Theodore Roethke lives on, but Morrill Hall will not

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“The edge is what I have.” ~ Theodore Roethke

I need to document a couple of things.

I work in one of the oldest buildings on campus, Morrill Hall.

Morrill Hall’s Chicago style architecture is simple.

The halls are old-school institutional.

Morrill Hall was built 1899-1901 as a women’s dorm when there was a Home Economics major. It was named for Justin Smith Morrill, the author of the Morrill Act, which is also called the Land Grant Colleges Act. The act intended to ensure that there would be at least one college in each state of the Union that would be accessible to all students, especially “to the sons of toil” (agriculture, science and engineering). Michigan State University was the first Land Grant University in the United States, established in 1855, before the Morrill Act. It was a few years later that Justin Morrill, a Representative (and later Senator) from the state of Vermont, authored the Land Grant Colleges Act that was signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, 150 years ago. It was from that point that Land Grant Colleges like MSU began to receive federal funding. (Here is a list of Land Grant Universities, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities.)

Here are a few of us reading Diane Wakoski poems to her in a tribute on the occasion of her retirement a year ago below her Morrill Hall office window.

Me reading Wakoski's

"Ode to a Lebanese Crock of Olives"

Diane Wakoski listening in her office window;
we gathered in her office afterward
and reminisced about going to office hours
back in the days of our classes with her

My second floor office is spacious with a ten-foot ceiling and oak trim, probably from the oaks that were clear-cut all across Michigan. (After the great Chicago fire Chicago was rebuilt from Michigan trees.)

Morrill Hall looks and feels just the way an English department should.

This cabinet in my office is where all the department's

published dissertations were stored, but not any more.

The teapots are used for Teas with Professors.

Unfortunately, Morrill Hall was built to be a women’s dorm over a hundred years ago for forty pounds of weight per square foot, not as office space for the departments of English, Religious Studies and History, with professors’ offices lined with books floor to ceiling. The floors now bear about 140 pounds per square foot, and the structure of the building just can’t take it. Floors sag in the middle, and ceiling plaster falls on desks. My filing cabinet tipped over last year, thankfully not on top of me. My floor sags, and the filing cabinet was not properly shimmed.

Thankfully I was standing at the cabinet when it began to tip,

and I was able to scoot out of the way.

I hate to think what would have happened

if I'd been sitting at my computer;

though the copper vase fell on my macbook,

the laptop didn't break.

The building will be torn down sometime in the next year. Even most of the people who don't like Morrill Hall for its bats, cockroaches, falling plaster, hellish heat, dingy halls and the like are sorry to see it come down. We’ll be moving across campus to a newer refurbished building near the river. There will be central air and even floors. No dark, ominous hallways with bats fluttering around your head. No character, in my humble opinion. When I visited my new digs across the river last year, I cried all the way back to Morrill.

There are lots of stories about old Morrill Hall that are being recalled by professors and staff who have been around the longest, many of them retiring this year and not making the move with us, including my professor and mentor Diane Wakoski. I graduated from the department the same year I got my job as academic adviser in 2001.

I had supper with two retiring friends last week who have worked in the department since the 1970s, and they reminisced for a couple of hours while I listened and asked questions. One standout story was of a poet-professor who climbed out his second floor (or third, depending on who tells it) classroom window and peered in at the students from the ledge making faces “to give them something to write about.” My professor friend couldn’t remember the poet-professor’s name. Next day when I found out he was Theodore Roethke, the Pulitzer prize winning poet considered one of the great and important American poets of his generation, I was sorry it had taken the demise of our building for me to hear about it.

Roethke (1908-1963) is one of the names I’ve heard since I got into poetry in the early 1990s with Wakoski, but I never read his work. I suppose there are so many wonderful and important poets, that you only focus on the few who catch your attention. I mostly spent time with William Carlos Williams from that generation. I assumed Roethke was intellectual and inaccessible. (Watch this lovely, artistic 25-minute film of him to see how he is not; he reminds me of Jack Benny and Charles Laughton at their most childlike and animated.)

