the difference as between the sublime and the beautiful; but twentieth-century psychiatric madness has all too little of the sublime about it. Where it engages the poet too closely with himself it tends to damage poetry, for the self should be the reservoir of poetry rather than its shallop. Poetry has suffered long from the preponderance of the idea that it exists to scratch the poet's itch. When madness enters in, the poet may try to cure himself upon the page, or to drive himself on to further intoxications of madness. If madness damages poetry, poetry must be defended. The poet as poet bears responsibility for the excellence and wholeness of his poem more than for his self's wholeness, no matter how mad he happens to be. In examining some of the books of verse published in the last year, I have kept in mind poetry before madness. Let us watch the outcome of each struggle." http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/65jan/davison.htm

[Dark Muse]

Hehe I am trying to make heads or tails out of this poem


Is he a bird or a tree? Not everyone can tell.

I really like this mine though it still somwhat baffles me, but from the other referecens within the first part of the poem, seems to be about the relationship or struggle between mother and sun.


Water recedes to the crying of spiders.
An old scow bumps over black rocks.
A cracked pod calls.

I really like this but have no idea what to make of it


Mother me out of here. What more will the bones allow?
Will the sea give the wind suck? A toad folds into a stone.
These flowers are all fangs. Comfort me, fury.
Wake me, witch, we'll do the dance of rotten sticks.

This makes me think of an old hag

The contradiction of the line between the flowers and the fangs seem interesting, as it seems to suggest that somthing which should be comforting has taken a negative turn here, it puts me in the mind of an overbearing mother figure who suffocates her children and will not let them go.


Shale loosens. Marl reaches into the field. Small birds pass over water.Spirit, come near. This is only the edge of whiteness.
I can't laugh at a procession of dogs.

There seems to be a lot of refrences to water


In the hour of ripeness the tree is barren.
The she-bear mopes under the hill.
Mother, mother, stir from your cave of sorrow.

I find this interesting, the use of the word barren, placed in connection with the idea of a mother. It could almost be an "empty nest" syndrom, with the moping, and retreating in the cave of sorrow. Not coping with her children growing.

[quasimodo1]

"Time for the flat-headed man. I recognize that listener,
Him with the platitudes and rubber doughnuts,
Melting a the knees a varicose horror.
Hello, hello. My nerves knew you, dear boy.
Have you come to unhinge my shadow?
Last night I slept in the pits of a tongue.
The silver fish ran in and out of my special bindings;
I grew tired of the ritual of names and the assistant keeper of the
Mollusks:
Up over a viaduct I came, to the snakes and sticks of another winter,
A two-legged dog hunting a new horizon of howls.
The wind sharpened itself on a rock;" As you mentioned Muse, there are many references to water and to many things you would be familiar with and fond of if your early life was lived amidst greenhouses. This "greenhouse" effect (no pun) comes through in almost all Roethke's poetry. In this one, I'm still trying to make connections between the text and the authors psychological beginnings. In the passage above, his father is a clear reference but just how the son would "unhinge" him, I'm still guessing.

[Virgil]

Are we discussing this poem: "Feud"?
Is this an early poem Quasi? It doesn't seem like Roethke's mature style, though a can pick up a echo. Here's the first stanza:


Corruption reaps the young; you dread
The menace of ancestral eyes;
Recoiling from the serpent head
Of fate, you blubber in surprise.

One thing I find interesting, and I do think Roethke employs this again, and that is the address to "you." "You dread," "you blubber," he puts the reader into the poem. It becomes a conversation.

Edit: Oops, I see we have changed the first poem to be discussed. Never mind.

[Dark Muse]

I notice a lot of his images seem to repeat


Up over a viaduct I came, to the snakes and sticks of another winter,
A two-legged dog hunting a new horizon of howls.
The wind sharpened itself on a rock;
A voice sang:

These lines seem to refelct back to some of the things which he said in the first part of the poem.

[stlukesguild]

Yes... "challenging" is certainly the word for it. Is it really "representative"? Most of what I have read by Rothke struck me as far more immediately accessible. Not that I question this. A great deal of Modern/Poet-Modern poetry is nearly abstract in nature... suggestive of a certain mood... atmosphere... idea... without ever being able to be reduced to a logical narrative meaning. As I first read through this poem I was certainly struck by the sound of his "music" as it were. Where a great deal of poetry has a sort of lilting musicality... often utilizing words that seem rooted in French and Italian and the Romance languages in general, Rothke repeatedly strikes me as producing a music that is rooted far more in the earthy Anglo-Saxon... harder... with hard guttural sounds... if that makes sense.

"Old scow bumps over black rocks..." "A cracked pod..." "A toad folds into a stone..." "That minnowy world of weeds and ditches..." "A slow snail lifting..." all of these words have a sound... and the images equally suggest something closer to the earth-bound dark and dank world of Beowolf and peat bogs and rough-tilled soil. In spite of the flow of images that suggests something Surrealistic or abstract... it is not the modernism of Rimbaud, Breton, Eliot, etc... that comes to mind but rather poetry such as that of Piers Plowman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ezra Pound's translation of the Seafarer, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. There is a seeming love of the more guttural, Germanic/Anglo-Saxon sounds. I suppose this is most obvious in the use of consonance (and assonance) as opposed to the end rhyme... a technique favored in Anglo-Saxon poetry... and later revived by Manley Hopkins:

A toad folds into a stone...

Wake me, witch, we'll do the dance of rotten sticks...

Morning-fair, follow me further back,
Into that minnowy world of weeds and ditches,
When the herons floated high over the white houses,
And the little crabs slipped into silvery craters...

Now to dig deep into the soil of this poem to attempt a further understanding of the poet's intention beyond the music of the form or the language...

[Virgil]

What’s this? A dish for fat lips.
Who says? A nameless stranger.
Is he a bird or a tree? Not everyone can tell.


Water recedes to the crying of spiders.
An old scow bumps over black rocks.
A cracked pod calls.


Mother me out of here. What more will the bones allow?
Will the sea give the wind suck? A toad folds into a stone.
These flowers are all fangs. Comfort me, fury.
Wake me, witch, we’ll do the dance of rotten sticks.
Now that is typical Roethke. :) The key phrase I think is "Mother me out of here."

[quasimodo1]

One expression that recurs in Roethke criticism is "confessional surrealism" where older methods are given up in favor of something more suggestive and emotive. I can see that working here. Since as Stlukesguild accurately reports...without ever being able to be reduced to a logical narrative meaning.

[quasimodo1]

Oh, Virgil, missed that post. At this point I would rather be discussing "Feud" but that will wait until we get a better handle on this piece.

[Virgil]

One expression that recurs in Roethke criticism is "confessional surrealism" where older methods are given up in favor of something more suggestive and emotive. I can see that working here. Since as Stlukesguild accurately reports...without ever being able to be reduced to a logical narrative meaning.

"Confessional Surrealism" yes I would concur with that characterization. Which is interesting because he was predated the confessional poetry movement that took off in the 1960s. I just looked up confessional poetry on wiki and they include Roethke. I had not considered Roethke as part of the confessional poets, but I guess it fits to some degree. I don't think he's as "confessional" as Robert Lowell.

[stlukesguild]

Upon a second reading I am struck by thoughts of some similarities in theme with Eliot's Wasteland and Hollow Men. The poem begins with a collection of images of earth and soil... and yet suggestions that such have become barren... wasted:

Water receded to the crying of spiders
An old scow bumps over black rocks
A cracked pod calls

Mother me out of here. What more will the bones allow?
Will the sea give the wind suck? A toad folds into a stone.
The flowers are all fangs. Comfort me, fury.
Wake me, witch, we'll do the dance of rotten sticks.

Shale loosens. Marl reaches into the field...

In the hour of ripeness, the tree is barren.

Like the closing stanza of Eliot's Hollow Men there are the sections that suggest a mocking nursery rhyme:

Where’s the eye?
The eye’s in the sty.
The ear’s not here
Beneath the hair.
When I took off my clothes
To find a nose,
There was only one shoe
For the waltz of To,
The pinch of Where.

The closing two sections of the poem contrast greatly with this as they look back in time... to a world far more succulent... fertile...lush...:

4

Morning-fair, follow me further back
Into that minnowy world of weeds and ditches,
When the herons floated high over the white houses,
And the little crabs slipped into silvery craters.
When the sun for me glinted the sides of a sand grain,
And my intent stretched over the buds at their first trembling.

That air and shine: and the flicker’s loud summer call:
The bearded boards in the stream and the all of apples;
The glad hen on the hill; and the trellis humming.
Death was not. I lived in a simple drowse:
Hands and hair moved through a dream of wakening blossoms.
Rain sweetened the cave and the dove still called;
The flowers leaned on themselves, the flowers in hollows;
And love, love sang toward.


5

To have the whole air!—
The light, the full sun
Coming down on the flowerheads,
The tendrils turning slowly,
A slow snail-lifting, liquescent;
To be by the rose
Rising slowly out of its bed,
Still as a child in its first loneliness;
To see cyclamen veins become clearer in early sunlight,
And mist lifting out of the brown cat-tails;
To stare into the after-light, the glitter left on the lake’s surface,
When the sun has fallen behind a wooded island;
To follow the drops sliding from a lifted oar,
Held up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward...

[Dark Muse]

I can see this poem having a certain confessional asepct to it.


The closing two sections of the poem contrast greatly with this as they look back in time... to a world far more succulent... fertile...lush...:

Yes, in the words that Quasi used, I cannot remember if he said it here, or just in his PM to me, but the last half of the poem does strike me as being more "innocent" than the first half.

[quasimodo1]

For sure, Stlukes, Eliot immediately comes to mind when reading some of Roethke's more complex, longer poems. In this particular poem, it seems accessability was never a consideration.

[quasimodo1]

Pleasure on ground
Has no sound,
Easily maddens
The uneasy man.

Who, careless, slips
In coiling ooze
Is trapped to the lips,
Leaves mare than shoes;

The Shape of the Fire has these mini-poem assemblies; does anyone have any idea what function they are serving?

[quasimodo1]

III
The wasp waits.
The edge cannot eat the center.
The grape glistens.
The path tells little to the serpent.
An eye comes out of the wave.
The journey from flesh is longest.
A rose sways least.
The redeemer comes a dark way.


{part three of THE SHAPE OF THE FIRE}

[Dark Muse]

I notice he seems to use all these currious little contradictions of words within the poem. Though I cannot make heads or tails of what they mean.

In the begining it starts with


Is he a bird or a tree? Not everyone can tell.

And than


The edge cannot eat the center.


The path tells little to the serpent.

They strike me as odd little lines, of things which relate to each other, but I cannot completely grasp what he is trying to say with his use of them.

[quasimodo1]

Muse, these lines stood out to me as well and as Stlukesguild said...he is creating a (psychological) mood and atmosphere. Before we all forget that Roethke had a more accessible side, I remember these lines from a NYTimes review.... Roethke, another quirky, intense Northwest Pacific soul, and these Gravesian words from Roethke's final book:


Now I adore my life

With the Bird, the abiding Leaf,

With the Fish, the questing Snail,

And the Eye altering all;

And I dance with William Blake

For love, for Love's sake;

And everything comes to One,

As we dance on, dance on, dance on

[quasimodo1]

refering back to Roethke's T.S.Eliot like sound..."Roethke taught at the University of Washington in Seattle. He was a talented tennis player (according to a friend's father, who had him for freshman comp at Penn in the '40s). These are the credentials of a bourgeois academic, for sure. And yet he wrote like a drum-beating wild man and had an unfortunate need to check into the psychiatric ward on occasion to check his mania. His last poems take after the litanizing Whitman and make way for the Deep Image movement of the '60s-yet he continued to acknowledge T.S. Eliot as the master. It's Eliot's advice from the sublime Four Quartet that Roethke's answering, with decisive concision, at the end of "The Longing":

Old men should be explorers?
I'll be an Indian.
Ogalala?
Iroquois
{ http://www.artseditor.com/html/january00/jan00_roethke.shtml }

[Jozanny]

After some research and because this poem seems so inaccessible, here are a few ideas about its makeup: The poems in this series, including "The Lost Son" are psychological comparisons, similar to what the German poets used to call a "bildungsroman" but also quite different because the poems don't show a linear progression from innocence to ethical strength. Also relative to the psychological factor is this quote from "Madness in the New Poetry" by Peter Davison..."Is madness a conflict between imagination and reality? (Theodore Roethke would call it "nobility of soul at odds with circumstance.") Perhaps, but what else but that very conflict gives rise to poetry? Where madness enters in we may expect incoherence; but let us take care to discriminate between the incoherence of not knowing how, and the incoherence of reaching beyond. Madness without poetry can sometimes, through the excitement that rises from it, arouse in the reader feelings much like those that would be aroused by poetry without madness. Longinus defined the difference as between the sublime and the beautiful; but twentieth-century psychiatric madness has all too little of the sublime about it. Where it engages the poet too closely with himself it tends to damage poetry, for the self should be the reservoir of poetry rather than its shallop. Poetry has suffered long from the preponderance of the idea that it exists to scratch the poet's itch. When madness enters in, the poet may try to cure himself upon the page, or to drive himself on to further intoxications of madness. If madness damages poetry, poetry must be defended. The poet as poet bears responsibility for the excellence and wholeness of his poem more than for his self's wholeness, no matter how mad he happens to be. In examining some of the books of verse published in the last year, I have kept in mind poetry before madness. Let us watch the outcome of each struggle." http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/65jan/davison.htm

Yea, but is this more about deconstructing Roethke or understanding his poetry? *The Shape of Fire* insofar as I can do this without a text of my own at hand, seems to be, indeed, about fire and its transitory dance, fragile existence. Think about the line "a dish at lips". This could be a face looking into a reflective surface, which mimics the attraction of fire as a visual experience. The entire first section may in fact be the voice of fire dreading the heaviness of water and dampness.

For now, I will leave the above paragraph as a suggestion--but would also suggest, for those of us who care about sustained readings of one author, we need to find a better way to go about this--if I am going to stay with the club anyway. The specific novel discussions seem much better organized than what *we* have done here.

I do agree with Virgil that discussing every poem in a standard collection length is impractical, but I think also that during the nominating process, links to the texts should be placed so they can be ordered before the vote closes, and we should use the polls like they do in the forum book club. The poll is a good measuring and organizational tool.

[Dark Muse]

The way in which he uses reputition, as well as some of the discriptions he uses, reading this poem, in some ways made me think of Joyce.

These verses in particular struck me as being Joyce like


Where's the eye?
The eye's in the sty.
The ear's not here
Beneath the hair.
When I took off my clothes
To find a nose,
There was only one shoe
For the waltz of To,
The pinch of Where.


Must pull off clothes
To jerk like a frog
On belly and nose
From the sucking bog.

[quasimodo1]

Jozanny: I like your observations and theories about what Roethke is getting at. If this poem is somehow about his psychological formation, I am assuming at a young age, then these metaphors (?) are running all over the place. I think we will give this poem tonight for more ovservations and tomorrow push on with poem chosen by someone else. As for the method of this discussion, I'm all ears. If it doesn't follow a clear and linear progressions like some prose discussions, well, perhaps poetry is not linear and our responses to it certainly are not. And Jozanny, I'll send the entire text in a bit.

[Jozanny]

:rolleyes: Thank you for your efforts quasi, I know they are sincere. It isn't that I can't afford the text of the collected poems; merely, I don't want to buy what I don't want to keep, and my seller's list at Amazon isn't moving.

I am sort of busy right now, but I will make a vain attempt at the free library next week. I need to renew my card anyway--I have access at my alma mater, and I could also possibly negotiate library usage on the University of Pennsylvania campus--they tend to be accommodating toward pretenders to the throne--but I do not want to go back into North or West Philly unless my own personal research requires it, so I am at the mercy of whatever public collections are available.

[quasimodo1]

"Death was not. I lived in a simple drowse:
Hands and hair moved through a dream of wakening blossoms.
Rain sweetened the cave and the dove still called;
The flowers leaned on themselves, the flowers in hollows;
And love, love sang toward." Going out on a small limb here, this section most likely refers to a slice of time when Roethke lived in the house with many greenhouses and "a simple drowse" probably refers to a time before self-awareness, a time before manhood.

[JBI]

Or, perhaps we could take a Frye approach, and look at the greenhouse for an allusion to Eden, and, I guess in the case of Roethke's life, a metaphor representing the fall from Eden, as related in the first chapters of Genesis, and even more importantly, in Milton. It isn't too long a shot to say, that in the context of the poem, the poem supports the Greenhouse as a sort of modern Eden - a containment of the refined goodness of life, without the outside negativity (being that it is walled off).

