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Morton Marcus: He said: Though the crocuses poke up their heads in the usual places, the frog's scum appear on the pond with the same froth of green, and boys moon at girls with last year's fatuous faces,

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I never am bored, however familiar the scene, when from under the barn, the cat brings a similar litter: two yellow and black and one that looks in between. Though it all happened before, I cannot grow bitter. I rejoice in the spring, as though

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no spring ever had been. He said: The spirit moves, yet stays, stirs as a blossom stirs still wet from its bud sheath, slowly unfolding, turning in the light

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with its tendrils, plays as a minnow plays tethered to a limp weed, swinging tail around, nosing in and out of the current, its shadows loose, a watery finger moves like a snail still inward, taking and embracing its surroundings,

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never wishing itself away, unafraid of what it is, a music in a hood, a small thing singing. His name was Theodore Roethke. He is one of the great American poets of the 20th century and he was born on May 25th, 1908, so

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that tomorrow is actually the birthday of Theodore Roethke, who died in 1963. This program, the first this year, is a Lost Voices and birthday program rolled into one for one of the great American poets and a great American poet of the West,

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Theodore Roethke. Roethke was born on May 25th, 1908, in Saginaw, Michigan, and grew up in the environment of a greenhouse owned by his father and uncle. He received his BA from the University of Michigan

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in 1929, and his MA from the same university in 1936. He taught at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania State College, and Bennington College, and from 1947 until his death in 1963 at the University of Washington, where his reputation as a

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distinguished teacher crystallized. In 1953, he married Beatrice Heath O'Connell, who had been a student of his at Bennington when he was teaching there, they had no children. Roethke had many honors, comprehending all

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major awards given in poetry in the United States, including Guggenheim Fellowships in 1946 and 50, the Pulitzer Prize in 954 for the "Waking Poems" 193 and 1953, the 1958 Bollinge Prize and the 1959 Edna St Vincent Millay Prize for hi

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book, "Words for the Wind," two year Ford Foundatio fellowship awarded to him i 1959, and posthumously, th highest book award in the Unite States at the time, the Nationa Book Award in 1965 for his las book, "The Far Field.

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Theodore Roethke is an amazingly interesting poet. He is anti-rational, he really doesn't want to talk in ideas. He is a nature poet, maybe one of the best nature poets we have ever had. He is also a love poet, an ironic love poet, and maybe one

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of the great love poets of all time. He is, though he does not like to be rational, still a meditative poet, and many of his poems are meditations on man's yearning towards our spiritual fulfillment. He also loves to use and uses beautifully

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traditional meters and traditional rhymes. In fact, he loves rhymes for themselves and he loves puns. And a whole bunch of his poems are nonsense rhyme poems for children, which I'll be reading shortly as well. Yet when all is said and done, he is

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also one of the finest free-verse poets America has ever produced. In other words, his range and his ability technically is enormous. What he is looking for is spiritual rebirth, and to reach it, he believes that one has to go

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inside. And more, one must begin with the slime and a mire of this physical world to reach the world of the spirit and to reach some kind of spiritual rebirth out of the slime. Everything he does, he says, is a struggle for spiritual identity. And yet,

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what is so interesting to me about his work is that it all starts in the physical world, it all starts in the world of the "pond of the unconscious," as he calls it. And it is interesting to watch as he struggles to find the spirituality, and yet does

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it continuously through this engagement with the world around him, in fact, even minimal forms of existence. Well, let's begin to read some of the poems of Theodore Roethke and I will just do them actually, from his Collected

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Poems, and just move in a chronological manner, you can hear the pages going. I won't read from the earlier book, "Open House," from 1941, except I've already read, "Vernal Sentiment," which is his idea of spring coming again and again.

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And here is some of the gaiety of his early poems as he thinks about the world around him. And he calls this poem: ACADEMIC The stethoscope tells what everyone fears: you're likely to

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go on living for years, with a nurse-maid waddle and a shop-girl simper, and the style of your prose growing limper and limper. One of the first poems we come upon, a group of poems that

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really made me sit up and take notice was, "The Lost Son and Other Poems," in 1948. And he considers himself a lost son in so far as he has lost God and is struggling to get back to him, but he is also the lost son of his father who died when he was

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fourteen. The father, as I've already said, and his uncle owned a greenhouse in Saginaw, Michigan, and it is this greenhouse that he has- I'm looking for my quote here, I guess I've lost it. I've lost it. But anyway, what he says is

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that all life, beginning and end, can be understood and seen in the greenhouse, so that the greenhouse becomes the symbol for, or the microcosm for the entire world. Here are some of the amazingly beautiful poems about his memories of this