Today is Theodore Roethke’s birthday, born 1908, though he’s just been born for me. I decided to write about him in a post about the death of Morrill Hall, because so often one life ends when another begins. (I think of dear Lister Matheson, the professor who passed away the day after my grandson was born.) You can read good bios at several sites. (Poetry Foundation, University of Illinois’ Modern American Poetry site, the Friends of Roethke home museum site).

You can read in those abbreviated bios about Roethke’s importance to poetry, and about his struggles with manic depression and drinking. How he wrote “the Greenhouse Poems” out of his childhood when his father and uncle ran a greenhouse in Saginaw, Michigan, "the greenhouse — my symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth" (from today's The Writer's Almanac). How he taught at Michigan State just a few months before being hospitalized in Ann Arbor after a mental breakdown. How after years of teaching at the University of Washington he died at age 55 with a heart attack in a friend’s pool. You can read the full biographical book about him called The Glass House by Allan Seager.

Besides the fact that he worked in my university building, I am trying to comprehend why Roethke has captivated my attention so profoundly. If I’d read a poem by him after hearing he worked in my department and not been astonished with the sort of beauty that comes through suffering, I probably would not have been drawn to him as powerfully as I have. But I was blown away after one poem, satiated. I couldn’t read another for several days. It was this poem I read first. You can see how he uses nature to connect with the interior life, and vice versa:

In a Dark Time

by Theodore Roethke

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

What strikes me from Roethke’s story and poetry is the way he opened up rooms of consciousness through all experience, including, maybe most importantly, through what was painful. To suffer, and within the suffering take a step forward into creativity, is profoundly brave and loving. He explored the self and was introspective, perhaps to a fault. He used “himself as the material for his art” and was criticized for it artistically; using his breakdowns "to reach a new level of reality" may have intensified his manic swings. But who is to say, except the one who is within the suffering self, what is right, or harmful, or beneficial? Other suffering poets evoke anger, sorrow, pity. The feeling I get from the Roethke poems I have read is joy and beauty, fed by sadness.

While I get a thrill that Roethke worked in the same halls where I work, unhappily his few months at MSU are when at age 27 he experienced his first mental breakdown. Rod Phillips, Michigan poet who wrote five poems about the MSU Roethke story of peering in at his students through a window in a collection called “The Ledge” wrote in the intro:

In November, midway through the fall quarter, he suffered the first of what would be several mental breakdowns. Roethke became obsessed by his reading of the Russian dancer Vaslov Nijinsky’s mystical diary, written while he was in an asylum in San Moritz. Fueled by heavy alcohol consumption, enormous doses of coffee and Coca-Cola, and by Nijinsky’s insistence that the path to truly knowing reality was through a trance-like madness, Roethke spiraled into a psychotic break that left him wandering shoeless, freezing, and incoherent in the woods near campus.

Here are a few pertinent and poignant lines from the poems by Phillips about the Roethke ledge incident and subsequent breakdown:

(“Now watch” you told them

as you backed out the window

“Write about this.”)

I see you waving at them, making faces

through the rippling distortion

of the thick window glass.

Glowing for a moment on that ledge,

that high thin extremest verge,

just six weeks before your breakdown—

the dizzying fall from sanity

that ended your brief time here

     ~ excerpt from “The Ledge”

It was all too big to keep indoors;

if the trees had souls as Nijinsky said

you had to verify this immediately,

before clarity was lost and you fell

back into the world of man.

     ~ excerpt from “The Campus Hotel”

It was the creaking of the trees

in the night wind that brought you back

into yourself, sweating and shivering . . .

A stranger wrapped a blanket

around your heaving shoulders . . .

     ~ excerpt from “The Secret of Nijinsky”

Later, when a doctor began to suggest

that mental states like yours had produced

some of history’s finest literature,

you cut him off in mid-sentence,

braced his arm and asked

“Don’t you know what poems like that cost?”