[quasimodo1]

"And mist lifting out of the brown cat-tails;
To stare into the after-light, the glitter left on the lake's surface,
When the sun has fallen behind a wooded island;
To follow the drops sliding from a lifted oar,
Held up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly
Shoreward;"
This section, especially "the sun has fallen behind a wooded island" seems like Roethke's northern temperate zone version of Eden.

[Virgil]

The more I read "The Shape of Fire" the more I love it. It is a magnificent work. Like everyone else I cannot graps it, but I do think the central thrust of the poem is a birthing process. From what he's birthing from and to I can't grasp it. But I think each section has a reference to a passage from one place to another.
Section 1: "Mother me out of here"
Section 2: "Up over a viaduct I came, to the snakes and sticks of another winter"
Section 3: "An eye comes out of the wave. /The journey from flesh is longest."
Section 4: "Morning-fair, follow me further back /Into that minnowy world of weeds and ditches"
Section 5: "To be by the rose /Rising slowly out of its bed"

This birthing to a new world is one set of tensions that are going on in the poem. Notice how there are constant references to an edge, the transition point between things:
"This is only the edge of whiteness," "The edge cannot eat the center," and "As an opaque vase fills to the brim from a quick pouring, /Fills and trembles at the edge yet does not flow over, /Still holding and feeding the stem of the contained flower."

Another set of tension that I see is between the physical world with a temporal, shadowy world:
"Spirit, come near," "Have you come to unhinge my shadow?," "The redeemer comes a dark way," and "Hands and hair moved through a dream of wakening blossoms."

So if you put together the notions of birthing, transition, physical and shadowy worlds, I think the poem is mostly about a transition from the physical world to a spiritual world. These lines from right at the center of the poem seem central: "An eye comes out of the wave. /The journey from flesh is longest."

One thing that I have found with Roethke is that he is very Platonic, the philosophy of Plato, that is. There are constant references to shadows and caves and light. He seems to use Plato's allegory of the cave as a framework for many of his themes.

[quasimodo1]

Virgil, I think you have it. This bit about transition to a spiritual life was mentioned is two of the better critiques of the poem, which also mentioned psychological growth.

[Virgil]

Thanks Quasi. I'm not sure if we are finished with "The Shape of Fire" but Quasi has gven me the go ahead to select the next poem. I select my favorite Roethke poem, a poem I consider one of the finest of the 20th century, "In A Dark Time." You can find the poem here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=172120.

Now this does not mean that one can't still comment on the previous poem. Feel free to start the discussion on the new poem or discuss the previous.

[Dark Muse]

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

I adored this stanza. It was so superbly dark and rich. And there is something quite heathenistic about which I just love.


I hear my echo in the echoing wood—

This line was just phenomenal.


A lord of nature weeping to a tree.

I loved this too

[Dark Muse]

This poem too me seems to be about a journey of the soul, ones quest to find themselves, and an awakening period, or time of Self-realization.


I live between the heron and the wren,

I find these line interesting, I have noticed these two birds specifically seem to often appear in his pomes. Does anyone know why the heron and the wren have such significance to Roethke.

Also I have noticed in a lot of his work he references water, and considering the heron is a bird with a connection to water. Did he by chance live near water?


What’s madness but nobility of soul

I really like this line


At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

This seems to reflect a time of awakening, and struggle with the self. With the mention of day on fire, it seems to be the light breaking through the darkness.


That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

This seems to reflect a moment of possible freedom, or escape, for while the cave would result in a dead end and more darkness, a winding path offers another alternative, a way out.

[Jozanny]

Well, I am not finished with "The Shape of Fire", so the rest of you can feel free to move on without me while I continue to examine it. I do not think the poem is truly about rebirth, even though Roethke certainly toys with the conceit. My reason for this is, I know something about both mental illness and broken bodies. Neither gets fixed, and I suspect Roethke knew it as well as Wittgenstein knew it, as well as I know it. Drugs and the brutality of good old fashioned psychiatric hospital treatments may lead to periods of stability, but a damaged brain once damaged remains so, and I think what the narrative voice attempts to examine is transformation as a redeemable process, without coming to any firm conclusions about it.

This is not a traditional rite of passage piece which leans toward salvation, and when I am finished my traditional monthly cycle of ailing, I will point toward a more complex reading than I've yet seen anyone offer--which is seemingly fitting. I do not think Roethke meant to be simplicity itself once the manic rhythm is settled into.

[Virgil]

Well, I am not finished with "The Shape of Fire", so the rest of you can feel free to move on without me while I continue to examine it. I do not think the poem is truly about rebirth, even though Roethke certainly toys with the conceit. My reason for this is, I know something about both mental illness and broken bodies. Neither gets fixed, and I suspect Roethke knew it as well as Wittgenstein knew it, as well as I know it. Drugs and the brutality of good old fashioned psychiatric hospital treatments may lead to periods of stability, but a damaged brain once damaged remains so, and I think what the narrative voice attempts to examine is transformation as a redeemable process, without coming to any firm conclusions about it.

"transformation as a redeemable process" versus rebirth, isn't that about the same thing?


This is not a traditional rite of passage piece which leans toward salvation, and when I am finished my traditional monthly cycle of ailing, I will point toward a more complex reading than I've yet seen anyone offer--which is seemingly fitting. I do not think Roethke meant to be simplicity itself once the manic rhythm is settled into.
Looking forward to it. I must say I really liked this poem and any further explanation of it is very welcomed. :)

[Jozanny]

"transformation as a redeemable process" versus rebirth, isn't that about the same thing?

No, it isn't.

[Virgil]

No, it isn't.

:lol: You will have to explain it to me. When you're feeling better, of course. :)

[quasimodo1]

Before another posting on the "Fire" poem, I thought this piece on Roethke from artseditor.com would be apropos..."I don't recall exactly which of Roethke's poems appeared in that anthology. (I still own the book, by the way; but I'm 200 miles away from the shelf it's on now.) But I do recall that we read the obligatory "My Papa's Waltz" as a prime example of Roethke's control of form and tone. I'm sure we read the hallucinatory recollections (fitting for our psychedelic pastimes) in the title poem of The Lost Son and Other Poems, getting off on its dark children's ditties -"The weeds whined," goes one quatrain, "The snakes cried,/The cows and briars/Said to me: Die."-and its troublesome notational utterances that sound, we probably said, like Eliot on acid:

What a small song. What slow clouds. What dark water.
Hath the rain a father? All the caves are ice. Only the snow's here.
I'm cold. I'm cold all over. Rub me in father and mother.
Fear was my father, Father Fear.
His look drained the stones.

Maybe professor-poet Plumly, ruggedly handsome and hip with thick wavy hair at the head of the class, told us that these two poems, "My Papa's Waltz" and "The Lost Son," represent the extremes of style between which Roethke usually worked in his several succeeding collections of poems. He also must have introduced us to the two outstanding sequences of poems that Roethke is perhaps best known for: the so-called "greenhouse" poems written early in his career (from The Lost Son and Other Poems) and "The North American Sequence" written toward the end of it (from The Far Field, 1964). For these have been the poems I've returned to frequently since then for an experience of the sublime. I read the compact and explosive descriptions of the greenhouse poems for almost no other reason than to enter the root cellar at his family's nursery in Michigan..." -- http://www.artseditor.com/html/january00/jan00_roethke.shtml

[quasimodo1]

An aside on Roethke: http://www.poetrysociety.org/journal/articles/poetsonpoets_02sp.html an interesting one-page vignette on the meeting of these two men.

[quasimodo1]

In order to have some designated time for discussion, and considering the fact the members post from every time zone possible...we will have Sunday afternoon and evening roughly from 4 PM to 12 midnight for a common meeting time. Any other time is of couse acceptable to post on this thread. Also any member who wishes, I encourage to comment. q1

[quasimodo1]

From The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke

JOURNEY TO THE INTERIOR

I. In the long journey out of the self,
There are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places
Where the shale slides dangerously
And the back wheels hang almost over the edge
At the sudden veering, the moment of turning.
Better to hug close, wary of rubble and falling stones.
The arroyo cracking the road, the wind-bitten buttes, the canyons,
Creeks swollen in midsummer from the flash-flood roaring into the
Narrow valley.
Reeds beaten flat by wind and rain,
Grey from the long winter, burnt at the base in late summer.
--Or the path narrowing,
Winding upward toward the stream with its sharp stones,
The upland of alder and birchtrees,
Through the swamp alive with quicksand,
The way blocked at last by a fallen fir-tree,
The thickets darkening,
The ravines ugly. {first of three parts} This is not the next poem for discussion just a favorite Roethke passage of mine. Virgil will be starting the next discussion on "In a Dark Time". Tomorrow night would be good but we shall see what members sign in.

[Virgil]

I was wondering when I should start "In A Dark Time." Tomorrow is perfect.

I was noticing the first line of what you just posted above Quasi. " In the long journey out of the self". So much of Roethke is a journey, either out of the self or into the self.

[quasimodo1]

That's a journey I can identify with. Great that tomorrow works out. I'll will sign in starting around 7PM but you just start when you can. Thanks.

[quasimodo1]

from Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical


IN A DARK TIME

In a dark time, eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks-- is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have. {first half of this poem...topic for tonight's discussion}

[Dark Muse]

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den

I adored this stanza. It was so superbly dark and rich. And there is something quite heathenistic about which I just love.


I hear my echo in the echoing wood—

This line was just phenomenal.


A lord of nature weeping to a tree

I loved this too


I live between the heron and the wren,

I find these line interesting, I have noticed these two birds specifically seem to often appear in his pomes. Does anyone know why the heron and the wren have such significance to Roethke.

Also I have noticed in a lot of his work he references water, and considering the heron is a bird with a connection to water. Did he by chance live near water?



What’s madness but nobility of soul

I really like this line

This poem too me seems to be about a journey of the soul, ones quest to find themselves, and an awakening period, or time of Self-realization.


At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,

This seems to reflect a time of awakening, and struggle with the self. With the mention of day on fire, it seems to be the light breaking through the darkness


That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

This seems to reflect a moment of possible freedom, or escape, for while the cave would result in a dead end and more darkness, a winding path offers another alternative, a way out.

[quasimodo1]

Well Muse, a line you highlighted now seems packed with extended meanings..."I live between the heron and the wren," Beside this dual-identity and a metaphor I take to mean one persona is that of a larger, agressive (assertive) type and the other a much smaller retiring type. In emerging from this "dark time", Roethke will have to gather the assets of both.

[Dark Muse]

I also thought it was interesting that while the wren, a smaller bird, and one which is more associated with the air and flight, while the heron, though it can fly, is in a way more "grounded" they are typically wading birds and are more associated with water than with air. And more often found on the ground than in the sky.

[stlukesguild]

This poem is quite fabulous... and far less obscure or hermetic than The Shape of the Fire... although I would not think to reduce it to any single simple "meaning". The sound or music of this poem is more traditional with its use of rhyme... but still there are the more complex echoes... repetitions of sound: assonance, consonance, rhyme within lines and not merely at the end of lines:

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

Knowing Roethke's connection with American Romantics of the West Coast... especially the Northwest... and their connection with Asian poetry... I wonder if Roethke's musical structure of internal rhyme and repetition might not echo such poetic uses as found in Asian... and especially Chinese poetry... as well as the Anglo-Saxon poetic forms filtered through Pound and Hopkins as I mentioned earlier.

Roethke was deeply passionate about the great Romantic and mystical poets such as Whitman, Emerson, Blake, Wordsworth, and Yeats. I definitely sense an imagery drawn from... or at least suggestive of many of the Romantic poems of the poet's personal travel through a dark place...

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--

These lines immediately suggest an affinity with nothing less than Dante's Inferno:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

(Midway on our life's journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost. To tell
About those woods is hard -- so tangled and
rough- Pinsky tr.)

But there are also echoes of Eliot- "Footfalls echo in the memory/Down the passage which we did not take/Towards the door we never opened" (which may not be surprising considering Eliot's profound admiration of Dante).

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!

The suggestion of a link between madness and the poet's personal struggles might be a tired cliché in the work of many writers... but not so much with Roethke... especially when one considers his own personal experience with exorcising such demons... and the fact that he never wallows in a "woe is me" attitude, but rather suggests something of a visionary deeper understanding of or transformation of the self growing out of his experiences.

Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Again I think of Dante's Comedia... which is essentially the journey of the soul... in which the poet awakens... in spite of the great length of the poem and the time that seemingly has passed... but a short time later... yet profoundly transformed. Also... to my mind... there are reverberations of San Juan de la Cruz' (St. John of the Cross') equally visionary Dark Night of the Soul.

...There is the lucky dark...
no sign for me to mark,
no other mark, no guide
except for my heart- the fire- the fire inside!

That led me on
keener than sunlight in the highest blue...

O dark of night, my guide!...

I stayed, I stayed; forgot me...

slipped from the me and not-me
and ties of earth untwined
among the lilies falling and out of mind.

from The Dark Night (of the Soul)- San Juan de la Cruz, tr. John Frederick Nims

Hopefully I'm making some sense as I'm actually sick as a dog this evening:sick:.

[JBI]

Seems interesting, just a question though;

The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Wind as in breeze, or Wind as in wound? What do you think? I personally am opting for a pun, since wind (breeze) would be the obvious word, yet wind (wound) would be the obvious rhyme, which seems fitting, and also contextually can be just as valid.

In terms of the rhyme though, he in two of the three other stanzas uses a full rhyme (wren/den, night/light), whereas he uses a half rhyme with cave and have, setting a possible president, and I think it a bit of a stretch to say he is using a half rhyme in the fourth stanza to continue a pattern (that seems a little bit unlikely). What are your thoughts on the couplet?

and, for any joiners wanting the full text, it is available here: http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/theodore_roethke/poems/16320

[Virgil]

I've been reading "In A Dark Time" for so many years (probably over 25 years!) and returning to it reguarly that I don't know where to begin. I guess I should start with structure and theme. It's four stanzas of six lines each of iambic pentameter and where the first four lines are unrhymed and a rhyming closing couplet. The themes of each stanza are structured in this way: Stanza 1, Disintegration or division; Stanza 2, the journey out; Stanza 3, a correspondence; Stanza 4, reunification. So there is a movement, a journey, from disintegration to reunification.

One of the poetic techniques that Roethke employes is an echoing within lines. Notice how words get repeated in a line:
Line 2: shadow/shade, Line 3 echo/echoing, Line 9 purity/pure, Line 18 natural/unantural, Line 19 dark/darker, Line 23 mind/mond. Besides the beauty of the sounds echoing, the technique supports the dichotomy of the self, the self dividing. I think Quasi is correct that the heron and the wren also shows a metaphor of splitting.

Another incredible technique that Roethke employs is literary allusions to other poems. Notice the allusions throughout: Plato's allegory of the cave, Dante's Purgatory of the winding path on an edge, Baudelaire's poem"Correspndences," Emily Dickenson's poem "I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died," Wallace Stenven's "Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour," and Dante's Paridisio. At least these are the ones I can identify. You will have to look them up and find them. Perhaps I will post them myself later.

One last thing for now. I must highlight one of the absolute greatest lines not just of poetry but of all humanity: "What's madness but nobility of soul/At odds with circumastances."

I definitely will have more to say. :D

[Virgil]

I mentioned some allusions in that last post. Here are the full poems Roethke alludes to.


CORRESPONDENCES
by Charles Baudelaire

Nature is a temple in which living pillars
Sometimes emit confused words;
Man crosses it through forests of symbols
That observe him with familiar glances.

Like long echoes that mingle in the distance
In a profound tenebrous unity,
Vast as the night and vast as light,
Perfumes, sounds, and colors respond to one another.

Some perfumes are as fresh as the flesh of
children, Sweet as the sound of oboes, green as pastures
-- And others corrupt, rich, and triumphant,

Having the expanse of things infinite,
Such as amber, musk, benzoin, and incense,
That sing of the flight of spirit and the senses.

Here's the original French:

CORRESPONDANCES
by Charles Baudelaire

La nature est un temple où de vivants pilliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se repondent.

Ii est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
-Et d'autres corrompus, riches et triomphants,

Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens
Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens.


I heard a Fly buzz -- when I died
by Emily Dickinson

I heard a Fly buzz -- when I died --
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air --
Between the Heaves of Storm --

The Eyes around -- had wrung them dry --
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset -- when the King
Be witnessed -- in the Room --

I willed my Keepsakes -- Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable -- and then it was
There interposed a Fly --

With Blue -- uncertain stumbling Buzz --
Between the light -- and me --
And then the Windows failed -- and then
I could not see to see --


Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour
by Wallace Stevens

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

You will have to look up Dante and Plato yourself, but I think you can see the allusions to them and within the poems I posted here.