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greenhouse in Saginaw, and the first one is called, "Cuttings." And you can hear the language again, free-verse poem, but the language is is amazing and the very surprising images, the acute observance of nature that is the hallmark of Roethke's

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poems and also, images of decay and growth, death and life, some of the images very, very unpleasant, put side by side and melded beautifully with images of great beauty. CUTTINGS

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This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks, cut stems struggling to put down feet, what saint strained so much, rose on such lopped limbs to a new life? I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing, in my veins, in my

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bones I feel it. The small waters sweeping upward, the tight grains parting at last. When sprouts break out, slippery as fish, I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet. And he said at one point, and it'll explain that poem, that he

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could become all things; that he actually does become those cuttings, and that he can go back, and wants to go back to the most minimal and primary of existences to relate to them, to commune with them, and in becoming one he then can turn

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around and start moving back up towards what is a continuous symbol for him, the light of the spirit. Here's another one from the greenhouse poems. It's called: ROOT CELLAR

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Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch, bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark, shoots dangled and drooped, lolling obscenely from mildewed crates, hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes. And

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what a congress of stinks! Roots ripe as old bait, pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich, leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks. Nothing would give up life: even the dirt kept breeding a small breath.

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And here are, "Orchids," which they would grow in the greenhouse. Just imagine an orchid here, and here's how he sees it. ORCHIDS

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They lean over the path, adder-mouthed, swaying close to the face, coming out, soft and deceptive, limp and damp, delicate as a young bird's tongue. Their fluttery fledgling lips move slowly, drawing in the warm air. And at night, the

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faint moon falling through whitewashed glass, the heat going down so their musky smell comes even stronger, drifting down from their mossy cradles: so many devouring infants! Soft luminescent fingers, lips neither dead nor alive, loose

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ghostly mouths, breathing. Here's another poem called: MOSS GATHERING (from the same group.)

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To loosen all ten fingers held wide and limber and lift up a patch dark-green, the kind for lining cemetery baskets, thick and cushiony, like an old-fashioned doormat, the crumbling small hollow sticks on the underside mixed with the

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roots, and wintergreen berries and leaves still stuck to the top. That was moss-gathering. 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.

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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

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had committed against the whole scheme of life, a desecration. And he remembers the night when he was young, when a big wind came up, a big windstorm. And it seems as though the greenhouses were great ships that were going their own way. And here is this

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amazingly evocative poem called: BIG WIND Where the greenhouse is going, lunging into the lashing wind driving water so far down the river all the faucets stopped.

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So we drained the manure-machine for the steam plant, pumping the stale mixture into the rusty boilers, watching the pressure gauge waiver over to red as the seams hissed and the live steam drove to the far end of the rose-house, where the worst wind

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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,

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ploughing with her stiff prow, bucking into the wind-waves that broke over the whole of her, flailing her sides with spray, flinging loose long strings of wet across the rooftop, finally veering, wearing themselves out, merely whistling thinly under

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the wind-vents. She sailed until the calm morning, carrying her full cargo of roses. And as they're doing at this time of year, some TRANSPLANTING

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Washing hands transplanting, turning and tamping, lifting the young plants with two fingers, sifting in a palm-full of fresh loam, one swift movement, then plumping in the bunched roots, a single twist of the thumbs, a tamping and turning, all in one,

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quick on the wooden bench, a shaking down, while the stem stays straight. Once, twice, and a faint third thump, into the flat-box it goes, ready for the long days under the sloped glass. The sun warming the fine loam, the young horns winding

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and unwinding, creaking their thin spines, the underleaves, the smallest buds breaking into nakedness, the blossoms extending out into the sweet air, the whole flower extending upward, stretching and reaching.

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And that for him really is a continuous symbol that comes: the flower, the man, the animal, extending outward, stretching and reaching. As you've probably noticed, the structure of these poems is generally dramatic. He gives you a scene or a setting,

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and then he gives you some incident in that setting, which he then paints very, very vividly. So he evokes a whole scene, and atmosphere, and it's usually a dramatic one. Here's another one from the same series. And it is a remembrance

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when he was on top of the greenhouses and could not get down and everyone thought he was going to fall. And here's an instance we all had of the similar thing when you can't get down, you think you may be able to fly or you're just gonna fall

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off and die. And he calls it: CHILD ON TOP OF A GREENHOUSE The wind billowing out the seat of my britches, my feet crackling splinters of glass and dried putty, the half-grown

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chrysanthemum staring up like accusers, up through the streaked glass, flashing with sunlight, a few white clouds all rushing eastward, a line of elms plunging and tossing like horses, and everyone, everyone pointing up and shouting!

