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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How to read a poem

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It's the middle of National Poetry Month, time to pause for a lesson. Believe it or not, my grandson is nearly three months old. He's a good teacher, and I should not keep his lessons to myself.

How to read a poem

Take him in your lap.

Look deep into his dark eyes.

Watch his arms while they

loop orbits in space

for no apparent purpose.

Let him ride his invisible

bicycle somewhere far—pumping,

pumping, pumping tiny legs,

making your thighs tremble.

See how still his eyes remain.

Fossick the meaning in his fists

where unknown words

are hidden and twirled.

(Don’t worry about the meaning

of those incomprehensible words now.

You can look for them later, together.)

He is telling you something

of where he has so recently been,

where you are desperately

trying to go in your perfectly

silent and heavy red chair.

He is showing you every truth

he has ever known

in a very small package.

When at last he smiles

in the otherwise motionless

residue following the flailings of his body,

you will understand what he means.

April 2012

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Wisława Szymborska on loan

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Everything’s mine but just on loan,

nothing for the memory to hold,

though mine as long as I look. . . .

. . .

I won’t retain one blade of grass

as it’s truly seen. . . .

. . .

Salutation and farewell

in a single glance.

~ From the poem “Travel Elegy”
by Wisława Szymborska, 
who bid us farewell February 1st

"Think of your spine ending inside your head, not at the top of your neck, and feel your head floating there atop the spine," my Alexander teacher tells me as she helps me relearn the posture of a child, one of many tactics of a strategy I am waging to alleviate the pain of repetitive strain injury that radiates from my hands up to my neck. So I focus on the essence of that physical relationship, and the unlikelihood of carrying around an eight-pound weight upon something as thin as a spine, like a Chinese circus performer balancing a white plate vertically on the end of a stick. It is almost easier to picture my head invisible, like those of vestal virgins standing in stone along the lane of the Roman Forum. Those heads are gone from their bodies—weightless in their absence—yet their essence remains, sacred in memory and imagination. However I think of it, there needs to be mindfulness of my head and spine as one, in flow.

What is hidden within flesh and bone? What radiates in spite of them?

The 2009 head shot of Wisława Szymborska, above, magnetizes me. The face was on loan to her for a lifetime, evolving with age, yet momentary as a sunrise. It is now just a memory, a hint of earth on a bronze brow, eyes brown stones embedded in the palest rose sky, cheeks hill pastures in the morning sun, a trace of lipstick on an upwinged smile about to fly.

Wisława returns to the sky and the soil, a bridge between hello and good-bye. At birth and death, we attend to essence as to a smudge stick of dried and bundled sage, carefully lit at the start, held closely above a candle flame. Then small rosy ember-buds sketch fragrant shadows on air for a time, until at last they burn out, just dried leaf-sticks with singed heads. Yet how wild, musky and holy their scent remains as I hold them to my nostrils, opening heaven to earth, and earth to heaven, as if their flame never burns out at all. Wisława's writing strikes me as weight born like effortless floating, all flame and fragrance simultaneously . . .

. . . For surplus and absence alike,

a single action of the neck.            

 my sage smudge stick smells like heaven to me

Poem "Travel Elegy" by Wisława Szymborska from the selected poems titled 'view with a grain of sand' published by Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993

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My personal work spaces and books

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William Blake's workroom and deathroom

painted by Frederic James Shields

"In the universe, there are things that are known,

and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors.”

—William Blake

Friends Brendan of Oran's Well, Hedgewitch of Verse Escape and Mark Kerstetter of The Bricoleur bared their bookshelves and journals for us to see, shone a light on their work spaces, and encouraged others to do the same. What drives us to do such a thing? Something in me wants a peek at theirs and yours, and something else in me wants to show you mine. Will you be utterly bored? Intrigued? Curious? Will you relate to my shelves a little, or not at all? Personal libraries are just that, personal, intimately personal, driven by soul and spirit in ways we can only speculate about. I love that even the ways we organize our collections reflect our personalities. That and where we sit and do what we do: read and write.

So here goes.

(I'm not showing you our collection of classic and contemporary works of literary fiction, or children's books. Maybe another time.)

I have four personal bookcases and three workspaces, but I'll show you one two workspaces. I don't use a desk, just my laptop. I don't journal much any more, as writing longhand is nearly impossible for any longer than a card or note because of carpal tunnel. I have many poetry books on my shelves at the university office as well.

Bookcase #1: Poetry 

This is one of my three study spaces: the corner of the living room,

behind a screen my Grandma Olive made, creating a makeshift private space.
The chair is old, as you can see, from my grandparents;
pen and ink with watercolor on the wall: Paris;
Navajo rug inherited from my great grandparents,
who were explorers and mountain climbers;
stack of NY Review of Books waiting to be read

Most important here:

Jane Kenyon, Rilke, and Neruda;

Cartier-Bresson from MoMA

Key here:

Volumes of my mentor: Diane Wakoski;

Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Anthologies from college

Bookcase #2 Poetry and Spirituality, mixed

This one is in the bedroom.

The Chinese fellow on the wall is practically a brother,

I love him so much; and hanging from him is a talisman

made by my friend Alek Lindus in Greece for protection;

I think of this photo (found in an antique store) and talisman

as representative of all my friends around the world

with a charmed prayer for their safety and health;
my mother's waste basket, which I remember by her desk;

my dressing table is to the right of it.

Notable here:

Pagels, Moyers, Gospel of Mary Magdalene;

much study from these books as I began to rethink

spirituality from my religious past in Baptist churches;
I don't know where Eckhart Tolle's Power of Now is,
I must have given it away.

Years of studying good poems here:

Extra poetry stack in my spare room workspace;

anything that's stacked, not in a bookcase, is being read daily or weekly;
most important here: Rumi and Dickey

Bookshelf #3: Spirituality and Paris

Notable here:

James Hillman, Jack Miles' biography of God,

Jung's Answer to Job, and my grandfather's book on astrology

Most important here:

Gurdjieff, Ken Wilber's Brief History of Everything (!),

Oxford very short introduction books on the right,
bought in the Oxford bookstore:

these two on the Celts and Quantum Theory

Getting down into the France reference books now:

Three very significant books here:

The NIV Study Bible, Rob Brezsny's Pronoia, 

perhaps my most valued book: my Plan de Paris,

a street by street map of Paris (the blue and red one)

Bookcase #4 Oversized:

Flowers, Plants, Art, History

This is the bookcase Grandma Olive picked up

secondhand somewhere in NYC and painted.

Here you go, Montag; I had this closeup photo of the painting above on file:

Notable here:

Carolyn Roehm flower books, The Way We Live,
a fabulous look at dwellings and lifestyles around the world;
Better Homes & Gardens reference book

standing up in the middle, importantly;
the "Donald" and "El Freda" mini-planters
we found at a secondhand store:
guess which of us is which?

My primary workspace:
The Red Chair

I sit here in the dark every morning, starting at 3AM.

Current stack of books read daily or weekly:

Table by the red chair with handy stack and quilting thread;

glasses of varying strength, for reading books and for quilting

Collection of postcards from museums used for bookmarks;

thread and scissors for quilting;

my Kindle

What's on the Kindle:

most notably:
War & Peace by Tolstoy,
Fermor's A Time of Gifts
Rumi's Big Red Book

Phew! Well, I wonder what you'll find interesting.

This is one of those exercises in which it's hard not to immediately focus on one's own spaces when seeing someone else's. At least that's what I found looking at Brendan's, Hedgewitch's and Mark's. Won't you join us?


Painting at top: Frederic James Shields, "William Blake’s Workroom and Deathroom," c. 1880.

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