[quasimodo1]

Virgil, your choice of the most outstanding lines..."What's madness but nobility of soul/ At odds with circumstances." are the highlight for myself as well and Stlukesguild's comment ..."The suggestion of a link between madness and the poet's personal struggles might be a tired cliché in the work of many writers... but not so much with Roethke... especially when one considers his own personal experience with exorcising such demons... and the fact that he never wallows in a "woe is me" attitude, but rather suggests something of a visionary deeper understanding of or transformation of the self growing out of his experiences." defines this further and perfectly.

[Virgil]

This poem is quite fabulous... and far less obscure or hermetic than The Shape of the Fire... although I would not think to reduce it to any single simple "meaning". The sound or music of this poem is more traditional with its use of rhyme... but still there are the more complex echoes... repetitions of sound: assonance, consonance, rhyme within lines and not merely at the end of lines:

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

Knowing Roethke's connection with American Romantics of the West Coast... especially the Northwest... and their connection with Asian poetry... I wonder if Roethke's musical structure of internal rhyme and repetition might not echo such poetic uses as found in Asian... and especially Chinese poetry... as well as the Anglo-Saxon poetic forms filtered through Pound and Hopkins as I mentioned earlier.

Roethke was deeply passionate about the great Romantic and mystical poets such as Whitman, Emerson, Blake, Wordsworth, and Yeats. I definitely sense an imagery drawn from... or at least suggestive of many of the Romantic poems of the poet's personal travel through a dark place...

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--

These lines immediately suggest an affinity with nothing less than Dante's Inferno:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

(Midway on our life's journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost. To tell
About those woods is hard -- so tangled and
rough- Pinsky tr.)

But there are also echoes of Eliot- "Footfalls echo in the memory/Down the passage which we did not take/Towards the door we never opened" (which may not be surprising considering Eliot's profound admiration of Dante).

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!

The suggestion of a link between madness and the poet's personal struggles might be a tired cliché in the work of many writers... but not so much with Roethke... especially when one considers his own personal experience with exorcising such demons... and the fact that he never wallows in a "woe is me" attitude, but rather suggests something of a visionary deeper understanding of or transformation of the self growing out of his experiences.

Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Again I think of Dante's Comedia... which is essentially the journey of the soul... in which the poet awakens... in spite of the great length of the poem and the time that seemingly has passed... but a short time later... yet profoundly transformed. Also... to my mind... there are reverberations of San Juan de la Cruz' (St. John of the Cross') equally visionary Dark Night of the Soul.

...There is the lucky dark...
no sign for me to mark,
no other mark, no guide
except for my heart- the fire- the fire inside!

That led me on
keener than sunlight in the highest blue...

O dark of night, my guide!...

I stayed, I stayed; forgot me...

slipped from the me and not-me
and ties of earth untwined
among the lilies falling and out of mind.

from The Dark Night (of the Soul)- San Juan de la Cruz, tr. John Frederick Nims

Hopefully I'm making some sense as I'm actually sick as a dog this evening:sick:.
Oh I missed the concluding posts on the previous page. I agree with everything you say. I had never thought about The Dark Night of the Soul as an allusion. I do think Roethke intended it.



Seems interesting, just a question though;

The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Wind as in breeze, or Wind as in wound? What do you think? I personally am opting for a pun, since wind (breeze) would be the obvious word, yet wind (wound) would be the obvious rhyme, which seems fitting, and also contextually can be just as valid.


JBI, there is a play of words on tear as in weeping and tear as in rip. The narrator is a "lord of nature weeping to a tree" but later is "tearless." And certainly there is a pun in the last line of "tearing." Remember that the lord of nature is the alter ego, a split self, someone who has been torn from his central ego. The lord of nature is the noble soul which gets picked up in the next stanza and is the mad, schitzophrenic half of the narrator. The lord of nature is also the one who corresponds with nature in the third paragraph. But in the fourth paragraph the nature is reduced to a maddened fly and a wind that tears. He has escaped the disintegrating forces of nature, the physical world, to an absorbing God, into the mind, an abstract form. I hope you see how that all interweaves.

[JBI]

We ready for the next poem?

[quasimodo1]

Just as an aside, I thought this quote from a blog was quite good, about Roethke- generally: "Among the many books I ordered from Amazon last December, the one that I've been reading a lot lately has been Theodore Roethke's Collected Poems. In fact I'm enjoying it so much that over the next few weeks I intend to read it from cover to cover - perhaps the first Collected I've read that way in a long time, since perhaps T.S. Eliot's, which I read shortly after graduating from university (over 20 years ago now…). Like Eliot's, Roethke's Collected is not particularly long, running some two hundred and sixty pages. It reads more like a selected. Minor poems, major linked works, but not a weak poem to be found, so far at least. (At this point, I've almost finished the second of seven collections in the book, The Lost Son and Other Poems, first published in 1948.)

What is remarkable about Roethke is that he constructs a far-reaching and resonant dialogue from a limited - obsessively limited -- set of themes and images, practically all pastoral. I find that kind of singularity amazing in an age when we are bombarded by so many different influences from so many different directions. In times of hyper-abundance, such narrowness of focus could almost be taken as dishonest. Where Roethke is honest, where he takes risks, is in his fidelity to his subject matter (I'm sure I'm being tautological here, but being true to ones subject matter always entails great risk), his sensitivity, his vulnerability, his expression of his very real throes of manic-depressive illness, his adventurous thrust into a world of wholly subjective language. The pastoral provided a refuge and mooring place -- the beauty and archetypal qualities of plants, winds, soil, greenhouses, as well as the structured rhythms and rhyme schemes which no matter how committed he was to free verse he always returned to. Whatever Silliman may say (I honestly don't know what Silliman thinks of Roethke), no Poetry of Quietude this. Too much edginess and anxiety here; too much flight into the unknown.

In his first book, Open House (1941) Roethke establishes himself on very solid if conservative ground. Aside from a few starchy, highly compressed constructions where he tries to sum up Reality in a few words (I'm thinking of "The Adament", in particular, and a couple of others), these short poems - and those that begin his second collection -- are among his most successful and highly anthologized. I'm thinking of the title poem, "Cuttings 1 & 2", "My Papa's Waltz", & others. (For a link containing a Roethke bio and many of these, click here.)" source= http://briancampbell.blogspot.com/2005/02/reading-roethke.html And JBI: Virgil might have more to add about "In a Dark Time" but if not we are ready to move on. q1

[Virgil]

One last thing on this poem. I wanted to discuss the last stanza. Here:


Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Do people think that the poem ends with death and unification with God or does the poem end as escape from maddeness into sanity, the unification with God being a metaphor? On the death side, the allusion to Dickenson's poem would suggest a death. On the sanity part, the allusion to Stevens's poem:

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
I think suggests an imaginative integration of his schitzophrenic personas. At least to me. Perhaps he means both. Any comments?

[quasimodo1]

My take on the ending is that transformation takes place, put only as one of an endless series of epistemological summits which for Roethke will lead to another.

[Dark Muse]

Though I do not know Roethke as well as most of the rest of you, from my reading of the poem and what I took from it, I did not see the end as being death. I will have to agree with quasi

[JBI]

How about for the next one, "I Knew a Woman"?

[quasimodo1]

Seems like an intriqueing poem to me and since I've never read it, I can't wait to see how Roethke percieved knowing a woman.

[stlukesguild]

Ah... JBI! You are after my own heart! That was surely the poem I wished to suggest as well.

http://gawow.com/roethke/poems/122.html

[quasimodo1]

First reactions to Roethke usually are not worth much but if anyone ever wished Roethke would stop placing perfume on a goat...they get their wish here.

[quasimodo1]

http://www.folkways.si.edu/trackdetail.aspx?itemid=30800 -- Hear Roethke recite the first stanza of "I Knew a Woman" from the Smithsonian.

[Virgil]

How about for the next one, "I Knew a Woman"?

Good choice. That's a fine poem, and very different from the two we've read so far.

[quasimodo1]

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/roethke/woman.htm Previous critiques of "I knew A Woman" by Richard Allen Blessing and others.

[Virgil]

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/roethke/woman.htm Previous critiques of "I knew A Woman" by Richard Allen Blessing and others.

Hey Quasi, that first article by Karl Malkoff:

Karl Malkoff

The first of the purely sensual poems, "I Knew a Woman,' seems, at first glance, completely innocent; but closer examination reveals that the poem's words, like its lady, move "more ways than one." Double meanings dominate the poem: the lady teaches "Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand"; the protagonist comes "behind her for her pretty sake"; and love, which likes a gander, "adores a goose." Even lines easily passed over have hidden sexual connotations: ". . .what prodigious mowing we did make." "To mow," in Scots dialect, means to have sexual intercourse. And should there be any doubt as to Roethke's knowledge of this meaning, the reader need only turn to "Reply to a Lady Editor," the poet's tongue-in-cheek response to the editor of a woman's magazine who had clearly missed the poem's suggestiveness; Roethke there calls Dan Cupid a "braw laddie-buck," and advises the editor just to lean herself back if be should arrive.

From Theodore Roethke: An Introduction to the Poetry. Copyright � 1966 by Columbia University Press.

I had Malkoff as a professor in college for modern American poetry. ;) Not sure I agree with all his thoughts here. I do agree there is a double entendre.

[Jozanny]

Yes, "In A Dark Time" is a superficially pleasing construct, but a piece I am least impressed with. I happen to like the real challenge of intricacy the reader is presented with in some of the other selections. Any poet can allude, or argue with Eliot, but by the early 60's one is starved for something authentic, even within dialectic engagement. "The Shape of Fire" speaks to me much better on that account, not so much obscure as a jigsaw, scarred yet strong.

[Virgil]

Yes, "In A Dark Time" is a superficially pleasing construct, but a piece I am least impressed with. I happen to like the real challenge of intricacy the reader is presented with in some of the other selections. Any poet can allude, or argue with Eliot, but by the early 60's one is starved for something authentic, even within dialectic engagement. "The Shape of Fire" speaks to me much better on that account, not so much obscure as a jigsaw, scarred yet strong.

I see your point about allusions, but what makes "In A DArk Time" really special to me is that the allusions are so smoothly integrated into the language that they are not just allusions. The poem works without knowledge of the allusions and the allusions only amplify the meaning. Sometimes with Eliot and Pound the allusions are clumsy and choppy to the flow. I agree. I don't have any sense of that here.

[Petrarch's Love]

Glad Virg. told me about -the discussion going on here. I haven't ever looked at Roethke in depth, so this sounds great. I may not have time to participate regularly, but I'll try to stop by and follow what's going on when I can. Love the choice of the next poem. What a piece of verse!

Quasi--Thanks for the link to Stanley Kunitz's memories of Roethke, and also for the recording of him reading. I enjoyed both a great deal.


I had Malkoff as a professor in college for modern American poetry. Not sure I agree with all his thoughts here. I do agree there is a double entendre.

Pretty neat to run into some thoughts from your former prof., Virg. What don't you agree with? He seemed to be on pretty sound ground. The only thing that surprised me about his blurb was the idea that someone could think this poem was "completely innocent" even at first glance. Maybe I've just read too much Donne for my own good. :p There's a very Elizabethan/Jacobean quality to this poem. He uses those double entendres just like the best of that period and, as one of the critics on the page Quasi linked pointed out, he also demonstrates that impeccable use of the caesura, and in a way that reminds me a bit of the early 17th century. His style in this one also reminds me vividly of Yeats for some reason, but I haven't yet taken the time to analyze exactly why. I don't actually know much of anything about Roethke's influences, so I don't know how strongly Yeats may have been on his radar, but there seems to be something very Yeatsian going on here. In general, though, what a perfect blend of wit, naughtiness, and--as least so I think--quite genuine love and affection. There's so much going on in there, but I'll sign off for now and see what others (many who may know more about the poet) have to say. I'll also go back and read the rest of the thread to see what I've missed. :)

[Virgil]

Glad Virg. told me about -the discussion going on here. I haven't ever looked at Roethke in depth, so this sounds great. I may not have time to participate regularly, but I'll try to stop by and follow what's going on when I can. Love the choice of the next poem. What a piece of verse!
Roethke is so under valued. I think he's top notch.



Pretty neat to run into some thoughts from your former prof., Virg. What don't you agree with? He seemed to be on pretty sound ground. The only thing that surprised me about his blurb was the idea that someone could think this poem was "completely innocent" even at first glance. Maybe I've just read too much Donne for my own good. :p
I guess Makoff is right. But I didn't think this was double entredre:

Double meanings dominate the poem: the lady teaches "Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand"; the protagonist comes "behind her for her pretty sake"; and love, which likes a gander, "adores a goose."
Maybe I just have an innocent mind. :p


There's a very Elizabethan/Jacobean quality to this poem. He uses those double entendres just like the best of that period and, as one of the critics on the page Quasi linked pointed out, he also demonstrates that impeccable use of the caesura, and in a way that reminds me a bit of the early 17th century. His style in this one also reminds me vividly of Yeats for some reason, but I haven't yet taken the time to analyze exactly why. I don't actually know much of anything about Roethke's influences, so I don't know how strongly Yeats may have been on his radar, but there seems to be something very Yeatsian going on here. In general, though, what a perfect blend of wit, naughtiness, and--as least so I think--quite genuine love and affection. There's so much going on in there, but I'll sign off for now and see what others (many who may know more about the poet) have to say. I'll also go back and read the rest of the thread to see what I've missed. :)
Good point on the caesura Petrarch, yes Roethke consciously uses it. He is a craftsman of a poet.

[Dark Muse]

Maybe I just have an innocent mind. :p

Innocent mind? Haha who are you fooling? You forget, I have seen some of your coments in the DL thread.

[quasimodo1]

"How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,/ She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand," Roethke in these lines (8,9) uses a form related to the Pindaric ode, from the lyric poets highest form of praise and exhibiting the depth of his knowledge of literary forms.

[Virgil]

Innocent mind? Haha who are you fooling? You forget, I have seen some of your coments in the DL thread.
:lol: You're right. :D



"How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,/ She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand," Roethke in these lines (8,9) uses a form related to the Pindaric ode, from the lyric poets highest form of praise and exhibiting the depth of his knowledge of literary forms.

Yes. I guess it is double entendre. I just considered it a metaphor.

Now what a wonderful last stanza:


Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I’m martyr to a motion not my own;
What’s freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways).
I do think that Petrarch is right in recalling 17th century poetry. I think the bringing up of eternity and wanton and time alludes to marvell's To His Coy Mistress. Only with the difference that the male narrator here is the one being seduced.

[Dark Muse]

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek.)

I just loved the first stazna of this poem


I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,

I think the first line is beautiful, and I think there is something almost primitive in the use of bones here. "lovely in the bones" almost sounds voodoesque to me. It makes me think of a Witchdoctor.


When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;

This is beautiful, and filled with sweet emotion. You can really feel a sense of tender love in these words.


Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:

This is a very beautiful and senusal, it seems to embrace the beauty of feminity. When I read it, I cannot help but to think of the swaying of hips.


Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek

These lines I found to be interesting, though I am not entierly sure what to make of them.

[Virgil]

I think the first line is beautiful, and I think there is something almost primitive in the use of bones here. "lovely in the bones" almost sounds voodoesque to me. It makes me think of a Witchdoctor.

I just noticed it for the first time and I've been reading this poem for years, Roethke brings back the "bones" in the last stanza!


This is a very beautiful and senusal, it seems to embrace the beauty of feminity. When I read it, I cannot help but to think of the swaying of hips.
I think that's what he wants you to think.



Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek These lines I found to be interesting, though I am not entierly sure what to make of them.
That connects back to Turn, counter turn and stand. Greek poetry.

[Dark Muse]

That connects back to Turn, counter turn and stand. Greek poetry.

Ahh ok, thanks for that. I wondered why those words were capatalized in the poem

[quasimodo1]

Saginaw News (MI){PUBLICATION2}


July 26, 2008
Page: 3E



Remembering Roethke

JANET I. MARTINEAU The Saginaw News
As celebrations continue marking the centennial year of the birth of Saginaw native and Pulitzer-winning poet Theodore Roethke, fans pause next week to remember his death 55 years later. On Friday, the Friends of Theodore Roethke Foundation hosts a Roethke Remembrance With Candlelight and Jazz event.