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And the final poem in that series is of the three women who transform in here, I think quite obviously, to the Three Fates. The three German women, he was of German descent and everyone who worked at the business in the greenhouse was of German

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descent. The three old women who work there who he remembers in this one of his most famous poems, as I said, seem to transform very, very readily to me into the Three Fates. FRAU BAUMAN, FRAU SCHMIDT, FRAU SCHWARTZE

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Gone the three ancient ladies who creaked on the greenhouse ladders, reaching up white strings to wind, to wind the sweet-pea tendrils, the smilax, nasturtiums, the climbing roses, to straighten carnations, red chrysanthemums. The stiff stems,

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jointed like corn, they tied and tucked, these nurses of nobody else. Quicker than birds, they dipped up and sifted the dirt. They sprinkled and shook. They stood astride pipes, their skirts billowing out wide into tents, their hands twinkling

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with wet. Like witches they flew along rows keeping creation at ease. With a tendril for needle they sewed up the air with a stem. They teased out the seed with a cold kept asleep. All the coils, loops and whorls. They trellised the sun, they plotted

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for more than themselves. I remember how they picked me up, a spindly kid, pinching and poking my thin ribs till I lay in their laps, laughing, weak as a whiffet. Now, when I'm alone and cold in my bed, they still

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hover over me, these ancient leathery crones, with their bandanas stiffened with sweat, and their thorn-bitten wrists, and their snuff-laden breath blowing lightly over me in my first sleep.

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Here's another remember from childhood, his father was very, very masculine. And too, obviously, he chooses as one of his main symbols in whom to approach, to have resolution for, who becomes his God symbol, was also rather rowdy-ish. And

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here is a rememberance from his childhood, much like the last one, "Child in the Greenhouse," and it's called, "My Papa's Waltz," and is one of his more anthologized poems. MY PAPA'S WALTZ

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The whiskey on your breath could make a small boy dizzy, but I hung on like death. Such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pans slid from the kitchen shelf. My mother's countenance could not unfrown itself. The hand that held my

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wrist was battered on one knuckle. At every step you missed my right ear scraped a buckle. You beat time on my head with a palm caked hard by dirt, then waltzed me off to bed still clinging to your shirt.

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Here's another poem called, "The Minimal," and it's very interesting when you analyze the last two lines, but it shows his concern with the minutia of life, the really similar things in life and how they contain importance that if he could

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commune with it, if he could merge with it, would allow him then because of the wisdom of the place of that minimal being, to find a steady place to stand whereby he could turn and move up the spiritual ladder. And this is one of the nicest poems

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in this area and it's called: THE MINIMAL, and it goes like this: I studied the lives on a leaf: the little sleepers, numb nudgers in cold dimensions, beetles in caves, newts,

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stone-deaf fishes, lice tethered to long limp subterranean weeds, squirmers in bogs, and bacterial creepers wriggling through wounds like elvers in ponds, their wan mouths kissing the warm sutures, cleaning and caressing, creeping and healing.

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And what's interesting, he wants to have a sexual act there in the end and in his poems, as I said, his love poems are very erotic. When he thinks of these small bits of life is that as they go about their existences, they are calling and caressing,

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cooping and healing. And he feels that God is in all objects and all things in that life, as he said in more than one occasion, is holy. And this brings us to a rather long poem, which I will read to end this half hour which has gone very

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quickly. And it was a series, this is one of the series of poems called, "The Lost Son," and the names of the poems are: "The Lost Son," "The Long Alley," "A Field of Light," "The Shape of Fire," then in the next book, which is called, "Praise

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to the End!" the poems are called, "Where Kock Is Open Wide," "I Need, I Need," "Bring The Day," "Give Way Ye Gates," "The Long Alley," "Praise To The End," "Unfold, Unfold," "I Cry, Love, Love." These are very, very original poems in which the

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poet - very, very different from what we did- we've talked about before yet very similar - attempts to go back to what he felt when he was not yet born, one year old, two year old, four year old eight year old, before he actually could think and move

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the distinctions between things. Let me give you an idea of what I'm talking about, if I can find it here, maybe. In many of the poems he has to ask questions because he cannot differentiate between what's going on because his mind cannot see the

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differences. So I'm gonna give you an example: in one of the books, "Where Knock Is Open Wide," which is Christopher Smart's line for birth, we have these these lines: A kitten can bite with his feet. Papa and Mama have more teeth."