     ~ excerpt from “There is Another Story”

This summer I plan to visit one of the picnics held at the Friends of Theodore Roethke Home Museum in Saginaw, Michigan. The curators want not only to establish a center spotlighting Roethke’s historical legacy; they also want to extend poetry workshops, community service and education about mental illness. I have spoken with them and might be able to help the Friends of Roethke dig deeper into facts of his time at MSU. (Photo of the Roethke house courtesy The Saginaw News)

One last thing. A couple of our young professors created an event a few weeks ago to write literary graffiti on the walls of Morrill Hall. We got permission from the Dean, and many professors, students and staff came to write favorite quotes, an impermanent gesture in a crumbling building to highlight what lasts in the heart. Sadly, my camera’s memory card was not inserted properly, and I lost all the photos from that event. But here are a few taken afterward.

The graduate lounge;

in the days of the women's dorm, this was one side of a lounge;

the other side is now partitioned as the graduate office

with an unpainted oak fireplace;

that was my office for my first year in 2001

It was a window like this that Roethke peered through

Of course I had to write some Diane Wakoski,

from her famous poem "Blue Monday";

I picked a line with "bats" in it

and drew a little cartoon of her

Professor Singh, who teaches Shakespeare,

wrote an Urdu poem in Hindi;

I took a photo of her writing it,

but as I say, my memory card wasn't in properly,

so it never made it to the camera sensor

This is my office (shorter filing cabinet now);

My friend Inge and I wrote on my office walls

last week

I wanted to memorialize Roethke somewhere in the graffiti

where my students would see it when they come in for an appointment
for a couple more months

I didn't realize until Inge had finished writing her Virginia Woolf quote

that we had both written about madness.

I'll end with one more Roethke poem, “Big Wind.” It is one of his greenhouse poems, about the rose house. I think of the rose house as Morrill Hall, the building many of us would like to save in the face of the big wind of time and progress. Ultimately, I guess, the building we want to save is ourself.

Big Wind

by Theodore Roethke

Where were the greenhouses going,
Lunging into the lashing
Wind driving water
So far down the river
All the faucets stopped?
So we drained the manure-machine
For the steam plant,
Pumping the stale mixture
Into the rusty boilers,
Watching the pressure gauge
Waver over to red,
As the seams hissed
And the live steam
Drove to the far
End of the rose-house,
Where the worst wind was,
Creaking the cypress window-frames,
Cracking so much thin glass
We stayed all night,
Stuffing the holes with burlap;
But she rode it out,
That old rose-house,
She hove into the teeth of it,
The core and pith of that ugly storm,
Ploughing with her stiff prow,
Bucking into the wind-waves
That broke over the whole of her,
Flailing her sides with spray,
Flinging long strings of wet across the roof-top,
Finally veering, wearing themselves out, merely
Whistling thinly under the wind-vents;
She sailed until the calm morning,
Carrying her full cargo of roses.

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After reading Frank O'Hara

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Frank O'Hara's perspective is profoundly urban, and I love his leaps and dives. The poem I read before my foray in the garden was not this one, a favorite, and with rare observations of nature. But it ended up inspiring mine. I don't know how he does it, just what he describes, to deepen you with his quickness. He catches that sense we get from a poem when you simultaneously feel you've discovered the deepest truth for the first time, but that you also knew it all along.

POETRY

by Frank O'Hara

The only way to be quiet
is to be quick, so I scare
you clumsily, or surprise
you with a stab. A praying
mantis knows time more
intimately than I and is
more casual. Crickets use
time for accompaniment to
innocent fidgeting. A zebra
races counterclockwise.
All this I desire. To
deepen you by my quickness
and delight as if you
were logical and proven,
but still be quiet as if
I were used to you; as if
you would never leave me
and were the inexorable
product of my own time.

I actually wrote my poem below after reading another O'Hara poem, "Meditations in an Emergency" with the lines:

However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.