The schedule is as follows:

2 p.m., reading and discussion of his epic poem, "The Lost Son," at his boyhood home, 1805 Gratiot in Saginaw.

4 p.m. to 7 p.m., ongoing tours of the home/museum and sales of poetry books written by area authors.

8 p.m., candlelight procession to Roethke's grave, reading of "The Lost Son" and three works by contemporary Saginaw poets: "Love Poem for Theodore Roethke, Oakwood Cemetery, 1908?1963" by Maxine Harris, "The Ghost on Gratiot" by Carol Lopez and "Shadow in the Glass House" by Marion Tincknell.

Meet at the entrance of Oakwood Cemetery, Gratiot at Midland roads.

9 p.m. to 11 p.m., dinner at Spencer's M-46, 5530 Gratiot, with performance by Brush Street, a jazz ensemble. Roethke was a jazz fan.

Participants will order from the menu and the restaurant will donate 10 percent to the Theodore Roethke Home Museum.

Roethke was born in Saginaw on May, 25, 1908, and died in Seattle, Wash., on Aug. 1, 1963, of a heart attack. He is an Arthur Hill High School graduate, and at the time of his death was a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Admission to all the events is free.

Judges picked, slam added

Meanwhile, plans continue at Saginaw Valley State University for the awarding of the 11th Triennial Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize in November.

Frank Bidart, who won the $3,000 prize in 1998, has selected the three judges who will choose the 2008 winner by mid-September. As set up in 1968, the prize winner is chosen by the three judges from worthy American writers they peruse on their own and not from solicited entries or nominations.

The judges are:

* Lloyd Schwartz, a Pulitzer-winning classical music critic and poet and commentator on National Public Radio's "Fresh Air." This summer the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts is setting some of his poems to music. Schwartz teaches English at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.

* Campbell McGrath, a historian, comedian, storyteller and poet who teaches creative writing at Florida International University in Miami. He has won numerous prizes and grants, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship.

* Peg Boyers, a poet and creative writing teacher at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, and the executive editor of the college's quarterly literary magazine "Salmagundi." Her recent book "Honey With Tobacco" contains autobiographical poems exploring her Cuban American experience and a childhood marked by travel and the tropics.

On Tuesday, Nov. 11, SVSU will host a 6 p.m. dinner and a 7:15 p.m. program during which the winner will read from his or her works. Both the dinner and the program are open to the public.

And in honor of the centennial year, SVSU has placed ads in Poetry magazine and on the Academy of American Poets Web newsletter at poets.org inviting the nation to the event.

Roethke's widow, Beatrice Roethke Lushington, also will attend the event.

SVSU is planning several other activities surrounding the awarding of the prize.

At 7 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 8, its Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum will turn one of its classrooms into a coffee house atmosphere for a free poetry slam - with the winner selected by the audience.

Any and all poets may participate by reading their works. The winning poem will appear in the SVSU Cardinal Sins literary magazine.

Other events between the slam and the award evening are a "Roethke Haunts" tour featuring his boyhood home, grave, the Tittabawassee River (which inspired many of his poems) and a favorite watering hole in Old Saginaw City. Also planned is a program featuring New York poet Bill Heyen, a Roethke fan, and a performance of "Reveling in Roethke" by the River Junction Poets of Saginaw.

Copyright, 2008, The Saginaw News. All Rights Reserved. Used by NewsBank with Permission.

[Dark Muse]

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin:
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing did we make.)

A lot of this stanza has already been discussed previously. I have to agree that I think it is filled with double entendre. I think it is full of sensulaity.



She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin

This is a beautiful line


She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,

I found this line to be currious, as not completely certain of what was implied here and how this symbology fits into the rest of the poem and the other ideas which were expressed within.

[Virgil]

And the sickle, rake. and mowing connects nicely with the grass and hay of the last stanza. :)

[Dark Muse]

Yes it connects with grasy and hay, but I do not see how it fits in with the overall theme of the Poem.

[quasimodo1]

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
.....I find these lines to be the center of this poem. Behind all the allure and beauty of Roethke's subject is this sense of time, or its instantanteity. Like all martyrs, at least of the religious type, his own mind set has predestined him.

[JBI]

I think this poem sort of fits with the earlier tradition of English verse, particularly in reference to Marlowe and Raleighs splendid reply. The question of Time, which is so rooted in Renaissance work, as Petrach has mentioned, is here turned completely upside down, in a sort of jazzy carpe diem poem, that is in a sense about the qualities of time, but completely ignores them. Roethke seems to be saying, to me at least, that all the fretting about death and age killing love is silly, as he already is (was) a slave to another more powerful thing - the woman, a stronger force.

[stlukesguild]

She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,

I found this line to be currious, as not completely certain of what was implied here and how this symbology fits into the rest of the poem and the other ideas which were expressed within.

It would seem to me to reinforce the idea that he... the poet... is the one who is seduced... as she mows him down. Of course it all fits in with his professed (and surely exaggerated) innocence. He almost seems to proclaim that with such a woman he never had a chance.:blush:

[Dark Muse]

Yes I can kind of see how that would work.

[stlukesguild]

JBI... I agree that there is something of what you suggest to be found especially in the closing stanza:

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)

"Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay..." Let time come and go as it will, he is indeed blinded by... enthralled with a greater force. In some ways I am also reminded of some of Yeat's later poems... the older poet forgetting all in the face of love and sensuality... or actually finding "an eternity in an hour"... spent with the woman who has so bewitched him.

[stlukesguild]

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?

.....I find these lines to be the center of this poem. Behind all the allure and beauty of Roethke's subject is this sense of time, or its instantanteity. Like all martyrs, at least of the religious type, his own mind set has predestined him.

Quasi... Yes, I love this final stanza. There is this play back and forth:

"Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay"... he starts to muse upon the passage of time... but rather suggests that he is content to let the world and time slide on past.

"I'm martyr to a motion not my own"... Again I sense a double meaning: he, like all of us, is martyr to the passage of time which is not his to control... but he is also martyr to this woman... ah! the motion of those hips!! A conquest of reason by passion... like the tale of Phyllis and Aristotle.

"What's freedom for? To know eternity." So proclaims the poet's reason... but once again her charms complete bedazzle and distract him: "I swear she cast a shadow white as stone."

"But who would count eternity in days?"... And so he confronts the question of "eternity" and suggests that perhaps eternity is not measured in time... that perhaps it is indeed, to be found in an hour... spent with the woman who so bewitches him.

"These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)" ... And has SHE not become his purpose or reason and his only means of counting the passing minutes?

[quasimodo1]

This thread has given me not so much of a new appreciation for Roethke, since there never was much to begin with, but a true appreciation of his poetry and almost every poem in this collection requires multiple readings.

[JBI]

Anyone else notice about 3/4 through the volume of his Collected Works he seems to shift away from free-verse, to a more consistent use of evenly lengthened lines, and traditional forms. What are you're thoughts on that?

[quasimodo1]

Yes, I was noticing many subtle (and some not so subtle) changes in style. He reminds me of Wallace Stevens in the sense that as Roethke matured (aged?), his poetry became more distant with far less concern for readers without literary backgrounds. He is known to have T.S. Eliot as a model and he gravitated toward that "ideal" consciously and subconsciously.

[Dark Muse]

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved.)

Though I know most have moved on to the last stanaza, I thought this one was worth mentioning before we wrap up this discussion.


Love likes a gander, and adores a goose

I really liked this play upon the old addage "What is good for the goose is good for the gander"


Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;

I loved this allusion to music, and I thought it touched back to the first stanza when it spoke of her and the birds, as well I think passion and music can often be tied in together.


My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees

At first this struck me as a bit odd, "flowing" is not a typical word used to talk about knees, it seems to refelect back to the begining "she moved in more way than one"


Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose

Was not sure what to make of the "mobile nose"

[Kafka's Crow]

I've been in and out of this thread regularly, what a way to enjoy a poet! Thanks Quasimodo for inviting me but I have not read much of Roethke. I ordered a copy of Collected Poems right away and it arrived today all the way from somewhere in America. So, I'll jump in the middle here. I have not read all the posts in this thread but can see that a very intelligent discussion is going on here and we (now I can say 'we') are making good progress. I don't know why but this poet reminds me of Wallace Stevens a good deal.

I Knew a Woman: I think this is a 'memory poem' as the title suggests. Its main concern is memory through time, the consciousness of memory, the consciousness itself. In this context the key lines are:


Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!

This is the kaleidescope of memory. The 'bright container' is that which gives shape, the consciousness, the person's own being casting shadow and reflecting, transforming reality of the subject. The whole universe is at work here, the birds, the sights, the music, the sounds and all these forces are turning the 'bright container' constantly. Then there is the poet himself, his desire, his love, his infatuation as it grows over the years bridging time and space. The woman is being transformed under pressures from all directions. Human consciousness is never free and memory is even more unreliable as it bears the whole burden of the time elapsed and the things that happened over the elapsed period exert their pressure on the subject.

Sorry, time for the school run but does this make sense? During my fleeting visits to this thread I have noticed this theme running through other poems as well, his theme of shadows (Plato's cave), reflections and lights. What do you folks think?

[JBI]

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?

.....I find these lines to be the center of this poem. Behind all the allure and beauty of Roethke's subject is this sense of time, or its instantanteity. Like all martyrs, at least of the religious type, his own mind set has predestined him.

Quasi... Yes, I love this final stanza. There is this play back and forth:

"Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay"... he starts to muse upon the passage of time... but rather suggests that he is content to let the world and time slide on past.

"I'm martyr to a motion not my own"... Again I sense a double meaning: he, like all of us, is martyr to the passage of time which is not his to control... but he is also martyr to this woman... ah! the motion of those hips!! A conquest of reason by passion... like the tale of Phyllis and Aristotle.

"What's freedom for? To know eternity." So proclaims the poet's reason... but once again her charms complete bedazzle and distract him: "I swear she cast a shadow white as stone."

"But who would count eternity in days?"... And so he confronts the question of "eternity" and suggests that perhaps eternity is not measured in time... that perhaps it is indeed, to be found in an hour... spent with the woman who so bewitches him.

"These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)" ... And has SHE not become his purpose or reason and his only means of counting the passing minutes?
StLukes, I got from the last line, that he body takes the form of a metronome/clock, to which he becomes slave. The image then would fit with his other time comments, and make for quite the double entendre, as the first meaning would seem to be of his captivation, whereas the second would allude to his imprisonment to her bidding, and her overbearing control.

[Kafka's Crow]

StLukes, I got from the last line, that he body takes the form of a metronome/clock, to which he becomes slave. The image then would fit with his other time comments, and make for quite the double entendre, as the first meaning would seem to be of his captivation, whereas the second would allude to his imprisonment to her bidding, and her overbearing control.

Allow me to steal your interpretation and dove-tail it with my understanding of this poem. Memory is the mechanism that keeps a consciousness afloat or alive. 'In my end is my beginning' as Eliot would quote Mary, Queen of Scots. The woman is a memory, transformed by and transforming consciousness:


Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?

(saves me from going back to my book and JBI's post again and again!)

Time destroys all, but why martyr? Why not just dead or decayed or consumed or deceased, why martyr. What is the cause that the martyr was defending or trying to uphold?

Eternity can be found in the working of one memory, Blake's grain of sand. Time (history) is made up of memories, a chain of memories and a close examination of only one memory can reveal the whole structure of history. It is invisible, individual memory that creates individual and ultimately group/collective-consciousness (history) is invisible. It moves without a shadow (white shadow is an invisible shadow) and works secretly but this is the 'moving mover'. We are made up of memories and memories are made up by us, by the world. We inhabit a world and a history that reflects nothing but ourselves. Time is memory, not days, hours or years. Time is what happens in time. But what happens in time is not pure but is transformed by many different forces while it keeps on transforming everything else. This is a curious idea but what we see is nothing but ourselves. The reality is nothing but consciousness and self is the most powerful part of the consciousness, the major ingredient so to speak. The image of rake (gleaner) following the scythe (the reaper, time) also point to the relationship between time and the memory. After time is passed, all we are left with is memories which are adulterated by external elements as well as emotions. Thus remembrance is never unadulterated and what is time (history) but remembrance?

[quasimodo1]

Welcome back to Kafka's Crow and your observations. "During my fleeting visits to this thread I have noticed this theme running through other poems as well, his theme of shadows (Plato's cave), reflections and lights. What do you folks think?" I think Roethke grew up in and around greenhouses, the source of this imagery?

[Dark Muse]

With all his talk about birds, particuarly herons and water I thought he may have grown up near the water somewhere. He does have a poem called Child On Top of a Greenhouse

[quasimodo1]

One of the poets Roethke read while institutionalized was "that sweet man John Clare.":

FIRST LOVE

I ne’er was struck before that hour
With love so sudden and so sweet,
Her face it bloomed like a sweet flower
And stole my heart away complete.


My face turned pale as deadly pale,
My legs refused to walk away,
And when she looked, what could I ail?
My life and all seemed turned to clay.


And then my blood rushed to my face
And took my eyesight quite away,
The trees and bushes round the place
Seemed midnight at noonday.


I could not see a single thing,
Words from my eyes did start—
They spoke as chords do from the string,
And blood burnt round my heart.


Are flowers the winter’s choice?
Is love’s bed always snow?
She seemed to hear my silent voice,
I never saw so sweet a face
As that I stood before.
My heart has left its dwelling-place
And can return no more.

[Dark Muse]

Now that it seems like I Knew A Woman is wrapping up, Quasi said I could pick the next poem for disuccion. I was really struck by the poem Genesis. It is not a very long poem, but out of all I have read so far, something about it just really sticks out in my mind the most.

[Kafka's Crow]

Ok! Let's do it stanza by stanza.

Genesis
This elemental force
Was wrested from the sun;
A river's leaping source
Is locked in narrow bone.

An utterly biblical title and an utterly scientific opening! What's going on here? The universal force is channelized into creating a small planet (the narrow bone). I am amazed by the six syllables. I think only a couple of lines or three in the whole poem are written in less than six syllabus and none exceeds six. Did he rest on the seventh? The poem is being created as well as the universe.

[Dark Muse]

Yes it is quite interesting that he choose the word Genisis as the titile of this poem, though the poem is riddled with biblical references, there is also something very "natural" about it.


This elemental force

This is a great opeening line. It enstnatly grabbed my attention in my first reading of the poem, and it never fails to effect me and I have read this poem over several times now. It does open the poem with a "bang" I think.


Was wrested from the sun

I think this is an interesting line. It is the idea of some struggle, a conflict of energy, a pushing and pulling force. It is a very scientific take on creation coupled with the title of the poem.


A river's leaping source
Is locked in narrow bone

Bones seem to come up a lot in Roethke's poems. I think the mention of the river, has a sort of calming effected compared with the violence of the first two lines. Though I was not sure what to make of the "narrow bone"

[Kafka's Crow]

Is this 'river' with a 'leaping source' the universal time and 'narrow bone' is the microcosmic or the earthly time, days and nights, hours, months and years, what Wordsworth calls 'earth's diurnal course'. I can be wrong here but I think he is talking about the creation of time.

[Bitterfly]

I think this is an interesting line. It is the idea of some struggle, a conflict of energy, a pushing and pulling force. It is a very scientific take on creation coupled with the title of the poem.

Why do you think the idea of conflict is "scientific"? I see strife more as "pre-scientific"(as in Greek cosmogonies, or in Ovid's account of Creation). The presence of natural elements (fire, water, which oppose each other) also make me think that. And "wrested from the sun" strangely reminds me of Prometheus...


Bones seem to come up a lot in Roethke's poems. I think the mention of the river, has a sort of calming effected compared with the violence of the first two lines. Though I was not sure what to make of the "narrow bone"

The very regular rhythm (perfect iambic trimeters) also contributes to the calming effect (and contrasts with the violence of the beginning), I find.

If I knew what the rest of the poem was about :D (didn't find it on the net), it would be easier for me to understand, I think, but the "narrow bone" gives me the impression that all that energy is being poured into man, there to be bounded ("locked").

[Dark Muse]

Is this 'river' with a 'leaping source' the universal time and 'narrow bone' is the microcosmic or the earthly time, days and nights, hours, months and years, what Wordsworth calls 'earth's diurnal course'. I can be wrong here but I think he is talking about the creation of time.

Ahh yes, that does make sense.

[Dark Muse]

Why do you think the idea of conflict is "scientific"? I see strife more as "pre-scientific"(as in Greek cosmogonies, or in Ovid's account of Creation). The presence of natural elements (fire, water, which oppose each other) also make me think that. And "wrested from the sun" strangely reminds me of Prometheus...