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Well, again, he cannot differentiate between mama and papa's teeth and the fact that the kitten, biting his feet, is really scratching him. And he says that anyone can understand these poems though they may seem very difficult at first, if you

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allow yourself to go back into your unconscious, if you allow the poem to take you to a time in childhood, when you're just experience things through your senses. This one continues: "A cat can bite with his feet. Mama and Papa have more teeth. Sit

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and play under the rocker until the cows all have puppies. His ears haven't time. Sing me a sleep-song, please. A real hurt is soft. Once upon a tree I came across a time, it wasn't even as a ghoulie as in a dream.

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And he goes on and you can hear a lot of maybe fun memories of things such as, "once upon a tree, I came across a time." He obviously has gotten the words confused as a kid and means once upon a time, I came across a tree. And other times when he

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says "sit and play in the rocker until the cows," and you may have thought the next line was going to be come home. And yet what he says is "all have puppies," because again, he cannot differentiate anything in the world. He's too young. Well,

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the poem, I'm going to read you, "The Lost Son," deals with him a quite a bit older, his father has died and he has come back looking for his father, and all of the sections are numbered. And the first one is called, "The Flight," and in the flight,

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he is just running away from the death of his father and just wants to run as fast as he can. And when he says that he is going fishing, he is also going fishing in the the old wound, which is the belly button which connects him with his parents

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and also into the pond of the unconscious where he goes all the time. So he's going into himself. But notice the snail and the birds and the worms he talks to. Again, he wants to be with minimal forms of life, because if he can get his feet

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set down in the lowest rung of existence, then he will have a place from which to move towards spiritual rejuvenation, which is what this poem is about. So here is the first part: THE FLIGHT

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(Woodlawn is a cemetery and it's a cemetery in fact where his father was born.) At Woodlawn I heard the dead cry out: I was lulled by the slamming of iron, a slow drip over stones, toads brooding in

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wells. All the leaves stuck out their tongues. I shook the softening chalk of my bones, saying, snail, snail, glister me forward, bird, soft-sigh me home, worm, be with me. This is my hard time.

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Fished in an old wound, a soft pond of repose. Nothing nibbled my line, not even the minnows came. Sat in an empty house watching shadows crawl, scratching. There was one fly.

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Voice, come out of the silence. Say something. Appear in the form of a spider or a moth beating the curtain. Tell me: which is the way I take? Out of what door do I go? Where and to whom?

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Dark hollows said, lee to the wind, the moon said, back of an eel, the salt said, look by the sea. Your tears are not enough praise, and you will find no comfort here, in the kingdom of bang and blab. Running lightly over spongy ground, past the

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pasture of flat stones, the three elms, the sheep strewn on a field, over a rickety bridge toward the quick-water, wrinkling and rippling. Hunting along the rivers, down among the rubbish, the bug-riddled foliage, by the muddy pond-edge,

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by the bog-holes, by the shrunken lake, shrunk and hunting in the heat of summere. The shape of the rat? It's bigger than that. It's less than a leg and more than a nose. Just under the water it usually goes.

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Is it sort of like a mouse? Can it wrinkle its nose? Could it come in the house on the tips of its toes? Take the skin of a cat and the back of an eel, then roll them in grease, that's the way it would feel. It's sleek, like an otter with wide webby

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toes just under the water it usually goes. Part two, a very short section, THE PIT. We're getting to the lowest place one can get before the movement upward. Where do the roots go? Look down under the leaves. Who put the

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moss there? These stones have been here too long. Who stunned the dirt into noise? Ask the mole, he knows. I feel the slime of a wet nest. Beware Mother Mildew. Nibble again, fish nerves.

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Three, THE GIBBER, or Incoherence. At the wood's mouth by the cave's door, I listened to something I had heard before. Dogs of the groin barked and howled, the sun was against me, the moon would not have me. The

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weeds whined, the snakes cried, the cows and briars said to me: Die. What a small song. What slow clouds. What dark water. Hath the rain a father? All the caves are ice. Only the snow's here.

