Poetry Bookclub 2

[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/janua..._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]

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/arch...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.