-
The Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
When Theodore Roethke died in 1963, he left behind
277 spiral notebooks which served as a kind of hot house for
his poetry. In them, he assembled bits and pieces of life
observations, lines he undoubtedly overheard in conversation,
quotes from things he read, single phrases that struck his
fancy, jokes, aphorisms, personal and public reflections, as
well as whole poems, and pieces of poems struggling to be
born.
Reading through the contents of these notebooks
from David Wagoner’s 1968 compilation entitled Straw for
the Fire was particularly interesting to me because of the
role Theodore Roethke played in the development of my own
poetic taste. I first read Roethke in college just a few
years after his death. His shadow still loomed large over the
poetic world, and I avidly devoured his collected poems and
dissected each one. To me, the poems in Words for the
Wind were so tight, so sharp and crisp in their conception
and execution that I was positively amazed by their intensity
and beauty. But beyond their technical acumen, I realized
that Roethke had found a way to transform his emotional life
into words without losing control of his material. It was
this kind of double accomplishment that impressed me. In
Roethke, I found an artist who had managed the trick of
simultaneously living a highly intense life and of recording
it with remarkable clarity.
As a young romantic, I had been alternately
captivated by Eliot and Yeats, enthralled by ancient Irish
sagas like the Tain while being simultaneously swept away by
the majesty of Anglo-Saxon verse like
The Seafarer. I
was thrown from one love to another without really having any
way to sort out the “me” at the center of these hot
affections. Roethke expanded my vision by helping me see how
a contemporary poet could go beyond the hard edge of modernism
without becoming maudlin in print.
The methodology behind this delicate combination
of self-control and emotional depth I only began to perceive
as I read the notebooks. Roethke had a plan, a sort of
rolling compositional process which started with accumulating
raw human experience in the notebooks at the top of the
system. These notebooks were a sort of catch-all for ideas
and expressions. They had no particular order or sequence.
They were direct and unlettered. They were at times crude and
trite, bland and brilliant. That was their glory. Here
Roethke could really let loose and experience things directly,
without the filter of an audience to hold him back.
Sometimes a single notebook entry showed up in any
number of poems, in greatly transmuted form. Most of the
time, cool rationality prevailed and whole passages never got
any further than the notebook page. Years after a given
notebook was full, Roethke would return to it to add or revise
the wording, thus suggesting that at least to some extent he
had each notebook’s contents permanently etched in his mind as
he struggled to assemble a single poem. He wrote like a man
trying to build a motorcycle out of a whole scrapheap of
motorcycle parts.
The scholar David Wagoner, who was a student of
Roethke’s in 1947 and his friend thereafter, estimates that
fully one third of any given poem is taken from the material
he recorded in the notebooks.
After an idea for a poem started to take hold,
Roethke went to the second stage, a clipboard with loose-leaf
sheets. After his death 8306 clipboard sheets were
recovered. Here he scribbled out ideas in a tentative
poetic form. The clipboard was undoubtedly a convenience that
allowed him to hold his words in some order as the ideas
rumbled and battered around in his brain. These sheets are
covered with circles, and arrows, and cross-outs. They are
messy and reflect the conscious shaping that was taking place
on them.
Once a draft of the poem emerged from the battle
of the clipboard, Roethke went to the typewriter and began to
compose the poem into a kind of paper sculpture. One of the
things that impressed me about Roethke early on was the sense
that each word in a Roethke poem has a pre-ordained place on
the page that reinforces the poem’s meaning. This was
probably an aspect that Roethke added at this point in the
compositional process. At the typewriter, he was able to
visualize how the words would appear typeset on a printed
page. I envision him typing many of his poems over and over
again.
Many poets have a single margin they prefer over
many years. Roethke’s margins vary widely. Many poets
decide early on how they will use white space. Roethke’s
poems are sometimes divided into sections and sometimes not.
Some of his most important poems have numbered sections. He
prefers symmetry in his stanzas, both in the number of lines
and length of each line, but he is by no means stuck on any of
these rules. I strongly suspect that these decisions were
made as Roethke bent over the typewriter.
One surprise in the notebooks is the low overall
quality of the prose, suggesting just how much of his artistry
arose from revision. The third and final step in Roethke’s
compositional triumvirate was the standard one, revise,
revise, revise. Although Ogden Nash claimed in his old age
that experience had taught him how to produce good work
directly from “the moving finger,” most poets find that
revising a single poem becomes a way of life that lasts for
decades in many cases. Ben Franklin claimed it continued
even on beyond the grave.
Many poets have used notebooks as an aid to
composition. In 1999, the University of Rochester Libraries
published John Gardner’s
College Journal which shows how far he had yet to
come as an artist before publishing his greatest works. In
1922, just months before publishing
The Waste Land, T.
S. Eliot sold his New York benefactor, John Quinn, a notebook
entitled Inventions of the March Hare, containing 55
poems, which reads to me like a notebook with drafts of his
most famous poems.
For Roethke, writing poems from notebooks seems to
have come naturally. He seldom composed chronologically, but
pieced a poem together backwards or inside out. The methods
vary widely from poet to poet, but the use of notebooks
reflects the intense desire of most successful poet’s to
create a method which will help them perfect the craft of
writing, and from this we can all learn.