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I'm cold, I'm cold all over. Rub me in father and mother. Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones. What gliding shape beckoning through halls, stood poised on the stair, fell dreamily down? From the mouths of jugs perched on

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many shelves, I saw substance flowing that cold morning. Like a slither of eels that watery cheek as my own tongue kissed my lips awake. Is this the storm's heart? The ground is unstilling itself. My

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veins are running nowhere. Do the bones cast out their fire? Is the seed leaving the old bed? These buds are live as birds. Where are, where are the tears of the world? Let the kisses resound, flat like a butcher's palm. Let the gestures freeze;

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our doom is already decided. All the windows are burning! What's left of my life? I want the old rage, the lash of primordial milk! Goodbye, goodbye, old stones. the time-order is going, I have married my hands to perpetual agitation, I run, I

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run to the whistle of money. Money money money, water water water. How cool the grass is. Has the bird left? The stalk still sways. Has the worm a shadow? What do the clouds say? These sweeps of light undo me. Look, look, the ditch is running

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white! I've more veins than a tree! Kiss me, ashes, I'm falling through a dark swirl. And with that section done, "The Gibber," as he goes into just asking one question after another seems to fall through

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one time and memory to another, going back to an earlier time. He then in Part Four begins to return to himself and a resolution of his father's death, and where he stands in his spiritual journey, and it's called, "The Return," and this

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takes place completely during a winter evening, in his memory in the winter evenings in the greenhouse, and the memory is this: THE RETURN, Part Four

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The way to the boiler was dark, dark all the way, over slippery cinders through the long greenhouse. The roses kept breathing in the dark. They had many mouths to breathe with. My knees made little winds underneath where the weeds

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slept. There was always a single light swinging by the fire-pit, where the fireman pulled out ro- [cut-off] -slowly over the white snow. There were many kinds of cool air. Then came steam. Pipe-knock. Scurry of warm over

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small plants. Ordnung! Ordnung! Papa is coming! A fine haze moved off the leaves, frost melted on far panes. The rose, the chrysanthemum turned toward the light. Even the hushed forms, the bent yellowy weeds moved in a slow up-sway.

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Five, and as that vision of life begin to come into the greenhouse, once more, marks his mind, he then remembers moving out on that winter morning and getting a sense of the light and getting a sense of the beginning of spirituality that it will

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return, that there are these moments when you are one with the spiritual. Part Five, IT WAS BEGINNING WINTER It was beginning winter, and in-between time, the landscape

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still partly brown. The bones of weeds kept swinging in the wind, above the blue snow. It was beginning winter, the light moved slowly over the frozen field, over the dry seed-crowns, the beautiful surviving bones swinging in the wind. Light

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traveled over the wide field, stayed. The weeds stopped swinging. The mind moved, not alone, through the clear air, in the silence. Was it light? Was it light within? Was it light within light? Stillness becoming alive, yet still? A lively

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understandable spirit once entertained you. It will come again. Be still. Wait. That is Theodore Roethke whose birthday we are celebrating today. He again was born on May 25th, 1908. And we will continue

00:33:27.250 - 00:34:55.360

reading Roethke after we take a small music break, and we'll be back then with some announcements. This is Mort Marcus again and I'd like to read you some announcements. First of all, the first half hour of this program

00:34:56.080 - 00:35:10.900

was presented by Stapleton's Natural Foods Grocery and KUSP wants to thank them for their support that helps to make that half-hour programming possible. Stapleton's Natural Foods Grocery specializes in organic and commercial produce at 415

00:35:10.930 - 00:35:30.850

River Street in Santa Cruz. On May 25th at 12:30, Elizabeth Sadoff joined "State of the Arts" as interviewer for the visual arts, an evening of Russian arts. Patrick Clark discusses the program scheduled at Cabrillo College opening on

00:35:30.850 - 00:35:47.860

June 6th through June 19th. So that's May 25th, tomorrow at 12:30 on "State of the Arts" right here on KUSP. Then at 12:45, "Pirates of Penzance" at Mountain Community Theater, the classic Gilbert and Sullivan Musical opens May 27th at MCT's

00:35:47.860 - 00:36:12.040

home in Ben Lomand and will be the subject from 12:45 to one o'clock. So tune in Elizabeth Sadoff tomorrow and "State of the Arts" right here at KUSP. While we are discussing the poetry of Theodore Roethke, and

00:36:12.760 - 00:36:32.410

I would like to continue with it, I see I'm not gonna have nearly the time I thought. But let me get on to some of the other kinds of poems that he wrote. First of all, some of the comic poems that he wrote, which are these little wonderful

00:36:32.410 - 00:37:01.240

nonsense poems, and I'll read several of those to you. And this is another sense of him, not so intense, but very, very humorous. And I will read these poems to you now. Here's: THE COW

00:37:02.470 - 00:37:19.090

There once was a cow with a double udder. When I think of it now, I just have to shudder. She was too much for one you can bet your life. She had to be milked by a man and his wife. One of my favorites, "The Sloth," a very strange animal