Though the poem might be touched with elements of mythology, it seems to me, that inspite of the title of the poem. At least those first opening lines seems to refelct more the idea of the "Big Bang" rather than Biblical Creation. The elements expressed within the poem contradict "Geneisis"

[quasimodo1]

Kafka's Crow will forgive me for jumping to the last stanza... "A pearl within the brain,
Secretion of the sense;
Around a central grain
New meaning grows immense." My take on this poem is much more personal, personal for Roethke that is. All the references come together if he is writing of his own unique source for a poem. How "meaning grow immense" once his mind has created that "seed" or concept.

[Bitterfly]

Though the poem might be touched with elements of mythology, it seems to me, that inspite of the title of the poem. At least those first opening lines seems to refelct more the idea of the "Big Bang" rather than Biblical Creation. The elements expressed within the poem contradict "Geneisis"

Ah, Ok, I hadn't understood that that was what you were emphasizing. Pretty interesting idea!:thumbs_up

Erm, I'd love to see the rest of the poem, now my curiosity has been sparked!

[Dark Muse]

I could not find it anywhere online, so I just PMed it to you, sense for legal reasons I cannot post it in its enterity here.

[Bitterfly]

Thanks a ton!
Now that I can see the whole poem, the meaning is a tad clearer! :p

First stanza: Creative forces: sun, water, "source" (reminiscent of the river in the garden of Eden). There's strife - as for all creative activity. The "narrow bone" has "locked" the force in - that's perhaps why it threatens to break out again in the second stanza?

Second stanza: I can understand the link with Genesis at least, now :p - there's a reference to the fruit of the garden of Eden. What's interesting is that it's not exactly the "fruit of good" in the Bible, is it? Isn't it rather the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? And why is the "wisdom" (positive connotations) associated with "floods" and "invades" (pejorative, the flood which came to punish mankind); likened to an almost destructive force ("swells", "burst"). Is creation both beneficial and destructive? One has the impression this force is going to break, to burst the mind that harbours it.

Third stanza: something hidden and secretive ("pearl", "secretion" which contains the word "secret") which you therefore have to go and look for? How come it hasn't burst out? It "grows immense" yet is still "within". Maybe the mind has found a way to control the elemental force of the beginning. More intellectual vocabulary (sense", "meaning", "brain" rather than "mind").
I find this stanza a bit of a letdown, actually... :( :p

[Dark Muse]

This wisdom floods the mind,
invades quiescent blood;
a seed that swells the rind
to burst the fruit of good

The second stanza is quite interesting. I think the frist two lines


This wisdom floods the mind,
invades quiescent blood;

Could be linked to poetic creativity and its effect upon a person. The way in which it says "wisdom floods the mind" from what information I have gleamed about Roethke by reading the other posts here, and his struggles with sanity, I think this line is quite fitting. It is something that comes overwhelming upon a person.

As I found the second line here


invades quiescent blood

To be quite interesting. I admit I had to look up quiescent

marked by inactivity or repose : tranquilly at rest

Now this is interesting, when pared with the line "invade" it seems to me to suggest one who is at rest, suddnely being sparked into activity again. It also toys with the early ideas of chaos seen in the first stanza.


a seed that swells the rind
to burst the fruit of good

These lines, paricuarly the mention of the seed that swells and than bursts into fruit, I could not help but to have the imagery of a woman impregnated, which would tie into ideas of creation.

[Virgil]

I have to apologize. I was away on a business trip and could not get an internet connection. I need to catch up.

[quasimodo1]

Virgil: Not a problem. While awaiting a response from the next person to choose a poem... I'd like to put one up for consideration. Let this one have at least a day or two. It surely is dense enough. See next posting.

[quasimodo1]

From The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
pp 13-14

THE COMING OF THE COLD

I

The late peach yields a subtle musk,
The arbor is alive with fume
More heady than a field at dusk
When clover scents diminished wind.
The walker's foot has scarcely room
Upon the orchard path, for skinned
And battered fruit has choked the grass.
The yield's half down and half in air,
The plum drops pitch upon the ground,
And nostrils widen as they pass
The place where butternuts are found.
The wind shakes out the scent of pear.
Upon the field the scent is dry:
The dill bears up it acrid crown;
The dock, so garish to the eye,
Distills a pungence of its own;
And pumpkins sweat a bitter oil.
But soon cold rain and frost come in
To press pure fragrance to the soil;
The loose vine droops with hoar at dawn,
The riches of the air blow thin.

II

The ribs of leaves lie in the dust,
The beak of frost has picked the bough,
The briar bears its thorn, and drought
Has left its ravage on the field.
The season's wreckage lies about,
Late autumn fruit is rotted now.
All shade is lean, the antic branch
Jerks skyward at the touch of wind,
Dense trees no longer hold the light,
The hedge and orchard grove are thinned.
The dank bark dries beneath the sun,
The last of harvesting is done.
All things are brought to barn and fold.
The oak leaves strain to be unbound,
The sky turns dark, the year grows old,
The buds draw in before the cold. ... {2 of 3 parts}

[stlukesguild]

Quasi has asked that I select the next Roethke poem and so I have done so... choosing Four For Sir John Davies:

1. The Dance

Is that dance slowing in the mind of man
That made him think the universe could hum?
The great wheel turns its axle when it can;
I need a place to sing, and dancing-room,
And I have made a promise to my ears
I'll sing and whistle romping with the bears.

For they are all my friends: I saw one slide
Down a steep hillside on a cake of ice-
Or was that in a book? I think with pride:
A caged bear rarely does the same thing twice
In the same way: O watch his body sway!
This animal remembering to be gay.

I tried to fling my shadow at the moon,
The while my blood leaped with a wordless song.
Though dancing needs a master, I had none
To teach my toes to listen to my tongue.
But what I learned there, dancing all alone,
Was not the joyless motion of a stone.

I take this cadence from a man named Yeats;
I take it, and I give it back again:
For other tunes and other wanton beats
Have tossed my heart and fiddle through my brain,
Yes, I was dancing-mad, and how
That came to be the bears and Yeats would know.

This first section can be heard read by Roethke himself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKaoXy2KaJU

Stanley Kunitz... poet and friend of Roethke writes the following of the genesis of this poem:

On another country visit, in the following decade, he asked me long after midnight to read something choice to him. I picked up Sir John Davies' neglected Elizabethan masterpiece, "Orchestra," a poem that he had somehow never chanced on despite his omnivorous appetite for verse, and I can still recall the excitement with which he responded to the clear-voiced music.

From that encounter, combined with his deep attachment to the poetry of Yeats—it was beat, above all, that enchanted him—he composed the eloquent sequence, "Four for Sir John Davies," which was to set the cadence for a whole new cycle of later poems.

The text of Sir John Davies' Orchestra can be found here:

http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/davies1.html

Hopefully Petrarch's Love will drop by and enlighten us with her knowledge of Davies' poem and perhaps offer up some insights into it's relationship with Roethke's work. I have been unable to find the entire poem on the net (anyone else have any luck? please post a link). It is included in my volume of Roethke's Words for the Wind as well as his Collected Poems. I'll PM the text to anyone needing it.

[Petrarch's Love]

Oh, I love that recording of Roethke reading the poem you posted, St. Luke's! Great youtube find. I'll be glad to join in the discussion, but it'll have to be tomorrow night, since I have to spend this evening finishing my class prep. for the first day tomorrow rather than get lured into the dance (though perhaps my students would rather we dance than have me get up and lecture on portraits of Elizabeth I and Shakespeare's Richard II :p). The Renascence text of the Davies is the one in my bookmarks, so I'm assuming that's the most complete version I could find on the web.

[quasimodo1]

"No poet, no artist of any art, has his

complete meaning alone. His signigicance, his appreciation, is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.

You cannot value him alone; you must set him for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of

aesthetic, not merely historical criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what

happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves,

which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them." T.S.Eliot

[stlukesguild]

That bit (and a little more) from Eliot's great essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent from The Sacred Wood has long been etched upon my mind. Art is as much a dialog with art and other artists as it is a dialog with the present.

Looking at the first section here of Roethke's poem it is clear that he builds upon Davies exploration of the idea of all the cosmos involved in a grand dance... or the Musica Universalis or the Music of the Spheres a concept often credited to Pythagoras, who is quoted as having suggested that "there is geometry in the humming of the strings; there is music in the spacing of the spheres." This concept was further echoed in Dante's Divine Comedy and the theory remained popular into the Renaissane and was even put forth in Johannes Kepler's Harmonice Mundi (1619) in which Kepler suggested a connection between geometry, astronomy, harmonics, and music... a universal music (musica universalis).

It is immediately intriguing to consider Roethke's use of the word "humming" in this context.

Is that dance slowing in the mind of man
That made him think the universe could hum?

It also leads me to think that the dancing bears to which Roethke speaks are none other than Ursa Major and Minor.

[quasimodo1]

According to some academic critics of Sir John Davies and other more recent critiques of Roethke's poems, in the past the mind and the universe (taking up stlukes. mention of constellations) were said to be somehow syncopated and/or humming in unison. "But what I learned there, dancing all alone,/ Was not the joyless motion of a stone" These lines indicate to me a harmony percieved of the planet (a stone) and the universe also in harmony with the dancing mind.

[Virgil]

Hmm, my Roethke collection doesn't contain this poem nor was I able to find it on line. Does anyone have a link to "The Dance"?

[stlukesguild]

Is that dance slowing in the mind of man
That made him think the universe could hum?
The great wheel turns its axle when it can

I ponder at the opening lines. Is Roethke asking merely whether we have lost faith in that old concept of the Musica Universalis... or have we lost something larger... a faith in an actual Universal Harmony... and order or meaning to the universe... God?

I need a place to sing, and dancing-room,
And I have made a promise to my ears
I'll sing and whistle romping with the bears.

For they are all my friends: I saw one slide
Down a steep hillside on a cake of ice-
Or was that in a book? I think with pride:
A caged bear rarely does the same thing twice
In the same way: O watch his body sway!
This animal remembering to be gay.

And then he turns to the dancing bears... and I wonder whether he is speaking of the celestial bears (Ursa Major/Minor)... and the image of the bear sliding on a cake of ice calls to mind the image of these constellations or a snowy horizon... or was it something read in a book?

...As the two bears, whom the First Mover flings
With a short turn around heaven's axeltree,
In a round dance forever wheeling be."

from Orchestra, Sir John Davies

And the caged animal is seen dancing with a joy that immediately calls to mind (especially in response to Roethke's choice of that word "gay") his beloved Yeats:

I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow.
Of poets that are always gay...

On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

from Lapis Lazuli

The last two stanzas reinforce this connection with Yeats and make me suspect that Roethke speaks of the dance of poetry... and certainly not the "joyless motion of a stone"... the "dance" of the dead planets throughout the celestial spheres:

I tried to fling my shadow at the moon,
The while my blood leaped with a wordless song.
Though dancing needs a master, I had none
To teach my toes to listen to my tongue.
But what I learned there, dancing all alone,
Was not the joyless motion of a stone.

I take this cadence from a man named Yeats;
I take it, and I give it back again:
For other tunes and other wanton beats
Have tossed my heart and fiddle through my brain,
Yes, I was dancing-mad, and how
That came to be the bears and Yeats would know.

Again I find myself thinking on Kunitz' description of Roethke's response to Davies' Orchestra:

it was beat, above all, that enchanted him—

There is an intriguing section of Davies Orchestra in which he discusses the music of poetry... its rhythm... as a dance:

70 (67)

But for more diuers and more pleasing show,
A swift and wandring daunce she did inuent,
VVith passages vncertaine to and fro,
Yet with a certaine aunswere and consent
To the quick musick of the Instrument.
Fiue was the number of the Musicks feete,
Which still the daunce did with fiue paces meete...

69

What shall I name those currant trauases
That on a triple Dactyle foote doe run
Close by the ground with slyding passages,
VVherein that Dauncer greatest prayse hath won
Which with best order can all orders shun:
For euery where he wantonly must range,
And turne and wind, with vnexpected change.

70

Yet is ther one the most delightfull kind,
A lofty iumping, or a leaping round,
VVhere arme in arme, two Dauncers are entwind,
And whirle themselues with strict embracements bound,
And still their feet an Anapest do sound:
An Anapest is all theyr musicks song,
Whose first two feet are short, & third is long.

92

And those great Maisters of the liberall Arts
In all their seuerall Schooles doe Dauncing teach:
For humble Grammer first doth set the parts
Of congruent and well-according speach:
Which Rhetorick whose state ye clouds doth reach,
And heau'nly Poetry doe forward lead,
And diuers Measures, diuersly doe tread.

93

For Rhetorick clothing speech in rich aray
In looser numbers teacheth her to range,
VVith twentie tropes, and turning euery way,
And various figures, and licentious change:
But Poetry with rule and order strange
So curiously doth moue each single pace,
As all is mard if she one foote misplace.

I'll wait for Petrarch to comment here...

[Virgil]

My Roethke collection contains this after all. I was looking under the wrong title. I was reading this last night and this is another outstanding poem. I don't have time to comment right now, but I will by tonight.

[Jozanny]

Will someone be kind enough to pm me the poem? I have not made it to the library yet because my Quickie and I are in a dark comedy of discovery as to which of us will kill the other first.

It is hard to digest Roethke from this angle, but what I have digested leaves me conflicted.

Thanks to those who helped. Hard day, bbl.

[quasimodo1]

STEPHEN SPENDER ON ROETHKE'S DANCING: "In his poems, Roethke seems often to be dancing. This is not the dance transcended and purified in the poetry; the entry into a metaphysical pattern of theological joy of Auden or Eliot, nor is it the tragic dancing on the graves of the dead of Yeats-- it is simply Roethke incredibly and almost against his will dancing. He is the boy who is waltzed round by his father of the whiskeyed breath; the sensual man swaying toward the woman swaying toward him; the dying man dancing his way out of his body toward God. There was never, one might say, such ungainly yet compulsive dancing, as in Roethke." Stephen Spender

[Virgil]

Two things strike me from this poem. First the number of questions throughout the poem. I count seventeen questions the narrator asks. He opens the poem with a question: "Is that dance slowing in the mind of man/That made him think the universe could hum?" That openning question is quite paradoxical, actually quite metaphysical. A dance in the mind is quite an image. It's not physically real and it leads to another metaphysical concept, the universe portrayed as a machine. How about some other questions: "What is desire?--/The impulse to make someone else complete?" "Who can embrace the body of his fate?" "Who's whistling up my sleeve?" "Things loll and loiter. Who condones the lost?/This joy outleaps the dog. Who cares? Who cares?" "What shape leaped forward at the sensual cry?--" "Did space shake off an angel with a sigh?" "Did Beatrice deny what Dante saw?" "Who leaps to heaven at a single bound?" "The visible obscures. But who knows when?" "The world is for the living. Who are they?"

All of these questions are paradoxical, disjointed, and realtively unanaswerable. Some are even outright absurd. From a poetic craft point of view, these questions creates a constant stress through out the poem. There is never a moment of relaxation.

The other thing that I observe is the constant contrast of opposites: light versus dark, ground versus universe or heavens, down versus up, mind versus body, spirit versus flesh, ice versus fire, animal versus human.

I should have more to say on the poem later.

[quasimodo1]

Was I the servant of a sovereign wish,
Or ladle rattling in an empty dish?
One of Virgil's questions quoted here, may seem absurd but my view is that it's rhetorical. The given answer is that Roethke sees himself as voicing or re-voicing the dead poets theme. He indeed was or wanted to be the "servant of a sovereign wish" almost as historical fiction when done correctly recaptures the past.

[Virgil]

Was I the servant of a sovereign wish,
Or ladle rattling in an empty dish?
One of Virgil's questions quoted here, may seem absurd but my view is that it's rhetorical. The given answer is that Roethke sees himself as voicing or re-voicing the dead poets theme. He indeed was or wanted to be the "servant of a sovereign wish" almost as historical fiction when done correctly recaptures the past.

Actually Quasi I missed that question entirely. So eighteen questions, unless I missed others. I'm not familiar with this dead poet's theme. Can you elaborate? I'm curious and interested. :)

[quasimodo1]

In the first stanza, Roethke is making a connection with Yeats referencing Davies work as subtext. Each stanza uses a different subtext: Homer and Virgil are two others. As Stlukes mentioned, "Orchestra" is a corresponding work serving both as inspiration and connection. Sir John Davies' theme or themes are ...comparing the natural order with that of the cosmos, the microcosm of man vis the macrocosm of God and/or the universe... the overall harmonies of man and the natural world. Davies uses Homer, I think, as a lens to meditate and elaborate on these comparisons.

