POETS Day! Theodore Roethke

Tribute, Mark Rothko Art Centre, Daugavpils (Latvia), October 2017 by Traqueurdelumieres

I’m usually a one check a year guy. J.T. Smallwood has been our tax collector since 2002 so each year I write my property tax check out directly to him, which seems nefarious but is done out in the open in a courthouse with badged officials and efficacious lanyards directing people between various stanchions connected with retractable nylons. There are several signs on the walls and copied sheets clear taped to the counters directing property owners at sufferance to “Make checks payable to J.T. Smallwood.” Credit cards are not accepted.

I wonder what happens when someone wants to write a check to J.T. Smallwood. A neighbor pitching in for a block party, say.

I pay my property tax in December, so I’m past the novelty of the new year and always get the date right. Younger generations will find this hard to believe, but there is no auto-correct for payment dates on checks and the possibly apocryphal rule that a check is good for a full year or six months, depending on who you listen to, was ignored for checks written between Dick Clark and Valentines for human frailty reasons. For all our penicillins, moon launches, and bread slicing, we’re not very good at the small stuff. Habits of the previous ten and a half months carried over. Every check written during that changeover period carried the uncertainty of a Super Bowl winner’s season of victory.

I had cause to write a check yesterday, and I’m proud to say that I wrote 2024 with no hint of hesitation. Was it the novelty of the act? I can’t say. I can say that the new year is off to a paper-saving good start.

Let’s keep the good start going and make use of that paper credit. There are blank notebook pages in desperate need of exercise regimens, weekly diet menu plans, lists of great books you always meant to get around to reading, or names of friends who can tell you if Rosetta Stone is better than Duolingo and which monthly “Soltanto Francais” get togethers serve the best merlot. Resolutions don’t get planned while work is being done so do yourself a favor and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Make 2024’s first one a resolute POETS Day.

Try reading a little verse first. The line breaks excite the list maker’s bullet point urge.

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I’m pretty sure I saw a few of Mark Rothko’s paintings at the Smithsonian in the 90’s. I’ve definitely seen them. It’s the where that’s in question. According to the artist,

“I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on, and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions. . . And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!”

Towards that goal he painted a series of first draft flags for imaginary European countries. They’re interesting, but interesting in the way Will Farrell movies are funny: the first three or four you see are great – the order doesn’t matter – but after that you’ve seen all that’s on offer.

I read that Ridley Scott gave all the characters in Alien names that weren’t tied to either sex. He wanted Dallas and Ripley to be played by the best actor rather than by the best male or female actor as called for. I don’t know if that’s true – Wikipedia says there was a definite decision to make the hero a heroine – but it’s an interesting tidbit that wanders around in my head. I knew a girl in high school whose cousin, also a girl, was named Rainer. That’s why the poet Rainer Maria Rilke is wrapped up with Sigourney Weaver. People with androgenous names recall other people with androgenous names. Drew Allison Carey.

Rilke is also tied with a pre-goth chick I used to know. She had combat boots and a leather jacket but paired them with peasant blouses and Stevie Nicks-style long patterned skirts. She wore it well with long blond hair and more often than not had a paperback, folded over on its spine, in her hand or sticking out of a pocket. She went through a Rilke phase.

That’s Rothko and Rilke, but as for Theodore Roethke… I got nothing. I’ve come across the name, of course. I’d just never read his work until this week. He’s an “Acknowledgements” type presence to be reckoned with. Of him James Dickey said, “in my opinion the greatest poet this country has yet produced.” He taught and inspired Richard Hugo, David Wagoneer, and Tess Gallagher. Sylvia Plath had a poem turned away by Poetry magazine because, per Wikipedia, “it displayed ‘too imposing a debt to Roethke.’”

Three similar names associated with artistic pursuits that shared the Earth between 1908 and 1926. I missed one. Two out of three ain’t bad.

