When Theodore Roethke died in 1963, he left behind 277 notebooks of poetic and prose fragments. His student the poet David Wagoner eventually gathered selections from this material and published them in 1973 under the title Straw for the Fire. It’s a wonderfully wrenching volume.
Roethke is congenial for many reasons: his poetics of the soil and its slow, slimy things; his engagement with western mysticism; his fanatical respect for words—finally, his self-effacing clownishness. High dedication for Roethke never meant he couldn’t laugh at himself. He knew what he was. Or perhaps: he was troubled to no end that he couldn’t quite figure out what he was. Which points up his work’s philosophical burden, everywhere evident in these notebooks.
Reading Straw for the Fire, I found myself taken up with the problem of which texts were crucial, which were at the core of Roethke and what he was up to. Yes, this inevitably meant crucial for me, or in terms of my own approach. But I started marking these core texts, and now I’ve typed them out. In document form, the selection comes to around 7 pages. Just about right.
In my choices, I neglect certain of his themes. I ignore the fragments about the women in his life, his wrestlings with memories of his father, and his many really brilliant insights (mostly short prose) on teaching. (Roethke was widely recognized as one of the great poetry teachers of the century, and the notebooks convey much about his classroom approach: his dedication, his provocations, his antics.)
Straw for the Fire gathers more than 250 pages of fragments. My choices are those of one reader, trying to distill a certain approach to writing and a certain being in the world: Roethke's. There are many places in his thought I wouldn’t follow him, but his notion of what the blank page is for—that’s a different matter. He was writerly in the most important way.
At the end I place his villanelle, “The Waking”, not included in Straw for the Fire.
E.M.
From Straw for the Fire
What dies before me is myself alone:
What lives again? Only a man of straw—
Yet straw can feed a fire to melt down stone.
*
I always wonder, when I’m on the podium, why I am there:
I really belong in some dingy poolhall under the table.
*
I don’t know a thing except what I try to do.
*
In the very real and final sense, don’t know anything. That is what saves me—from you, dear class, and from ultimate madness.
In every man there is a little woman.
A teacher needs his students to stay human.
Suppose you master one cliché—
You’re a step beyond a horse: a horse’s A.
*
A breath is but a breath
And the smallest of our ties
With the long eternities,
And some men lie like trees,
The last to go is the bark,
The weathered, tough outside.
*
What words have good manners? None.
*
Dear God: I want it all. The depths and the heights.
*
Give me the pure mouth of a worm;
I’ll feed on leaves; I’m a knob waiting for the opening squeak.
*
Who else caught the burning bush?
I’m blistered from insights.
Several times I’ve heard the slow sigh of what is,
The moaning under the stones,
And the flames flashing off wings, burning but not consuming.
*
I must be more than what I see. O Jesus,
Save this roaring boy riding the Devil’s blast.
*
An intense terrifying man: eating himself up with rage.
Such a one as never milked a mother.
I practice at walking the void.
*
Shine forth, you idiot forms,
With what I cannot see.
Essentiality
Of all ground-seeking worms.
*
I have no native shape.
*
I am by way of becoming
No more or less than I am.
*
I knew a fool for luck
Who never changed his ways
Until his own soul’s lack
Disturbed his later days.
*
I slept with Yes, but woke to No.
Show me what rest I have, and I’ll become restless.
I ate the Lord, and choked.
I ate myself to live, and woke a fiend.
The familiar longing to be ill.
My babbling’s nearer; I will feed the moth.
*
To possess or be possessed by one’s own identity?
The self, the anti-self in dire embrace. Instead of embracing God, he hugs himself.
I spent myself in mirrors, like a whore.
The mirrors laughing with their dreadful eyes.
*
I can become what I will,
He cried, and grew a tail.
Can I become that philosophic man
Without the sanction of philosophy?
One thinks too long in terms of what to be—
That grandeur of the crazy man alone
Who thinks imagination is the Soul
And that its motion is perpetual.
*
Acting one’s age is just a form.
*
I sing other wonders
Than my heart’s slowness:
In the inner eye
A bird quivers
Throbbing my heels
With a throat’s shimmer.
*
Five songs away, a whistler by himself
Stayed to his branch, a working fellow too,
And gave against the wind his throaty throb.
*
Granite on granite pressing the earth down,
Each singing thing straining to come to form,
Made one by light on dark, stark in the sun.
*
That question cries again—
What is the least we know?
I call the slug my kin,
And move with those born slow.
*
By singing we defend ourselves from what we are.
*
I see what I believe.
*
Between the soul and flesh
What war? I never heard:
I know a singing fish,
A silent bird.
*
Things dance in a young mind
Until the soul is blind.
Sometimes it’s well to leave things in the air.
Let me remember me: not my despair.
*
Am I a vanished type, a mastodon
Lunging this way and that in the great damp?
*
She. Woman’s the noble word for the bright soul.
He. Things as they are beat at me like a flail.
She. Deep dreamless sleep is true beatitude.
He. Or frenzy called up by a gush of blood.
*
My soul shrinks to a bird;
I am less than a child,
A vein beating, unheard,
In the close, in the coming dark,
My spirit turns to its work.
*
That ultimate seed, the soul,
Growing between two stones,
Heard a mandrake’s groans,
A sound altering all
Bird-songs and bird-bones.
*
I ask a question of the supernatural.
At what point does the self become a soul
When it deserts this clumsy animal,
This bear-like shape that lumbers down a hall
Or clambers up a hill?
*
I went into a flame,
A priest of kingdom come,
The false light cried my name,
“You are no one.”
I saw a shape in a crowd,
Grisly, amorphous, lewd;
I cried, and loud,
“Here! Here is our God!”
A pure light came;
And stole me away
From time.
*
In the hot sweat of why not,
In the cold dark of who did,
In the battered dish of she dares
In the absolute dead middle of all-around
—I dug my flesh until I was a wound
And the day sighed out its light, and the white kingdom came.
*
Long, fruitless introspection, characteristic of the German, relieved by occasional dim flickers of light.
Teetering precariously on the brink of the navel.
Many meditations destroy.
A love for the bottoms, the fell last roots of things.
*
Body drags soul into the changeable.
I am the edge of an important shadow.
Lord of Laughter and Light, attend me.
God robbed poets of their minds that they might be made expressions of his own.
*
Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.
*
Observe, random energist, the bear’s placidity.
*
There is no end to what should be known about words.
*
Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It’s what everything else isn’t.
*
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, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
***
QED: Idiocy, Ltd.
Chinese edition / 中文版 : Idiocy, Ltd.
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