[quasimodo1]

On the composing of "Four for Sir John Davies" in Theodore Roethke's own words: "Let me say boldly, now, that the extent to which the great dead can be evoked, or can come to us, can be errie, and astonishing. Let me, at the risk of seeming odd, recite a personal incident. I was in that particular hell of a poet: a longish dry period. It was 1952, I was 44, and I thought I was done. I was living aone in a biggish house in Edmonds, Washington. I had been reading-- and re-reading--not Yeats, but Ralegh and Sir John Davies. I had been teaching the five-beat line for weeks--I knew quite a bit about it, but write it myself? --no: so I felt myself a fraud. Suddenly, in the early evening, the poem "The Dance" started, and finished itself in avery short time--say thirty minutes, maybe in the greater part of an hour, it was all done. I felt, I KNEW, I had hit it. I walked around, and wept: and I knelt down--I always do after I've written what I know is a good piece. But at the same time I had, as God as my witness, the actual sense of a Presence-- as if Yeats himself were in that room. The experience was in a way terrifying, for it lasted at least half an hour. That house, I repeat, was charged with a psychic presence: the very walls seemed to shimmer. I wept for joy. At last I was somebody again. He, they--the poets dead--were with me. Now I know there are any number of cynical explanations for this phenomenon: auto-suggestion, the unconscious playing an elaborate trick, and so on, but I accept none of them. It was one of the most profound experiences of my life."

[stlukesguild]

A fabulous quote... Roethke channeling Yeats. It certainly suggests the author certainly believed in the notion that one of the roles of the poet was to engage in a sort of dialog with one's predecessors. Perhaps not unlike the already quoted comments by Eliot.

I'm looking now at the second poem in the suite, The Partner, where Roethke has moved on from the dance per se:

Between such animal and human heat
I find myself perplexed. What is desire?
The impulse to make someone else complete?
That woman could set sodden straw on fire.
Was I the servant of a sovereign wish,
Or ladle rattling in an empty dish?

Roethke seems to move on to questions... unanswerable... about love/desire/sex and whether it is all part of some plan of nature... or of God... part of the music of the spheres... the universal harmony... or nothing but a sound (and a fury?) signifying nothing?

We played a measure with commingled feet:
The lively dead had taught us to be fond.
Who can embrace the body of his fate?
Light altered light along the living ground.
She kissed me close and then did something else.
My marrow beat as wildly as my pulse.

I am continually struck by Roethke's ability to suggest multiple meanings... or ask multiple questions... with a single phrase: "Who can embrace the body of his fate?"

[quasimodo1]

Who can embrace the body of his fate?
Light altered light along the living ground.
Roethke in describing the "body" of his fate intends to speak of the multiple fates which comprise a life, perhaps his life up to this point. Is the next line adjoined to this one? The light which alters the "light" is the metaphor for each small fate illuminating the next as he (we) moves through a life. So it might follow that Roethke doesn't view fate as a predestined end but one shaped and formed by all influences, definitely including a poetic ancestry.

[Jozanny]

I. The Dance

Is that dance slowing in the mind of man
That made him think the universe could hum?
The great wheel turns its axle when it can;
I need a place to sing, and dancing-room,
And I have made a promise to my ears
I'll sing and whistle romping with the bears.

For they are all my friends: I saw one slide
Down a steep hillside on a cake of ice,--
Or was that in a book? I think with pride:
A caged bear rarely does the same thing twice
In the same way: O watch his body sway!--
This animal remembering to be gay.


Although Roethke was dead before animation had advanced to make it possible, this opening has the false sentimentality of the Coke polar bear commercial, while the narrative voice lacks the courage to really link the caged bear to bear baiting itself, which Davies no doubt knew of if he was a true poet of the Renaissance.

I hate to be the odd woman out while digesting my kippers (a breakfast practice I adopted from The Turtle Diary once I could afford it), but Roethke really does have a limited use of tropes to authenticate himself. A great poem does more than scan perfectly, and Roethke doesn't quite break the mold while staying within the mold. He obsesses certain things well--clumsy manic feet, dishes, the body itself, but I'd like it if he would really try to put a fist through his retrospective fragmentation now and then.

I don't know how many more pieces we're going to discuss, but I'd like to nominate "Epideral Macabre" (http://gawow.com/roethke/poems/18.html#top) for the next. More daring in its chances.

[quasimodo1]

Jozanny: You really need to get intouch with you feelings. Criticizing Roethke for his editorial restraint...you know, that has been a kind of background music. I'll go with that.

[Jozanny]

Jozanny: You really need to get intouch with you feelings.

I am too in touch with them already and have no idea what you are intending to rebuff with this sentiment.


Criticizing Roethke for his editorial restraint...you know, that has been a kind of background music. I'll go with that.

Was I doing that?

[quasimodo1]

No rebuff intented, Jo. I totally get your response and wish for the fist occaisonally.

[stlukesguild]

I will add... that like Jozy I also thought almost immediately of bear-baiting with Roethke's image of the caged and dancing bear. Considering the Renaissance source of inspiration I somewhat suspect that he was not unaware of the allusion himself. Should he have been more forceful... the fist... the kick in the groin? Perhaps that is better left to Bukowski. Seriously I do agree that formalism can get rather dry and leave you wanting something more... but then again I'll take the formalism of Wilbur and Hecht over the "expressionism" of Sexton, Plath, Bukowski, and Ginsberg any day. But we are speaking of Roethke. While he is not Yeats or even Eliot I do find that he is not some effete formalist afraid of stepping on any toes. There is a certain muscularity there. If anything he may be too indebted to his predecessors.

[stlukesguild]

Before this discussion wanes... and hopefully Petrarch shows up to offer some of her thoughts... I would like to suggest that it might make sense to begin thinking about possibilities for the next poet of discussion. I believe Octavio Paz and Anna Ahkmatova (sp.?) were tied for second in the original poll. I would certainly be for renominating them as potentials for future discussion. I'm throwing out this idea now in order that we might have time to make nominations, hold a poll, and actually get the needed book(s) without a lot of down-time.

[Jozanny]

Why does *force* have to be associated with Bukowski's cheap theatrics? Look at Donne:

Death Be Not Proud


Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not soe,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

John Donne




He is beloved for more than being Elizabethan.

[quasimodo1]

Dante attained the purgatorial hill,
Trembled at hidden virtue without flaw,
Shook with a mighty power beyond his will,--
Did Beatrice deny what Dante saw?
All lovers live by longing, and endure:
Summon a vision and declare it pure.
This stanza has a force beyond most others; I see Roethke on a height overlooking the purgatorial doings of the human race if only temporarily and while composing this poem.

[Virgil]

Dante attained the purgatorial hill,
Trembled at hidden virtue without flaw,
Shook with a mighty power beyond his will,--
Did Beatrice deny what Dante saw?
All lovers live by longing, and endure:
Summon a vision and declare it pure.
This stanza has a force beyond most others; I see Roethke on a height overlooking the purgatorial doings of the human race if only temporarily and while composing this poem.

I agree, that was a remarkable passage.

[Petrarch's Love]

I've been meaning all week to put down a few comments in relation to Davies' Orchestra and the Roethke, and at last find myself with that most precious of all possessions, a bit of spare time.

St. Luke's pointed out earlier in the thread that the focus of Davies' poem is the musica universalis or the music of the spheres, and the universal dance that accompanies that music. (For those unfamiliar with the concept of the music of the spheres, I put a little basic information and a few pictures in a blog entry awhile back, which might prove helpful:http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?b=4861). Again, as St. Luke's has already said, the opening lines of Roethke's poem:


Is that dance slowing in the mind of man
That made him think the universe could hum?

refer to this old way of understanding the workings of the universe in terms of a universal music and a universal dance. The lines might also be a criticism of our current culture. Is there something wrong, something lost to an age that no longer can "think the universe could hum?" I think that in some ways this relates to the number of questions in the Roethke that Virg. has been attending to. Orchestra is a poem that, in many ways, provides a cohesive vision, a delightful answer to the workings of the universe. It suggests the way everything is connected to everything else by means of the cosmic dance. Roethke's poem not only questions whether we can still imagine such an answering vision, but also, if it is no longer possible to think the universe could hum or that everything is connected in a delightful universal dance, then he questions what it all means. We see things dancing, but don't know the wherefore, don't know the prime mover: "What's the cue?" (Roethke, "The Partner" ln. 17) Of course the questions in the Roethke don't neccessarily have to imply a criticism of the modern age. They do, however, suggest a mind wondering, inquiring into the meaning or lack of meaning in the world. What are the living? What happens in the animal movements of bears and men? What happens when two bodies meet? "Did each become the other in that play?"

One of the loveliest things about Davies' Orchestra is the way it lightly plays with, and intertwines thoughts about both love and the cosmos. The framing story of Davies' poem is a classic carpe diem pitch from one of the suitors of Penelope (Odysseus' faithful wife from the Odyssey). He invites her to dance, which she obviously interprets as at least prelude to a sexual advance, and prudently denies. What follows is his defense of dancing starting with the origins of the universe and the dancing of the cosmos as ordained by love. In the context of the frame story, there is obviously a certain bias of the poem to calling upon love as being central to the universe, with the goal of getting the girl to give in. Yet the pleasure of the poem, like many of the best poems in the same period (there's a very Spenserian feel to Orchestra) is that, while it never transcends erotic love, never leaves the body entirely behind, it none-the-less broadens into much more than that. While the poem starts with erotic love as it's theme, it continually moves ("moves" of course, being a key word for both the Davies and the Roethke) back and forth between physical love and physical movement, and a wider universal sort of love, and a movement of the mind and, ultimately, of the soul. Every imaginable thing: sun, moon, planets, plants, animals, gods, graces, words...is a part of the dance, which in turn owes its origins to love, but exactly what sort of love shifts gracefully and seamlessly throughout the poem. At times dancing seems like a metaphor for love; at times both seem like a metaphor for erotic love. At other times all of the above merge into an inclusive vision of universal movement. At one point he even alludes to a specifically erotic tale, that of Venus and Mars caught in Vulcan's net, only to claim that they were simply engaged in an innocent bit of dancing :


This is the net wherein the sun's bright eye
Venus and Mars entangled did behold;
For in this dance their arms they so imply
As each doth seem the other to enfold.
What if lewd wits another tale have told,
Of jealous Vulcan and of iron chains?
Yet this true sense that forged lie contains.

This cleaning up of a familiar lusty myth is partly just a flirtatious bit of fun. Taken within the framing story one could read it as the suitor telling Penelope..."see they were only dancing and we should dance just like Venus and Mars ":brow: It's also just another example of the way the poem dances around the themes of love, sex, physical movement, and the way they all relate to one another. What seems to be an amorous entanglement may in reality be a dance. In other places, what would seem to be merely movement takes on amorous overtones: the sun loves the earth, there are even hints that rhetoric can make words a bit "licentious":D


For Rhetorick clothing speech in rich aray
In looser numbers teacheth her to range,
VVith twentie tropes, and turning euery way,
And various figures, and licentious change:

Roethke, of course picks up on this playful and delicate blurring of the lines between love and sex and dancing and divine vision, and in turn produces his own nuanced lines entwining them all. In Roethke's poems, however, while there is a similar degree of movement between the various shades of love and experience, there is, in places, less assurance about how all these things relate, anf more unease; less lightheartedness in the play.

My personal sense of the mind behind Roethke's poem is one that is troubled and has been taking comfort in that delightful and moving vision of the Renaissance poet. There's something comforting, perhaps cathartic, in his obvious attachment to the beat, the meter, of the poem. There's something about the way he frames his questions that makes it seem as though the writing of them is in some sense providing him answers. The poem seems like a pleasant but fragile break in a time that otherwise has been filled with profound uncertainty. I think one of the central lines has to be that in the Dante stanza of "The Vigil":


All lovers live by longing, and endure:
Summon a vision and declare it pure.

This is a description of love, but could just as easily be a description of poetry. Part of what Roethke seems to desire to do is to "summon a vision and declare it pure," but it is uncertain whether that is entirely possible to a mind that may no longer be capable of thinking the universe can hum; it may not even be desirable in a world "for the living. Who are they?" Certainly part of Roethke's poem seems to be an even more explicit version of the carpe diem elements of Orchestra. He suggests that "The flesh can make the spirit visible," and the answer to the question who are the living, could certainly be that they are those who die; the answer to life is in le petit mort at the conclusion of the poem. Another part of the poem is an attempt to form some sort of pure vision, while still acknowledging on a certain level, the impossibility of doing so, either in life or in poetry.


Roethke in describing the "body" of his fate intends to speak of the multiple fates which comprise a life, perhaps his life up to this point. Is the next line adjoined to this one? The light which alters the "light" is the metaphor for each small fate illuminating the next as he (we) moves through a life. So it might follow that Roethke doesn't view fate as a predestined end but one shaped and formed by all influences, definitely including a poetic ancestry.

I would also add that to anyone who has been reading a lot of Renaissance poety, the idea of a "fate" as an allegorical human figure is likely also at play, giving the term body the potential for a slightly more literal valence.

[Jozanny]

Petrarch offers an orderly collegiate analysis, while I return to my tireless percussion of "yes but this isn't enough to save Roethke for me..."

It is not because I am channeling the confessionalism of the Beat generation, as luke and quasi attributed to me yesterday, so much as I am channeling Donne, Dickinson, Bishop, and even Robert Frost. The modernist Shakespearean who taught me to be honest with my own work and to eschew formalism if I had to, also taught me something about mastering formalism to the degree that you could transcend it. Bishop's work, still so fresh, and so vogue, does this. As her TNR critic pointed out, "One Art" her one and only villanelle, might have just as easily been Shakespeare's, or Donne's, and yet is an absolutely perfect signifier of the 1970's.

To now channel Calvino, Roethke loses me with his signifier(s). His dialectic is Eliot? Well, Eliot's most famous rebels bulldoze Roethke's romantic naturalistic tropes, but no wait, his dialectic is Yeats modernist irony through which he yanks the Renaissance design configuration (and nostalgia for it) from its grave? Frost (http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/fire-and-ice/) shuts all this groping down with one eloquent American compliment and contrast in "Fire and Ice".

Back to Roethke:

Did each become the other in that play?
She laughed me out, and then she laughed me in;
In the deep middle of ourselves we lay;
When glory failed, we danced upon a pin.
The valley rocked beneath the granite hill;
Our souls looked forth, and the great day stood still.

Charming, but why hide yourself in the cliche of angels on a pin when you have the skill enough to defy expectations? I want to like the guy, I really do, but he is neither over-arching enough nor presents himself with a muted originality so that I can adopt him within my own poetic affection.

[Virgil]

I agree Jozy the cliche of angels on a pin could have been left out, but look at the brilliance of the lines before that:

She laughed me out, and then she laughed me in;
In the deep middle of ourselves we lay;
I love those lines!! I really do think that Roethke is an outstanding poet.

And kudos to Petrarch for that analysis. It enlightened my thinking of the poem.

[Petrarch's Love]

Petrarch offers an orderly collegiate analysis, while I return to my tireless percussion of "yes but this isn't enough to save Roethke for me..."

:lol:Petrarch will now attempt a disorderly, non-collegiate analysis, but may fail miserably:

Jozy--While I appreciate your criticisms of Roethke--he's hardly being a shattering rebel and iconoclast in a poem like this--I also think the estimation of this poem very much depends upon the needs and expectations one brings to it. Your criteria for appreciating the poem seems to be linked with whether it is sufficiently innovative, and I'll certainly agree that it doesn't achieve the kind of innovation you're pointing to. It is not fresh in the way you describe the work of other poets being, and I'll state now that I fundamentally agree with you that this poem is not up there with Donne's "Death be not proud," or the top of of Frost's or Dickinson's works, but then that is a rather high bar to set.

So, I agree that this poem is not, perhaps, at the very height of poetic production and certainly that it isn't shattering any boundaries. All the same, I cannot help but wonder if "they also serve who only stand and wait"? The poem may not be bursting forward, but there's more appeal to it than simply that it scans well. There's some real talent there, not just at the formal level of producing smooth iambs, but in his ability to create layers of meaning in a single line, to create a certain kind of play between the words and the ideas. Some of those lines, including those the ones Virg. pointed out above, are really outstanding and both effective and affecting (not simply affectations) in their own right. Yes, he's intentionally channeling the past in this poem, but I think it would be grossly unfair to characterize this as a poem that creates a hollow echo of the past devoid of feeling. If one comes to it with the expectation of finding a great and ground breaking piece of verse, then there's bound to be some disappointment, but if the expectation is to find some pleasure in a piece of verse that uses its language well to convey certain images, thoughts and emotions, then I think it will not be a disappointment. Take this stanza:


What shape leaped forward at the sensual cry?
Sea-beast or bird flung toward the ravaged shore?
Did space shake off an angel with a sigh?
We rose to meet the moon, and saw no more.
It was and was not she, a shape alone,
Impaled on light, and whirling slowly down.

