Remembering Roethke

.....But something always went out of me when I dug loose those carpets 

Of green, or plunged to my elbows in the spongy yellowish moss of the marshes:

And afterwards I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road, 

As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland;

Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,

By pulling off flesh from the living planet;

As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration. 

Moss-Gathering by T. Roethke

Theodore Roethke's name recently came to mind since my daughter and her husband will soon be moving to Bainbridge Island in Washington state. This is where the great poet died of a heart attack in 1963. Roethke may not be a household name like Eliot or Frost but I believe he ranks among the giants of the last century. He was a bear of a man whose language had a certain gristle to it and zings with physicality like no other.

He was from a family of German immigrants who owned several greenhouses in Michigan. I understand one greenhouse been replicated now in Saginaw, Michigan to serve as a memorial shrine to him.  He struggled to reconcile his father’s Teutonic compulsion for order with a chaotic, emergent, sense of self. It was evidenced throughout his life with periodic bipolar episodes. His father died when he was 14 but was a constant presence whom he had interjected into his psyche. His genius lay in his ability to transform this inner turmoil into a flow of language which had its own musicality. In My Papa's Waltz this loving but fierce braiding of bodies is expressed.

The whiskey on your breath / Could make a small boy dizzy; / But I hung on like death / Such waltzing was not easy........You beat time on my head / With a palm caked hard by dirt / Then waltzed me off to bed / Still clinging to your shirt.

Many poets have immersed themselves in the natural world, from Mary Oliver’s sentimentality to Frost’s crusty Yankee farmer to Gary Snyder’s bear-shit-on-the-trail poetry with a Zen twist to W.S. Merwin’s reverence. None so identify with the diminutive subterranean world, fetid and teaming with worm-life, laboring to pierce toward light and life.

Roethke’s language was tactile, uneasily felt. His subject was nothing less than a report from the primordial ooze; the heaven and hell of it, swarming with malevolent forces and fecundity. His ferocity makes most contemporary poets seem pale and tepid. The visceral descriptions articulate this struggle of plant life pushing up through the soil as if tunneling through a womb.

Roethke used himself as the material of his art. He combined a pared, strict and hard-edged language with a certain grace of movement. His poems were never static; he regarded motion as emotion. If the greenhouse was his epicenter and the subject, himself, his poetry had a centrifugal power which touched me in an elemental place and, I suspect, most readers. It grabs me, slaps me around so I can almost remember that first slap which brought me to life.