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Gary Lehmann |
The Notebooks of Theodore Roethke |
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When Theodore Roethke died in 1963, he left behind 277 spiral notebooks which served as a kind of hot house for his poetry. In them, he assembled bits and pieces of life observations, lines he undoubtedly overheard in conversation, quotes from things he read, single phrases that stuck his fancy, jokes, aphorisms, personal and public reflections, as well as whole poems, and pieces of poems struggling to be born.
Reading through the contents of these notebooks from David Wagoner’s 1968 compilation entitled Straw for the Fire was particularly interesting to me because of the role Theodore Roethke played in the development of my own poetic taste. I first read Roethke in college just a few years after his death. His shadow still loomed large over the poetic world, and I avidly devoured his collected poems and dissected each one. To me, the poems in Words for the Wind were so tight, so sharp and crisp in their conception and execution that I was positively amazed by their intensity and beauty. But beyond their technical acumen, I realized that Roethke had found a way to transform his emotional life into words without losing control of his material. It was this kind of double accomplishment that impressed me. In Roethke, I found an artist who had managed the trick of simultaneously living a highly intense life and of recording it with remarkable clarity.
As a young romantic, I had been alternately captivated by Eliot and Yeats, enthralled by ancient Irish sagas like the Tain while being simultaneously swept away by the majesty of Anglo-Saxon verse like The Seafarer. I was thrown from one love to another without really having any way to sort out the “me” at the center of these hot affections. Roethke expanded my vision by helping me see how a contemporary poet could go beyond the hard edge of modernism without becoming maudlin in print.
The methodology behind this delicate combination of self-control and emotional depth I only began to perceive as I read the notebooks. Roethke had a plan, a sort of rolling compositional process which started with accumulating raw human experience in the notebooks at the top of the system. These notebooks were a sort of catch-all for ideas and expressions. They had no particular order or sequence. They were direct and unlettered. They were at times crude and trite,
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