There's an obvious Ovdian/Yeatsian touch to this stanza, and yet I don't think its only merit is that it is imitative. I get the same sort of pleasure from the metamorphoses of this stanza as I do from parts of Ovid (perhaps not the pinnacles of the Metamorphosis, but some of the good bits). I respond, not just because it sounds like Ovid, but because in its own right it conveys the same feeling just as well as some of Ovid's passages, or Yeats' passages. I could know nothing about the earlier poets and still find this effective, whereas hollow imitators dependent on form alone for their effect usually fall very far short of being able to provoke any kind of emotional response independent of a response to them as a shadow of the past they imitate. While this may not be one of the all time "great" poems (and again, I am not claiming it is), I think it would be a disservice not to appreciate and enjoy the very real qualities it does have to offer.

This is to say that I sense some real substance here, some genuine pleasure to be had in this poem apart from a mere reliance on nostalgia and formalism. At the same time, it would be remiss to say that nostalgia plays no part in the poem, and I think to try to punch a fist through it, so to speak, would likely ruin part of what it has to offer. As I said in my previous post, my feeling is that part of the function of this poem is as a kind of comfort, a fragile yearning for something the poet is trying to find and yet not quite certain ever even existed. I think this quality in itself is both real and moving in the poem. His attempts to re-create "that first fine careless rapture" of high moments, both in the poetic past and in the past of his own life, may not ultimately be successful in all places in the poem, but there is something inherently moving about the attempts themselves.

Of course, it may not just not be your cup of tea, and there's nothing wrong with that. Figured I would put my 2cents worth of defense in though.

[Petrarch's Love]

And kudos to Petrarch for that analysis. It enlightened my thinking of the poem.

Thanks, Virg. Glad if my thoughts on the poem could be helpful. :)

[Jozanny]

What shape leaped forward at the sensual cry?
Sea-beast or bird flung toward the ravaged shore?
Did space shake off an angel with a sigh?
We rose to meet the moon, and saw no more.
It was and was not she, a shape alone,
Impaled on light, and whirling slowly down.

There's an obvious Ovdian/Yeatsian touch to this stanza, and yet I don't think its only merit is that it is imitative. I get the same sort of pleasure from the metamorphoses of this stanza as I do from parts of Ovid (perhaps not the pinnacles of the Metamorphosis, but some of the good bits). I respond, not just because it sounds like Ovid, but because in its own right it conveys the same feeling just as well as some of Ovid's passages, or Yeats' passages. I could know nothing about the earlier poets and still find this effective, whereas hollow imitators dependent on form alone for their effect usually fall very far short of being able to provoke any kind of emotional response independent of a response to them as a shadow of the past they imitate. While this may not be one of the all time "great" poems (and again, I am not claiming it is), I think it would be a disservice not to appreciate and enjoy the very real qualities it does have to offer.

A very fine apologia:). Bravo! But it may point to the difference between a poet's rivalry with his or her predecessors, and a critic's ability to illuminate for a mature readership; I am not sure. Eliot would no doubt object, since he negotiated the full terrain. When I do sit and read my betters, which isn't often, I ask what I can steal if it is profound enough. Roethke is new to me, didn't floor me, and occasionally rumbles my digestion.

I'll maintain an open door policy in the meanwhile.

[Petrarch's Love]

A very fine apologia. Bravo!
Thanks.


But it may point to the difference between a poet's rivalry with his or her predecessors, and a critic's ability to illuminate for a mature readership; I am not sure. Eliot would no doubt object, since he negotiated the full terrain. When I do sit and read my betters, which isn't often, I ask what I can steal if it is profound enough. Roethke is new to me, didn't floor me, and occasionally rumbles my digestion.

I figured you were reading it with the mining eye of the poet, since that's usually the perspective that what most desire some sort of innovation. As for reading like a poet, versus reading like a critic, it's an interesting question. Though I certainly can see they are two different modes of approaching a poem, I personally find it very hard to think of them as entirely separate modes, and impossible to think of them as mutually exclusive. Absolutely the reason I ended up in literary criticism was because at a young age I began reading poems with an eye to writing poems. It was not the reading of poetry but the writing of poetry that made me want to study it, to read it with the goal of seeing how it ticked. I was, as you say, floored by certain things and interested in what worked and how it worked with an eye toward using it myself and to experimenting with how to make it new. I make no claims to being a poet of any worth (which I'm not), but writing, for writing's sake, is still often something at work in my mind when I'm reading poetry: how does this work? How could it be reproduced? Improved upon? (Though I have also since found other reasons to analyze poetry, the most important being to teach it or open it up for others). I also write poetry in order to produce criticism. Any significant critical work I've done has also involved producing hundreds of lines of poetry in imitation of the poet(s) I'm working with. I need to have that first hand insight into how the poetry is working, what the rules the poet is making and breaking are, how they play out. I have trouble understanding how some of my colleagues can be literary critics without ever having any kind of interest in writing poetry, and how poets could have little interest in analyzing it, though I don't question that both can do their jobs very well without taking the other into account; I just can't personally identify with how one functions entirely without the other. I suppose I must, in this respect, have some sort of mindset in common with T.S. Eliot as you mentioned above, though naturally with no claims to anything approaching his level of skill as either a critic or a poet. :D

When it came to this poem, I think I had both my poet's cap (which looks for great stuff to use) and my critic's cap (which is primarily interested in detached judgement) conveniently off and was appreciating the experience provided by the poem with relatively little detachment. Read for appreciation's sake I thought it worked quite nicely, though this could also simply be a matter of taste, and clearly you just weren't taken with it, which is fine. Thanks for the thoughtful posts you've been providing. :)

[Virgil]

Henry James said the following:

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
What he means is that an artist be allowed his subject matter. It is his choice and his perogative. How we judge him is by what he does with the subject matter.

[stlukesguild]

Petrarch... You raise an interesting question. Does a writer/poet read in a manner inherently different from a critic/academic? Certainly we might suggest that a critic/academic reads in a manner somewhat different from the common reader, so is the poet's eye still different yet?

I raise this question wondering from my own position. I have had my differences with Mortalterror (among others) in my preference/admiration for certain forms of literature in which the narrative is not the central issue. Undoubtedly this owes much to my own perspective as a visual artist. While narrative exists in visual art it is commonly frozen and assumes a recognition of the story by the audience. If not... the "narrative" is often quite ambiguous... or open-ended... or of little real importance as opposed to mood, atmosphere, "feeling", etc...

In art one regularly hears of the painter who is referred to as "a painter's painter"... suggesting that while he or she may have a certain acceptance within the larger audience of art lovers, painters tend to recognize some real depth and ability that is perhaps not more commonly recognized. Are there not poets referred to as "a poet's poet"? At the same time, might one not assume that there is something of Bloom's "anxiety of influence" involved in any artist confronting the work of a predecessor? The art lover or poetry lover can approach a marvelous painting or poem without the least anxiety... without a sense of a bar set too high for one to ever master... without a sense of hostility directed toward the masterful (read authoritative) work that seemingly challenges all that one values or struggles toward in one's own work.

[Virgil]

One last post on “FOUR FOR SIR JOHN DAVIES.” I would like to really explore the last section, “The Vigil.” But first notice how he gets to the last section.

The first section could be summed up as the poet’s search for a theme that reflects the universe’s “hum.” Why he finds it in the dancing bear I can’t figure out, but so he does, and the central facts I think of that first section are the master that coordinates the dance and the solitary experience of the poet. Here he tries “to fling his shadow at the moon.”

The second section can be summed up as the making love and how that interweaves with the humming of the universe. We see this in the lines “We played a measure with commingled feet” and “Who's whistling up my sleeve?” and “O what lewd music crept into our ears!” And the solitary consciousness is replaced by “we” and other “she.” “She kissed me close, and then did something else” and “I gave her kisses back, and woke a ghost.”

The third section can be summed as the aftermath of the love making and try to understand the love’s relationship to the hum. “We two, together, on a darkening day/Took arms against our own obscurity.” and “The flesh can make the spirit visible;/We woke to find the moonlight on our toes.” The question then arises if they transcend into the Platonic ideal of perfect love within the universe’s motion:

What shape leaped forward at the sensual cry?--
Sea-beast or bird flung toward the ravaged shore?
Did space shake off an angel with a sigh?
We rose to meet the moon, and saw no more.
It was and was not she, a shape alone,
Impaled on light, and whirling slowly down.

And so we come to the final section where we find the narrator not in the heavens but as Dante just before entering Paradiso on the “purgatorial hill.” The question becomes can the physical love of the two transcend into the perfect form of love. The poet trembles at the moment and ponders it:

Trembled at hidden virtue without flaw,
Shook with a mighty power beyond his will,--
Did Beatrice deny what Dante saw?
All lovers live by longing, and endure:
Summon a vision and declare it pure.

Can the two make the leap from Purgatory to Heaven? Ultimately it’s not the single ego of the poem who strives but the two, “we.”

Though everything's astonishment at last,
Who leaps to heaven at a single bound?
The links were soft between us; still, we kissed;
We undid chaos to a curious sound:
The waves broke easy, cried to me in white;
Her look was morning in the dying light.

Then he has a moment of individualism:

The visible obscures. But who knows when?
Things have their thought: they are the shards of me;
I thought that once, and thought comes round again;

But notice how the central “I,” the ego of the first section is weakened now, just “shards” and discarded as in the past, “I thought that once.” The central ego has been fragmented and the we is quickly reconstituted and the forces of disintegration “mocked.”:

Rapt, we leaned forth with what we could not see.
We danced to shining; mocked before the back
And shapeless night that made no answer back.

And finally central ego is completely dissolved into the female form, and word “form” is quite key.

The world is for the living. Who are they?
We dared the dark to reach the white and warm.
She was the wind when wind was in my way;
Alive at noon, I perished in her form.
Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall:
The word outleaps the world, and light is all.

Notice how all four sections of the poem have the motif of "leaping" somewhere in the section. It sets up the final leap, the leap to the heavens of the fourth section. Their love has reached the Platonic form, and all this through “word” of poetry.

[quasimodo1]

This posting is not meant to preclude any discussion of Roethke. I mean to update participants that the following poets have been mentioned for the next discussion: Octavio Paz, Ana Ahkmatova, Eugenio Montale and Mebdh McGuckian. We need at least one more, hopefully an English or American poet for balance. That is all.

[Dark Muse]

What about Elizabeth Bishop, she was mentioned the first time around. Hah, I would say Plath, but I seem to be the only one who likes her.

[quasimodo1]

Muse: Consiser Bishop and Plath added to the list. At some point we'll have a proper vote.

[Jozanny]

Hah, I would say Plath, but I seem to be the only one who likes her.

Eh, I would not say you were the only one DM. I think "Blackberrying" is one of her more powerful efforts; I would however, sit out a Plath discussion, despite the fact that I have her hubby's Collected Poems, and read The Bell Jar. I am weary of the Plath saga, the romanticism-as-tincture to her illness. My mother was bipolar, untreated and undiagnosed for a long time, and what this does to families is neither prophetic or particularly charming. Plath's emotional instability is too closely married to any analysis of her contribution to the canon. At least Bishop's small if near perfect output can stand by itself, despite the fact that all of the poets entrenched in this era seemingly loved their mood disorders and sinus pressure.

Now, quasi has politely hounded me to introduce Roethke's "Epidermal Macbre" which I selected in post 200, but here is the link (http://gawow.com/roethke/poems/18.html) again because I can waste myself til death if I like.

Even though I am less than sold on Roethke's trinket jangling with his schemes and couplets, and this post made me miss part of The Newshour, for which I will hold quasi responsible (glares sternly), what I like about the piece, is what this annotation (http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/Annotation?action=view&annid=360) states eloquently:


Much of Roethke's poetry stemmed from what W. H. Auden described in a review as "the experience of feeling physically soiled and humiliated by life." For Roethke this began with his own physical ungainliness. Many of his readers identified with his poems describing the pursuit of spirituality, continually hampered by a sense of the obscene, the earthly, and the mundane. The Roethke contingents among us provide a counterbalance to the Whitmanesque celebrants of the body and should remind caregivers to be respectful of modesty and shame.

I can relate, and like the metaphor of the body as an ill-fitted suit which is malevolent in its own right:

The garment neither fur nor hair,
The cloak of evil and despair,
The veil long violated by
Caresses of the hand and eye.

[Virgil]

What about Elizabeth Bishop, she was mentioned the first time around. Hah, I would say Plath, but I seem to be the only one who likes her.

I like Syvia Plath. I like Elizabeth Bishop too.

[Dark Muse]

I like Syvia Plath.

Well at least I am not completely alone. Usually whenever I mention her name, people have a tendency to look down their noses at me, like I am such unsophisticated pauper because I happen to enjoy her work. Or they presume that the only reason I must like her is because it is just the cliche thing to do based upon the popularity given to her life story and past, and that I could not just genuinely happen to enjoy reading her work.

I do not think everyone must like her, but I am tired of others pulling the snob card out, just becasue I do.

[quasimodo1]

"Poetry is usually considered the most local of all the arts. Painting, sculpture, architecture, music, can be enjoyed by all who see or hear. But language, especially the language of poetry, is a different matter. Poetry, it might seem, separates peoples instead of uniting them." T.S. Eliot in his Nobel speech. I'm quoting Eliot on how poetry seperates people, at least in an appreciative sense...also Eliot is referring to the local nature of poetry; and in Roethke's work as JoZ has so eloquently commented, he never got over his sense of province. Or his physical sense of self. The point about poet's various states of mind, or lack of, and how that can temper your enjoyment is well appreciated. No one could pay me to be in John Berryman's head, even for a second.

[Virgil]

Well at least I am not completely alone. Usually whenever I mention her name, people have a tendency to look down their noses at me, like I am such unsophisticated pauper because I happen to enjoy her work.
Really? I've known lots of sophisticated poetry readers like Plath. I studied her in college.


Or they presume that the only reason I must like her is because it is just the cliche thing to do based upon the popularity given to her life story and past, and that I could not just genuinely happen to enjoy reading her work.
Well, her life story does grab some people. But I think her poetry stands up pretty well.


I do not think everyone must like her, but I am tired of others pulling the snob card out, just becasue I do.
Ah, don't worry. She's a fine poet. Died way too young. Actually she's better than her husband Ted Hughes.

[Dark Muse]

Ah, don't worry. She's a fine poet. Died way too young. Actually she's better than her husband Ted Hughes.

Here here to that. I tried reading Hughes work, and it really did not do it for me.

[Jozanny]

The rest of you can do as you like. I go in and out of things, and I am out right now on the forums, and the only reason I stopped by this evening was so quasi would cease pming me. I am not feeling well and I have been trying as best I can despite ailing to get back to *my* work. I am tired, stressed, and my brother and sister are whining that they want me to pay their damn mortgages and I'd like to bust both their heads.

I know all the regular posting voices here pretty much, including mine, and I am bored with it, for now. Have fun, good luck, happy holidays, and see you all around.

[quasimodo1]

JoZ, this might not be polite, and I am not without empathy, especially about your siblings, but sometimes you are absolutely hilarious.

[Virgil]

The rest of you can do as you like. I go in and out of things, and I am out right now on the forums, and the only reason I stopped by this evening was so quasi would cease pming me. I am not feeling well and I have been trying as best I can despite ailing to get back to *my* work. I am tired, stressed, and my brother and sister are whining that they want me to pay their damn mortgages and I'd like to bust both their heads.

I know all the regular posting voices here pretty much, including mine, and I am bored with it, for now. Have fun, good luck, happy holidays, and see you all around.
Jozy I understand. I will always look for you here on lit net. :) I liked the Roethke Macabre poem you highlighted. I just need a lttle time to think about it before I say anything.

[Jozanny]

JoZ, this might not be polite, and I am not without empathy, especially about your siblings, but sometimes you are absolutely hilarious.

That's what they tell me old man ;), but I am taking time off from my distractions here, just for a little while. I will probably be back before turkey day. I do not hate Plath; her tropes are just same old same old, like Eliot. I'd rather do an author more under the radar, but not just now.