I’ve written enough about college football, extolled its virtues, etc., that it might not be believed that for the POETS Day before the College Football Playoff Championship Game between the University of Michigan and the University of Washington, I chose serendipitously from the shelves of my local library a poet who earned his BA and MFA at the University of Michigan and taught for fifteen years at the University of Washington, but that’s what happened. I had no biographical idea who he was other than that he was a poet of importance and that I should be embarrassed not to have read him. My word as a disdainer of all things not SEC, I didn’t know.

I have on loan his final collection, The Far Field, published posthumously in 1964 and winner of the 1965 National Book Award for Poetry. I may have to buy this one.

Most of the best works are too long to reprint here so I’ll make do with excerpts. This first is from the book’s titular poem, “The Far Field.” He throws out images in succession with only bare indications as to what relation they have to each other in space but in quick sequence they become an atmosphere and you know the whole. This book is his final work. I’m interested to take a dive into his earlier stuff to see if this is a technique that developed over time – maybe it was less terse, more flowery before he decided on simple and direct descriptions. Here, everything seems polished and confidently deployed.

At the field’s end, in the corner missed by the mower,
Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,
Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse,
Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,
Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery, —
One learned of the eternal;
And in the shrunken face of a dead rat, eaten by rain and ground-beetles
(I found in lying among the rubble of an old coal bin)
And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run,
Its entrails strewn over the half-grown flowers,
Blasted to death by the night watchman.

In this excerpt from “Meditations at Oyster River,” his images begin as a wave and gradually calm to still. The persona goes from disturber to observer.

At last one long undulant ripple,
Blue-black from where I am sitting,
Makes almost a wave over a barrier of small stones,
Slapping lightly against a sunken log.
I dabble my toes in the brackish foam sliding forward,
Then retire to a rock higher up on the cliff-side.
The wind slackens, light as a moth fanning a stone:
A twilight wind, light as a child’s breath
Turning not a leaf, not a ripple.
The dew revives on the beach-grass;
The salt-soaked wood of a fire cackles;
A fish raven turns on its perch (a dead tree in the rivermouth),
Its wings catching a last glint of reflected sunlight.

I’m not yet impressed with Roethke technically. If he’s operating within boundaries in the above, I’ve not spotted them, but he’s crisp and I can find a song if not a repeating rhythm. It’s my intent in these POETS Day posts to introduce a poet and give an idea of what he or she has to offer. If you’re interested, you’ll seek out more.

I got myself this time. It’s only the one book of finished poetry I’ve gone through but I’ll check out another. He wrote ten or so more. The poet David Wagoneer put together a collection of Roethke’s notebooks in a volume titled Straw for the Fire. It’s unfinished works, notes, and revisions. Roethke died unexpectedly of a heart attack. We’ll never know how many of those would be developed. I’ve skimmed the book and it’s interesting, but a lot if it is single lines like “If you can’t think, at least sing,” “Body drags soul into the changeable,” and “Anything that’s longer than it is wide is a male sex symbol, say the Freudians,”; random thoughts and pedigreed bumper sticker copy, but verse too. A lot unrealized.

The swimming pool in which he died is paved over and repurposed as a Zen garden. There’s no plaque or point of interest sign there, but he was remembered by the city of Seattle. The Blue Moon Tavern, a favorite haunt of his and other literary types, is bound on one side by an alley now known as Roethke Mews.

I’ll leave you with one more, this a complete poem.

The Pike
Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)

The river turns,
Leaving a place for the eye to rest,
A furred, a rocky pool,
A bottom of water.

The crabs tilt and eat, leisurely,
And the small fish lie, without shadow, motionless,
Or drift lazily in and out of the weeds.
The bottom-stones shimmer back their irregular striations,
And the half-sunken branch bends away from the gazer’s eye.

A scene for the self to abjure!-
And I lean, almost into the water,
My eye always beyond the surface reflections;
I lean, and love these manifold shapes,
Until, out from a dark cove,
From beyond the end of a mossy log,
With one sinuous ripple, then a rush,
A thrashing-up of the whole pool,
The pike strikes.