After reading Frank O’Hara

I am weeding
the bed of mint—
spearmint peppermint
chocolate —
and feel the quick stab
of stinging nettles
through garden gloves

the damn leaves
almost the same
and while I rub
the tender spot
you tell me
it is good
for pain

No kidding, I think

But what you mean
is that its extract
relieves pain
in joints and such

and so I squat back
down in the delicious air
and let the pain
surprise my hands
with goodness
before
they feel it


May 2012

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Bonfirebird

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Bonfirebird

We circle ‘round

a bonfire at midnight.

The fire is warm, and dangerous.

We can’t turn our faces

away from its seductions

yet only get so close.

Next gray morning it feels safe

to poke the nest of ash and char

with a cold black stick,

looking for the truth of fire

in what is left behind.

But, O Soul, don’t hide

your face and wait like that; turn

over the crimson ember-eggs

of desire buried in ash; pile on

dried spikenard and fig,

almond and cherry; smell

as they crackle to life; feel

how voluptuously

your flame-wings rise up!

May 2012

Art notes

Top: Costume Design for The Firebird, by Leon Bakst

Bottom: Cover of the book The Firebird, by Konstantin Somov

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Driving with pink angels

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Driving with pink angels

Pink of the dissolving petals, pouring out of the tree
and pink in the palms of my hands. Pink dangling
tongue over lips,
coffee spilling into my throat;
spring and pink allergic eyes
tearing in the presence of fragrance.

Sing for us, Joni,
with packed pink linens
in your traveling bag.
I do not move
here in this weighted world
but only through our music.

Your pink sunset is my sunrise
ahead of the weekday road, what lowers
my feet into slippers
morning by morning; black crow
wings and a beak tearing pink breakfast;
rise again, pull again, lift the
pink-skinned sun across the sky
into night as satin as your wings.

April in wind, April in rain.
April pansies and hyacinth;
phlox, quince, alyssum;
crystal vase on a black piano,
pink tulips opening, floating
like windblown hair, or
jet trails from California
to Michigan, traveling on
a blue string song.

My body pink under
freshwater pearls; the painted stripe
on rainbow trout in my rivers,
wiggling like ribbons;
hands spilling over ivory stones
in your memory, every song
a fish swimming into my next poem.

Mother, where have you gone,
pink woman of the keys,
white and even like your teeth?
My poisoned hands play jazz
out of your hymns
in this sobbing flesh of ours. Pink mother
with fragrant goodnight lips,
pink moon of hearts
cracked in crater-places
healing under black-winged nights
that rise with the crow
every time I pass.

An angel in pink walks up to me
in my satin wedding gown
with pink ribbon ‘round the waist,
her pearlescent high heeled shoes
bright as the diadems of her eyes,
pink lipstick and raven hair.
The rush of her wings says

Poems live.
Flesh from soul.
Sing, body.
Play the fractured song,
pour Brandywine and redbud,
maple fringe and weigela,
pink as a baby just out
of her mother’s bleeding peony.

April 2012


Poetry should be heard.

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happy feet

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Where have your feet been? I heard this week that through cell phones, our comings and goings are trackable, and predictable. We tend to go the same places in our daily routines no matter what our lifestyle is.

Look at Mikhail Baryshnikov's feet. Imagine if you could track his comings and goings. I caught the first shot of a recent interesting photo shoot Annie Leibovitz had with him now that they're both in their sixties after knowing each other 30 years (not the photo at left), and my eyes were drawn to his feet. If you go to that first shot link you'll see him standing on a black box in her studio on the right side of the photo, his toes overlapping the edge. Veins bulge from what look like bulky broad bald hobbit feet. They're beautiful. I believe in his feet. I remember the first ballet I went to, it was Nutcracker, and what do I remember most? The sound of dancers' feet hitting the stage when they lept and jumped. A person who weighs 130 pounds bears about 500 pounds of pressure with every step. So, extrapolate that to a leaping, jumping Misha who is just my height, 5'6" or so, but I think more than 130 pounds.