00:37:19.090 - 00:37:30.700

and he- even in the sound not only of the rhymes, but of the rhythms and the words he chooses, really gets this great sense of the sloth. Remember, that's the animal that hangs upside down on a branch of a tree and then just goes to

00:37:30.700 - 00:37:42.700

sleep. It looks a little bit like a small bear. Here's what Roethke says about: THE SLOTH In moving slow he has no peer. You ask him something in his

00:37:42.700 - 00:38:06.490

ear, he thinks about it for a year. And then before he says a word there, upside down (unlike a bird), he will assume that you have heard. A most exasperating lug. But should you call his manners smug, he'll sigh and give his branch a hug. Then off

00:38:06.490 - 00:38:31.150

again to sleep he goes, still swaying gently by his toes. And you just know he knows, he knows. Another one called: DINKY Oh, what's the weather in a beard? It's windy there, and

00:38:31.150 - 00:38:50.380

rather weird, and when you think the sky has cleared, why, there's Dirty Dinky. Suppose you walked out in a storm, with nothing on to keep you warm, and then step barefoot on a worm, of course, it's Dirty Dinky. As I was crossing a hot hot plain, I

00:38:50.380 - 00:39:08.560

saw a sight that caused me pain. You asked me before, I'll tell you again: it looked like Dirty Dinky. Last night, you lay a-sleeping? No! The room was thirty-five below, the sheets and blankets turned to snow. He'd gotten in: Dirty Dinky. You

00:39:08.560 - 00:39:27.640

better watch the things you do. You better watch the things you do. You're part of him, he's part of you. You may be Dirty Dinky. Also, he was very, very famous for his love poems, his

00:39:27.670 - 00:39:41.020

wonderful, erotic love poems. And I'm going to read his most famous love poem and maybe one of the great love poems of the Western world. And it's a humorous love poem called, "I Knew A Woman." And it's some intensely rhymed, but what's so

00:39:41.020 - 00:39:58.780

interesting is that he is using very strange images for love poems. And not only is he using strange images, but he gives this wonderful sense of the male who is speaking as the victim of the female. She is the leader in the sexual relationship and at

00:39:58.780 - 00:40:15.460

the same time, she's not only the leader, but he very gently goes along with whatever she wants to do. Listen to these wonderful images though, and enjoy this very, very witty, self-mocking poem and which is extremely erotic. And yet the

00:40:15.460 - 00:40:28.420

words really can be taken two or three ways, so he is punning all the time. And here it is. It's called: I KNEW A WOMAN I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, when small bird sighed,

00:40:28.570 - 00:40:48.190

she would side back at them. Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one: a shape a bright container can contain. Of her choice virtues only gods should speak, or English poets who grew up on Greek (I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek). How

00:40:48.190 - 00:41:04.720

well her wishes went! She stroked my chin, she taught me turn, and counter-turn, and stand. She taught me touch, that undulant white skin. I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand, she was the sickle. I, poor, I, the rake, coming behind her for

00:41:04.720 - 00:41:21.100

her pretty sake (But what prodigious mowing we did make). Love likes a gander, and adores a goose: Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize. She played it quick, she played it light and loose. My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees.

00:41:21.190 - 00:41:40.630

Her several parts could keep up pure repose, or one hip quiver with a mobile nose (She moved in circles, and those circles moved). Let's seed be grass, and grass turn into hay: I'm martyr to emotion not my own. What's freedom for? To know eternity. I

00:41:40.630 - 00:42:02.860

swear she cast a shadow white as stone. But who would count eternity in days? Those old bones live to learn her wanton ways (I measure time by how a body sways). And let me read you another one. The suggestions in these poems

00:42:02.860 - 00:42:20.740

is wonderful. For example, when he does that great line, everyone loves a gander and a goose. The word goose in there, of course, can be taken in several different ways as so many of the poems can. Here's another poem called, "Words for

00:42:20.740 - 00:42:34.240

the Wind," which is the title of one of his songs and you can really hear the lyricism he can get in these poems. Here's: WORDS FOR THE WIND Love, love, a lily's my care, she's sweeter than a tree.