Smooches:p:p

[mortalterror]

There's an obvious Ovdian/Yeatsian touch to this stanza, and yet I don't think its only merit is that it is imitative. I get the same sort of pleasure from the metamorphoses of this stanza as I do from parts of Ovid (perhaps not the pinnacles of the Metamorphosis, but some of the good bits). I respond, not just because it sounds like Ovid, but because in its own right it conveys the same feeling just as well as some of Ovid's passages, or Yeats' passages.

I well consider all that ye haue sayd,
And find that all things stedfastnes doe hate
And changed be:

Forgive my obtuseness, but the Ovidian nature of the poem is not so obvious to me. The Yeats is straight forward enough. Roethke is careful to cite it. He fairly beats us over the head with his allusion and it would be tough to miss in any event. Where my comprehension breaks down, what I don't quite get, is how besides the passage you've already quoted above Roethke reminds you of Ovid.

I'm not sure you are misinterpreting Roethke so much as I fear you may be misreading Ovid. Truly, there is a metamorphosis in the passage described, but let's not confuse any topoi with the writers who wrote them best. We say of a sonnet that it bears the stamp of Petrarch, but is Petrarch to be defined or confined to a sonnet? Was he not first a writer of latin epic? Should his letters to classical authors be dismissed out of hand? Ovid wrote several books: historical, pedagogical, epistolary. His finest was The Metamorphoses. Indeed, it was. But even The Metamorphoses is not solely about metamorphoses. What was Ovidian about The Metamorphoses were the narratives, the humor, the emphasis on love, not the metamorphoses themselves. There are many writers of sports and hunting which do not remind me of Hemingway. It is rather the manner of his treatment which so characterized his stories, a particular view of the world. Consequently, not every change of state is an overt reference to Ovid.

The structure of the Roethke poem reminds me a bit of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, with it's seemingly disconnected parts containing an overriding theme; but there the resemblance ends. Roethke's method is his own and not Eliot's. His conceits, his interests, his style, as well as the places he draws on for inspiration are all very different. I wouldn't call this an Eliotic poem, especially because I don't think that The Wasteland represents the quintessential Eliot mode.

I don't mean to belabor the point, but as I already said, I don't quite get what you mean when you call Four for Sir. John Davies Ovidian. If you have other reasons for doing so besides the brief transformation passage I would love to hear more about it. I'd especially like to know what parts of Ovid you are likening it to; since my copy of The Metamorphoses is nearly 400 pages long with many transitions and conversions.

[Petrarch's Love]

Forgive my obtuseness, but the Ovidian nature of the poem is not so obvious to me. The Yeats is straight forward enough. Roethke is careful to cite it. He fairly beats us over the head with his allusion and it would be tough to miss in any event. Where my comprehension breaks down, what I don't quite get, is how besides the passage you've already quoted above Roethke reminds you of Ovid.

Hi Mortal--I think this can all be cleared up pretty quickly. I didn't mean to claim at all that the poem as a whole was Ovidian, which I don't think it is. I was merely bringing out the metamorphosis in the passage by Roethke which seems to have Ovid lurking around behind it (albeit in a very simple way), and saying that I got a similar sort of pleasure out of the way Roethke handles a metamorphosis bit as I do out of some of those described by Ovid (I hasten to emphasize the "some," since there are many metamorphosis descriptions in Ovid that far surpass what is offered in the Roethke passage quoted). I was just trying to get a small point across about imitation in poetry with a specific passage. I did not in any way intend to claim that this meant the entire poem had direct parallels with Ovid and certainly did not intend to claim that an allusion like this summed up the works of Ovid which, as you rightly point out, have a great deal to offer beyond a few descriptions of metamorphosis. I should probably also point out right now that, even in the passage I quoted, I don't really want to claim that Roethke is reaching the full, rich, heights of Ovid, that he is a particularly Ovidian poet, or even that the passage itself is intensely Ovidian. I think, as I believe I said in my original post, that it has something of an "Ovidian touch" which in my opinion works nicely. The Roethke passage clearly could not reach the kind of full effect that the best bits of Ovid have because, among other things, it lacks the framework, the overall vision that supports and builds up to the best passages. That overall narrative, the way Ovid's poem moves and shifts as it progresses, is, of course, one of the great pleasures of the Metamorphoses, which could not possibly be captured in Roethke's small play in this passage.


not every change of state is an overt reference to Ovid.

This is true, but I think in that particular passage he is making a slight Ovidian reference. This would be especially unsurprising given that in the poem as a whole he's responding to the poetry of the Elizabethan age, which is jam packed with Ovidian references.


I well consider all that ye haue sayd,
And find that all things stedfastnes doe hate
And changed be:

As a postscript I'd like to add that it warms this Spenserian's heart to see the Mutability cantos being quoted. :) Now if we wanted to have a serious talk about some poetry that really and fully imitates, even rivals Ovid...

[Jozanny]

From Plath to Ovidian imitators. Gotta love you people. Even though my harried middle age wars to reduce my pleasure in discussion, I will nominate someone who I feel would reward me as a poet most, and that would be Allen Tate. The little I've picked up on him is tantalizing and full of intrigue.

Petrarch: I enjoy your arguments for Roethke much more than I enjoy the samples of his work presented to me, with the possible exception of "The Shape of Fire"; the best way I can say why, in the moment, is because I sense Roethke uses formalism much like a straight jacket is used to control the disruption and the danger in the delusional patient.

And for myself, I ask, why not take the risk? Why not leap and see what kind of brush fire your manic state leaves behind? You want to, and have the appreciation of Yeats and Eliot in the fumes of your aspiration, and yet, you hold yourself in.

And thus far, that is my argument with him, which remains unanswered. Do I have to square this with my argument that Plath's biography is too tied to her output? Hehe! :)

[JBI]

From Plath to Ovidian imitators. Gotta love you people. Even though my harried middle age wars to reduce my pleasure in discussion, I will nominate someone who I feel would reward me as a poet most, and that would be Allen Tate. The little I've picked up on him is tantalizing and full of intrigue.

Petrarch: I enjoy your arguments for Roethke much more than I enjoy the samples of his work presented to me, with the possible exception of "The Shape of Fire"; the best way I can say why, in the moment, is because I sense Roethke uses formalism much like a straight jacket is used to control the disruption and the danger in the delusional patient.

And for myself, I ask, why not take the risk? Why not leap and see what kind of brush fire your manic state leaves behind? You want to, and have the appreciation of Yeats and Eliot in the fumes of your aspiration, and yet, you hold yourself in.

And thus far, that is my argument with him, which remains unanswered. Do I have to square this with my argument that Plath's biography is too tied to her output? Hehe! :)

Oh, most certainly - none of the really popular Plath poems were even published in her life time, and I think if she didn't kill herself, people would realize how pretentious, and outright insulting her most famous "Daddy" really is. To be honest, I still find it insulting how some bourgeois girl, who had everything given to her whole life, and great opportunities, could have the nerve to compare herself with a Jew in a concentration camp. What justification does she have even, for the less controversial, but still as depressing poems? Lets be honest, none. Most people in this world go through harder times than she did (her husband didn't love her, oh well), and most don't kill themselves. I think she merely took Robert Lowell, and tried to become him, leading to a failure within her life, as everything crumbled around her, until her eventual suicide.

As for the verse, I find it like going to Bedlam on tour, but all the bedlamites are mere actors, putting on a show. But, perhaps that is just me.

[quasimodo1]

Thanks to mortalterror for joining the discussion. And JoZ, Allen Tate jumps out as one of the best suggestions for the next poet. I have to admit only a passing familiarity but the Poetry Foundation, something of an overly-austere group, had this to say of Tate: One of Tate's preoccupations was indeed "man suffering from unbelief." His modern Everyman, however, faced a more complex situation than the simple medieval morality tale hero. Michigan Quarterly Review contributor Cleanth Brooks explained, "In the old Christian synthesis, nature and history were related in a special way. With the break-up of that synthesis, man finds himself caught between a meaningless cycle on the one hand, and on the other, the more extravagant notions of progress—between a nature that is oblivious of man and a man-made 'unnatural' utopia." Even though he had periods of skepticism himself, Tate felt that art could not survive without religion. Pier Francesco Listri wrote in Allen Tate and His Work: Critical Evaluations, "In a rather leaden society governed by a myth of science, [Tate's] poetry conducts a fearless campaign against science, producing from that irony a measure both musical and fabulous. In an apathetic, agnostic period he [was] not ashamed to recommend a Christianity to be lived as intellectual anguish."

[Dark Muse]

Oh, most certainly - none of the really popular Plath poems were even published in her life time, and I think if she didn't kill herself, people would realize how pretentious, and outright insulting her most famous "Daddy" really is. To be honest, I still find it insulting how some bourgeois girl, who had everything given to her whole life, and great opportunities, could have the nerve to compare herself with a Jew in a concentration camp. What justification does she have even, for the less controversial, but still as depressing poems? Lets be honest, none. Most people in this world go through harder times than she did (her husband didn't love her, oh well), and most don't kill themselves. I think she merely took Robert Lowell, and tried to become him, leading to a failure within her life, as everything crumbled around her, until her eventual suicide..

So if someone comes from an Upper-Middle class background, they can only write nice happy little poems?

[quasimodo1]

I get your point JBI; it coincides with JoZ's take on Plath. But Muse also makes a point...when I read something like "Black Rook in Rainy Weather"...there is definately a poet there. The pretensions about the holocaust; well, where do you go with that?

[quasimodo1]

From The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke

THE REPLY



I'm neither out nor in
Before that simple tune
As cryptic as a rune,
As fresh as salt-drenched skin.

This shivers me, I swear
A tune so bold and bare,
Yet fine as maidenhair,
Shakes every sense. I'm five
Times five a man; I breathe
This sudden random song,
And, like you, bird, I sing,
A man, a man alive.
{last two of three stanzas}

[JBI]

So if someone comes from an Upper-Middle class background, they can only write nice happy little poems?

No, but they can't say,


An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.


To be honest, as a Jew who had his whole families past history wiped out, I find this highly insulting.

[Jozanny]

No, but they can't say,


An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.


To be honest, as a Jew who had his whole families past history wiped out, I find this highly insulting.


It is insulting JBI, and I hope Hughs does not include it in the edition I have; what a rotten trinket. I have used Stalinist Russian imagery to discuss writing in my poetry, but one immerses in the imagery to join it to the mindset--what she is doing here is childish and diminishing.

[Virgil]

No, but they can't say,


An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.


To be honest, as a Jew who had his whole families past history wiped out, I find this highly insulting.

What exactly is insulting about it? She is not ridiculing Jews in any way. If you look at that entire poem, she is speaking from a little girl's voice, and there are metaphors through out the poem. I found that poem quite original.

Actually I'm surprised. I have not come across serious readers who did not like Plath. I would love to discuss her. Could be interesting debate. :D

[Jozanny]

What exactly is insulting about it? She is not ridiculing Jews in any way. If you look at that entire poem, she is speaking from a little girl's voice, and there are metaphors through out the poem. I found that poem quite original.

Actually I'm surprised. I have not come across serious readers who did not like Plath. I would love to discuss her. Could be interesting debate. :D

Then you can do it without me. My objection to Plath rests on the cult of personality which is so dependent on the modality of her poetic tropes. She was stale when I was in highschool:rolleyes:, and there are fresher stronger more interesting voices out there--and that verse JBI cited is offensive even if it was written as a childish ditty. It isn't ironic; it is a mirror reflection of bigotry in formation. One cannot get away from boards like this where it is always stale performers like Plath or Dostoevsky as the epitome of Russian realism. There are so many other interesting things going on in the literary world, and the majority of posters here never venture forth. It is a real shame.

[JBI]

What exactly is insulting about it? She is not ridiculing Jews in any way. If you look at that entire poem, she is speaking from a little girl's voice, and there are metaphors through out the poem. I found that poem quite original.

Actually I'm surprised. I have not come across serious readers who did not like Plath. I would love to discuss her. Could be interesting debate. :D

She isn't writing from a child's point of view, she just writes childishly. The verse is insulting, because she went through virtually no hardships, had a good upbringing in a wealthy family, with a good education, yet has the nerve to equate herself with a Jew in a concentration camp being sent to his death simply for racial prejudice. I find that insulting. In the words of the movie Election, Who the &*^% does she think she is?

[quasimodo1]

So I'm guessing that Plath as a subject would be too volatile or just enough? Anyone familiar with her collection, COLOSSUS?

[Virgil]

Then you can do it without me. My objection to Plath rests on the cult of personality which is so dependent on the modality of her poetic tropes.
I admit she has resonated into a cult of personality, but I think that unlike Bukowski there is a there there. I don't understand what you mean by "modality of her poetic tropes." every poet uses poetic tropes.


She isn't writing from a child's point of view, she just writes childishly. The verse is insulting, because she went through virtually no hardships, had a good upbringing in a wealthy family, with a good education, yet has the nerve to equate herself with a Jew in a concentration camp being sent to his death simply for racial prejudice. I find that insulting. In the words of the movie Election, Who the &*^% does she think she is?
First of all lots of people were using the Jew in a concentration camp as a metaphor post WWII. Lots. In poetry and fiction. If she's a product of her age than what's wrong with that? It's like saying Shakespeare shouldn't be using Renaissance metaphors or Dante using Christian metaphors. I studied Plath in college with that same professor I quoted above with a Roethke poem, Karl Malkoff. And he was Jewish and felt no insult and he thought her poetyr of quality, enough to include in a class of Stevens, Wiliiams, Lowell, and the other great American second half 20th century poets .


So I'm guessing that Plath as a subject would be too volatile or just enough? Anyone familiar with her collection, COLOSSUS?
No I'm not familiar with the collection but I guess I have a deal of her poems and I can find iton the internet. I bet it woould be a fiesty discussion. :D But if people don't want to I understand.

Here's a poem:


Death & Co.
by Sylvia Plath

Two, of course there are two.
It seems perfectly natural now——
The one who never looks up, whose eyes are lidded
And balled¸ like Blake's.
Who exhibits

The birthmarks that are his trademark——
The scald scar of water,
The nude
Verdigris of the condor.
I am red meat. His beak

Claps sidewise: I am not his yet.
He tells me how badly I photograph.
He tells me how sweet
The babies look in their hospital
Icebox, a simple

Frill at the neck
Then the flutings of their Ionian
Death-gowns.
Then two little feet.[Snip]
http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/sylvia_plath/poems/18927

I find this a solid poem by a world class poet.

[Jozanny]

So I'm guessing that Plath as a subject would be too volatile or just enough? Anyone familiar with her collection, COLOSSUS?

Dear no,

If Virgil and DarkMuse want to do Plath, I simply will not join in. I did not know that Plath, too, dabbled in anti-semitic musings, which, again, was once so acceptable in certain segments of British and American society. I wearied of her pretty much as soon as I decided to become a writer, but it was the weariness tinged bemused.

This discovery through JBI has rattled me a bit though. As I mentioned previously, I enjoy "Blackberrying" (http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/blackberrying/). She manages here to stop sniveling and let the imagery do what her biography should not have to--but even here, new wave feminism has long moved past this kind of transcribed idealism.

In short, to me Sylvia has long been a minor figure, too entangled in her own story for me to much care. When the vote is taken if the chips are in her favor I will wait for someone more interesting, that is all. You're the leader q.:)

[Dark Muse]

IAnd he was Jewish and felt no insult and he thought her poetyr of quality, enough to include in a class of Stevens, Wiliiams, Lowell, and the other great American second half 20th century poets

In my opinion she is better then Lowell, I do not particularly care for his works all that much. Some of them are interesting, but I cannot say I am a huge fan.



So I'm guessing that Plath as a subject would be too volatile or just enough? Anyone familiar with her collection, COLOSSUS?

I do not know that particular collection, currently I have a collection of her works that are part of an athology of Contemperary Poetry. And once upon a time ago I got a couple of collections of her work from the librabry, but obviously I do not have them now, and cannot recall which collections they were.

[quasimodo1]

Poetry Bookclub



The choices for a vote.

OCTAVIO PAZ

ANA AHKMATOVA

EUGENIO MONTALE

MEDBH McGUCKIAN

ELIZABETH BISHOP

SYLVIA PLATH

ALLEN TATE

Let's see, that's one South American, one Russian, one Italian, one Irishperson, two American women and one American man. I hate to bother Logos for this, so just send or post a first and second choice. Gracias

[Virgil]

I've never read Montale. I may pick that one. But I'll hold out for now. ;)