Thursday, April 14, 2011

more and more, I think Roethke is my favorite


(Thanks to Brent Goodman for posting this on Facebook.)
Posted by at 2:05 PM
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2 comments:

Steven said...

Stephanie,
I'm so happy to hear you say this! Roethke was my god in my late teens and early 20s. He was my major influence starting out. My first mentor studied with Roethke in Washington and later spent years delving in his archives, combing through it all, from the great poet's drafts to his checkbooks. He would play recordings of Roethke reading his poems and I was mesmerized. He even had me do some exercises that Roethke had used in his classes.

My first real poems were desperately Roethke-esque. I will try to see if I still have a long poem that Roethke inspired, which actually won the Browning dramatic monologue prize at San Francisco State. It's TERRIBLE! But shows clearly how I identified with the natural world of his Midwest upbringing.

Of all the books I've dragged after me for decades crisscrossing the country, one of the longest-lived is my copy of Roethke's "Collected Poems." It was my bible for many years. The poems about his father were especially important to me. "The Far Field" was my favorite poem. I used to write melodies to others' poems and one of my favorite was set to his villanelle "The Waking." One of its recurring lines is one that I still mutter to myself frequently: "I learn by going where I have to go."

April 17, 2011 6:23 PM
Stephanie said...

Jennifer Atkinson got me into Roethke in undergrad, and I loved him then, but I recently started going back to him and reading things beyond the really famous ones (of course the really famous ones are just so damn beautiful). I love "The Visitant," "Cuttings (later)," "In a Dark Time," "The Waking," "Orchids," "I Knew a Woman," etc., but I recently read all of his "Nonsense Poems" and those are really wonderful, too. Dude was so brilliant.

April 17, 2011 6:32 PM

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