What Book

I made some minor discoveries in the archives in Seattle. For example, in a Book of Common Prayer, Theodore Roethke marked this line in pink: “Jesus said unto his disciples, Now I go my way.” A source for his well-known line, “I learn by going where I have to go”?

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As I researched him, his things, I found him researching himself. In a copy of Antony and Cleopatra, he marked the line, “You must think this, look you, that the worm will do his kind.” He circled the second “you,” wrote “Roethke” over it. In an anthology, he wrote “Roethke” beside Wordsworth’s “Ode to Duty.” And signed his name across the title page of Reading Poetry: An Introduction to Critical Study—not as one would to indicate ownership but as though to imply authorship, or something further. “I’m always sad not to be in anthology,” he wrote in a notebook.

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And a fragment, in a margin: “The heart enchanted by my name.” Not, importantly, “my” heart.”

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Wordsworth’s “Ode to Duty” begins with a quotation from Seneca: “I am no longer good through deliberate intent, but by long habit have reached a point where I am not only able to do right, but am unable to do anything but what was right.” Roethke: “I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.”

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“Narcissism charming,” he wrote next to a couplet by Kenneth Koch: “There is no midnight mystery / And no coconuts here to see.” He then tried some lines in the style.

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It happens most floridly in a copy of Stanley Kunitz’s Intellectual Things, in which Roethke’s annotations are closer to tagging, defacing, suggesting a cascading, whirling mood. He writes his name again and again. He crossed out “Kunitz” on one page, wrote “Roethke” over it on another. He’s calling himself forth? Trying to hold himself together?

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Jane Hirshfield describes a ninth-century monk, Zuigan, talking to himself each morning: “‘Master Zuigan!’ he would call out. ‘Yes?’ ‘Are you here?’ ‘Yes!’” And Roethke wrote “Roethke.”

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Or it’s like writing the name of a high school crush over and over in a notebook. But he wrote his own name. Kunitz, his mentor and friend, remarked that Roethke was not really a close observer, which, Roethke’s biographer says, was fine, because “everything around him was useful to him only as signatures of himself.” A poet of nature who, in any environment, got out of the car, sat down, stayed in one place.

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Daffy notes, sometimes. What was he actually responding to? In an anthology of Beat poetry, he wrote: “Like the pike, like the hyena, these people are unkind.” That may have been true, actually, but it appears next to a poem by Kerouac that ends with immense kindness: “everything is alright / forever and forever and forever, O thank you / thank you thank you.”

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I jotted my research in the margins of Roethke’s collected poems, using it as a notebook, without regard for the text on the page. Similar to how Roethke wrote in books. I combined notes from the archives with lists, observations, personal reminders. I know it looked strange; I hid it from librarians. Among the table of contents, for example, I wrote, “Arnold Stein: ‘What contemplation was to some philosophers, composition was to Roethke.’” And: “S says the restaurant where he works is 2-3 years ahead of recent trends in pickling.”

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Roethke worked in a pickle factory. “The fruit rolled by all day. / They prayed the cogs would creep.”

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And was famously competitive. He and Kunitz were friends, but he may have been trying to make Kunitz’s book his own, his glory. James Dickey said that Roethke saw other poets as “rivals merely,” with “appalling pettiness.” Fixated on the kind of greatness that Koch mocks in “Fresh Air,” when he redundantly intones, “Who are the great poets, and what are their names?” Koch is mocking, say, Stephen Spender in his poem from the era that begins, “I think continually of those who were truly great,” who “left the vivid air signed with their honors.” For years I misread “signed” as “singed” and liked the poem more.

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His critics often have a similar emphasis. The question for future readers, one wrote, would be if Roethke was “truly great.” Another worries that he lacks the “authentic greatness” of the greatly great modern poets. Another considers him “America’s most major minor poet,” an epithet that Roethke anticipated in a notebook: “I’m going to be a great man. A minor hint of a great man; but still great.”

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As one who finds minor hints to be the most revealing, the most substantial, I’m less interested in the sweaty Mount Rushmores of poetic acclaim. I recently learned that it’s not uncommon for poets my age to be seriously discussing which archive will receive “their papers.” What ongoing world are they imagining.

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His ambition could also be more inward-facing. “The trouble probably lies in the age itself,” he wrote, of literary striving, “in the unwillingness of poets to face their ultimate inner responsibilities, in their willingness to seek refuge in words rather than transcending them.”

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His sense of identity was dependably mystical. “Jacob Boehme, like Roethke,” one critic notes, “often referred to himself as a tree.”

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“I stretched like a board, almost a tree,” he wrote.

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And: “When I stand, I’m almost a tree.”

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And: “Is he bird or a tree? Not everyone can tell.” I love the perspective of “not everyone can tell.” Can the speaker tell? Can whoever he’s responding to?

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His reputation was often ruled by anecdote. The jocular tellings of bad behavior at the faculty club, impulsive purchases, schemes in the hydrotherapy tub. Drinking, pills. Delusions. Affairs. He often showed up with too many flowers, made guests stay too late. Suffered, was difficult, required care. The fur coats, baggy suits, what Richard Hugo called his “W.C. Fields-as-gangster” affectations. His knees hurt. But outside the anecdotes, I’ve strained to consider the hours reading, writing. The 277 notebooks in the archives, the annotations. He must have written for hours before any anecdote’s party. How does that enter criticism. Picture the poet reading.

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I was having trouble waking. Tumor, etc. Attempted to maintain my dogged scholastic diversion. I thought of Barthes: “I shall punish myself, I shall chasten my body: cut my hair very short, conceal my eyes behind dark glasses (a way of taking the veil), devote myself to the study of some serious and abstract branch of learning. I shall get up early and work while it is still dark outside, like a monk. I shall be very patient, a little sad, in a word worthy, as suits a man of resentment.” I shaved my head, walked to the archives.

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Feeling fucked up, it’s easy to feel like you must have fucked something up. Or everything. Or to assume this is just how things feel now. How they are. And so you think, you can at least make something—not of it, but through it. We might not pull through, but we might pull something through, a small knot in the frayed, if no great consolation. There’s Fitzgerald, in “The Crack-Up”: “I have now at last become a writer only.”

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Adrienne Rich: “The failure of criticism to locate the pain.”

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I wrote you as though by auto-fill fail, so you would think of me.

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Roethke’s poem “The Pure Fury” (“What book, O learned man, shall set me right? / Once I read nothing through a fearful night”) describes a time in which “every meaning had grown meaningless.” It catalyzes a prowl:

That appetite for life so ravenous

A man’s a beast prowling in his own house,

A beast with fangs, and out for his own blood

Until he finds the thing he almost was

When the pure fury first raged in his head

And trees came closer with a denser shade.

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I first read those lines among trees near campus. Almost twenty years later, they were using the same sign to advertise the annual event: “The Physical and Spiritual Benefits of Tai Chi.” I like what always applies.

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And there was that wildness, a dependable foretaste of disease. What the crisis called forth. Its wild needs. I woke in a grove. A man asked if I had a light. Of course I did. He offered some of the foil he was smoking. I asked what it was. I couldn’t understand the word.