Now look at Annie Mullins' adopted feet. See her here wearing her athletic prostheses. She has different ones - realistic flesh-like legs for dresses and even hand carved boot ones with high heels. My friend Jean posted a TED video presentation of hers. I watched, stunned, as this model-actress-athlete who was born without shin bones and had her legs amputated below the knee when she was about a year old could electrify a huge audience to encourage kids to go where they want to go, not in spite of circumstances, but through them, because of them. She stood and walked around on the stage, her black jumpsuit fluttering around her legs, and I never would have known from the way she carried herself and her level of confident authority, what she was born without. I believe in her feet too. I think of that Emerson quote at the Princess Margaret Hospital by the chemo completion bell: "What lies behind us, and what lies before us, are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."

I've learned not to judge myself by celebrities. I know these two are celebrated for extraordinary skill, training, and perseverance, sometimes through remarkable pain, and live up there in the stratosphere of accomplishment. But their feet interest me, because feet are normal. They touch the earth or the floor every single day. They are so basic that even though Aimee didn't have them, with help she fought to get and use them, even competing with athletes whose legs were born healthy. Think of Jake in Avatar and how he went nuts running around and jumping on his new avatar feet after being a human paraplegic.

I think of Don's feet going to and from the barn, up and down the barn steps, walking among his chickens. Or standing in his classroom several hours a day, five days a week. Or Susie's feet in her kitchen standing and moving from stove to sink to refrigerator as she prepares meals with love for her family. Or rauf's feet that run up and down the stairs to his sisters' apartments to look in on them when they're ailing. Or Loring's feet that faithfully march in peace to the stop-war beat. Or the feet of my students who walk miles in a week getting to classes on our huge campus. Their feet are part of their education. Or Lesley getting to work in Manhattan from Astoria, Queens - walking to the elevated train, then riding, hopping out on the platform, switching trains, then getting out, climbing the stairs to the street and walking in any weather to her office. I tell her she should wear flat shoes to and from work, but you know New Yorkers, shoes are part of the ensemble, and what would NY street life be without fashion? For something a little depressing if you love them, look at the effects of high heels.

Feet. There they are, at the bottom of my legs. One fourth of the bones of my body are in my feet. During my lifetime I will probably walk the distance from the earth to the moon. In between I'll stand, balance, lean, walk, dance, run, turn, pivot, squat, wiggle, dig, point, press a gas pedal, then quickly brake a pedal, climb stairs, descend stairs, stand on tiptoes to be taller. Martha Washington said,“Think of the magic of that foot, comparatively small, upon which your whole weight rests. It's a miracle, and the dance...is a celebration of that miracle.”

Today I'm going to shuffle, skip and jump in a foot party.


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New Yorker magazines

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i was going to lug them all to work
let the students take them
or professors
whoever
from the help yourself book table
because they appear in our mailbox at home
every week
and get stacked
in the hopeful piles
waiting to be read
and this morning i remembered being in high school
i used to go to the library at lunch
take the new yorker off the shelf
just leaf thru
look at the ads and the photos
images
cartoons
read the poems
and that was all
and so this morning
i thought
what if the main value to me is that -
get back to what i did as a child
just the images
and so i opened the new issue
and they just touched me
immediately
those photographs
poems illustrations
paintings drawings
even ads
just like then
it was a revelation
i have to get back to who i am -
you know?
have to keep reminding myself
whenever it was a couple of years ago when i was worried about
how i wasn't writing poems
i was obsessed with taking pictures
and in my mind they were separate
and suddenly
it dawned on me
they need not be separate things
they could connect
and that's when i started beginning with just
some visual
and letting it go inside
inspire
and then i could write from it
we all have to find what it is that excites
it might not be the same as anyone else
and some people it will be ten things
all seemingly unrelated
but in that one person
they are mixed and fused
in such imaginative beauty!
and we just stare
and wonder
how we didn't think of it
oh it just makes me weep
for beauty

sometimes a window opens
and it will be like we just

danced
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All photos shot near Holland, Michigan, May 2008
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