00:42:34.360 - 00:42:53.080

Loving, I use the air most lovingly: I breathe. Mad in the wind I wear myself as I should be, all's even with the odd, my brother the vine is glad. Are flower and seed the same? What do the great dead say? Sweet Phoebe, she's my theme: She

00:42:53.080 - 00:43:10.810

sways whenever I sway. "Oh love me while I am, you green thing in my way!" I cried, and the birds came down and made my song their own. Motion can keep me still: She kissed me out of thought as a lovely substance will. She wandered, I did not. I

00:43:10.810 - 00:43:30.520

stayed, and light fell across her pulsing throat. I stared, and a garden stone slowly became the moon. The shallow stream runs slack, the wind creaks slowly by, out of a nestling's beak comes a tremulous cry I cannot answer back. A shape from

00:43:30.520 - 00:43:46.030

deep in the eye, that woman I saw in a stone, keeps pace when I walk alone. And that's one of four prose- of poems called, "Words for the Wind." Since time is going so quickly here, I'm just going to

00:43:46.390 - 00:44:03.430

keep moving on to other poems. At one point, he wrote five poems called, "Meditations of an Old Woman," in which he became an old woman thinking about her life and he had written one poem earlier on the theme of an old woman, and he had gotten this

00:44:03.430 - 00:44:17.650

from William Carlos Williams poem called, "The Widow's Lament in Springtime." And what he did was, that was a rather short poem, around 20, 25 lines. What he did was, he extended it to these very, very long poems about an old woman thinking

00:44:17.890 - 00:44:33.250

about her death and about the life around her and how she is losing her touch with life, her sensuous touch or creative touch with life, because she is very close to death. And I will just read one of those, which is called I'M HERE

00:44:33.250 - 00:44:56.710

and is the "Second Meditation of an Old Woman." So here, he takes on the mask of an old woman: Is it enough? The sun loosening the frost on December windows, the glitter of wet in the first of morning? The sound of voices,

00:44:56.710 - 00:45:10.350

young voices mixed with sleighbells, coming across snow in early evening? utside, the same sparrows icker in the eaves. I'm tired f tiny noises. The April heeping, the vireo's

00:45:10.350 - 00:45:28.160

nsistence, the prattle of the oung no longer pleases. Behind he child's archness lurks the ad animal. How needles and corners perplex me! Dare I shrink to a hag, the worst surprise a corner could have, a witch who sleeps with

00:45:28.160 - 00:45:45.230

her horse? Some things are worse. I was queen of the vale for a short while, living all my heart's summer alone, ward of my spirit running through high grasses, my thighs brushing against flower-crowns; leaning

00:45:45.230 - 00:45:59.330

out of all breath, bracing my back against the sapling making it quiver with my body. At the stream's edge, trailing a vague finger, flesh awkward, half-alive, fearful of high places, in love with horses, in

00:45:59.330 - 00:46:15.290

love with stuffs, silks, rubbing my nose in the wool of blankets, bemused, pleased to be, mindful of cries, the meaningful whisper, the wren, the cat-bird. So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, an

00:46:15.290 - 00:46:32.300

intolerable waiting, a longing for another place and time, another condition. I stayed: a willow to the wind. The bats twittered at noon, the swallows flew in and out of the smokeless chimneys, I sang to

00:46:32.300 - 00:46:48.860

the edges of flame, my skin whiter in the soft weather, my voice softer. I remember walking down a path, down wooden steps toward a weedy garden and my dress caught on rose briar. When I bent to

00:46:48.860 - 00:47:03.410

untangle myself, the scent of the half-open buds came up over me. I thought I was going to smother. In a slow coming out of sleep, on the sill of the eyes, something flitters, a thing we feel at evening or by old doors,

00:47:03.530 - 00:47:20.780

or when we stand at the edge of a thicket, and the ground chill comes closer to us. From under the dry leaves, a beachy wetness. The bonnie delighting in thresholds rocks in and out of itself. A bird small as a leaf sings in the first

00:47:20.780 - 00:47:34.850

sunlight. At a time I was so sick, the whole place shook whenever I got a chill. I closed my eyes and saw small figures dancing, a congress of tree shrews and rats romping around the fire, jumping

00:47:34.880 - 00:47:53.420

up and down on their hind feet, their four paws joined together like hands. They seemed very happy. In my grandmother's inner eye, so she told me when I was little, a bird always kept singing. She was a serious woman.

