In The Poetry

Everyone knows that America is a continent but few Europeans realize the various and diverse parts of this land. The Saginaw Valley where I was born had been great lumbering country in the 1880s. It is very fertile flat country in Michigan and the principal towns, Saginaw and Flint, lie at the northern edge of [...]

One called ‘Big Wind’ – a grisly(?) one this, getting into the corn(?) routines at the moment in spite of all my… This appeared in a magazine with just ‘Big Wind’ and then the typographer put in almost equally big words ‘Theodore Roethke’ not ‘by Theo…’ (laughter).

The Big Wind

Where were the greenhouses going,
Lunging into [...]

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, [...]

The Sloth

In moving-slow he has no Peer.
You ask him something in his ear;
He thinks about it for a Year;

And, then, before he says a Word
There, upside down (unlike a Bird)
He will assume that you have Heard –

A most Ex-as-per-at-ing Lug.
But should you call his manner Smug,
He’ll sigh and give [...]

Elegy for Jane – this is for a studen of mine who was killed by a fall from a horse.

Elegy for Jane

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the [...]

The second book had to do with some ‘Prelude’ poems about a greenhouse that I grew up around. That’s a metaphor – I mean my unconscous is going to be (?) It’s terribly labyrinthine the whole process. One called ‘Child on Top of a Greenhouse’.

Child on Top of a Greenhouse

The wind billowing out the seat [...]

My Papa’s Waltz

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step [...]