00:47:56.510 - 00:48:13.850

My geranium is dying for all I can do. Still leaning toward the last place the sun was. I've tried I don't know how many times to replant it. But these roses I can wear them by looking away. The eyes rejoice in the act of seeing and the fresh

00:48:13.880 - 00:48:30.320

after-image, without staring like a lout or a moping adolescent, without commotion. Look at the four trees at the end of the garden. The flat branch of that hemlock holds the last of the sun, rocking it like a sun-struck pond and a light

00:48:30.320 - 00:48:49.280

wind. I prefer the still joy, the wasp drinking at the edge my cup, a snake lifting its head, a snail's music. What's weather to me? Even carp would die in this river. I need

00:48:49.280 - 00:49:10.370

a pond with small eels and a windy orchard. I'm no midge of that and this. The dirt glitters like salt, birds are around. I have all the singing I would, I'm not far from a stream. It's not my first dying. I can hold this valley loose in my lap, in

00:49:10.370 - 00:49:30.110

my arms. If the wind means me, I'm here, here. And as we move to [unintelligible], I'd like to read one of the more important poems, two more poems of Theodore Roethke whose birthday we are celebrating one day early

00:49:30.140 - 00:49:49.280

today. And it is from his final sequence which includes just incredible poems, called- from, "Journey to the Interior." It was published as a group of poems which were called, "The Far Field," in 1964, and include poems like, "The Longing,"

00:49:49.820 - 00:50:03.140

certainly, "Journey to the Interior," which is not only to the interior of the country, but to the interior of his unconscious, "Along Waters," "The Far Field," the name of it itself and some other wonderful poems. And this whole sequence

00:50:03.140 - 00:50:21.230

really comes to a final kind of end for him. In his 1962 poem called, "The Rose," he's one year away from his death now, and I'd like to read it for you. And, "The Rose," like the light becomes a symbol of his always being in continuance as he goes

00:50:21.230 - 00:50:34.190

once more onto a journey in a very specific place, looking for the spiritual light. THE ROSE There are those to whom place is unimportant, but this place,

00:50:34.490 - 00:50:50.090

where sea and fresh water meet, is important. Where the hawks sway out into the wind, without a single wingbeat, and the eagles sail low over the fir trees, and the gulls cry against the crows in the curved harbors, and the tide rises up against

00:50:50.090 - 00:51:06.560

the grass nibbled by sheep and rabbits. A time for watching the tide, for the heron's hieratic fishing, for the sleepy cries of the towhee, the morning birds gone, the twittering finches, but still the flash of the

00:51:06.560 - 00:51:24.920

kingfisher, the wingbeat of the scoter, the sun a ball of fire coming down over the water, the last geese crossing against the reflected afterlight, the moon retreating into a vague cloud-shape to the cries of the owl, the eerie whooper. The old

00:51:24.920 - 00:51:43.310

log subsides with the lessening waves, and there is silence. I sway outside myself into the darkening currents, into the small spillage of driftwood, the waters swirling past the tiny headlands. Was it here I wore a crown of birds for a moment

00:51:43.520 - 00:52:02.360

while on a far point of the rocks the light heightened, and below, in a mist out of nowhere, the first rain gathered? As when a ship sails with a light wind, the waves less than the ripples made by rising fish, the lacelike wrinkless of the

00:52:02.360 - 00:52:20.150

wake widening, thinning out, sliding away from the traveler's eye. The prow pitching easily up and down, the whole ship rolling slightly sideways, the stern high, dipping like a child's boat in a pond, our motion continues.

00:52:21.620 - 00:52:39.950

But this rose, this rose in the sea-wind, stays, stays in its true place, flowering out of the dark, widening at high noon, face upward, a single wild rose, struggling out of the white embrace of the morning-glory, out of the briary hedge, the

00:52:39.950 - 00:52:57.410

tangle of matted underbrush, beyond the clover, the ragged hay, beyond the sea pine, the oak, the wind-tipped madrona, moving with the waves, the undulating driftwood, where the slow creek winds down to the black sand of the shore with its

00:52:57.410 - 00:53:13.760

thick grassy scum and crabs scuttling back into their glistening craters. And I think of roses, roses, white and red, in the wide six-hundred-foot greenhouses, and my father standing astride

00:53:13.760 - 00:53:33.170

the cement benches, lifting me high over the four-foot stems, the Mrs. Russells, and his own elaborate hybrids, and how those flowerheads seemed to flow toward me, to beckon me, only a child, out of myself. What need for heaven, then, with that man,

00:53:34.310 - 00:53:53.690

and those roses? What do they tell us, sound and silence? I think of American sounds in the silence: on the banks of the tombstone, the wind-harps having their say, the thrush singing alone, that easy

00:53:53.690 - 00:54:09.740

bird, the killdeer whistling away from me, the mimetic chortling of the catbird down in the corner of the garden, among the raggedy lilacs, the bobolink skirring from a broken fencepost, the bluebird, lover of holes in old wood, lilting

00:54:09.740 - 00:54:26.720

its light song, and that thin cry, like a needle piercing the ear, the insistent cicada, and the ticking of snow around oil drums in the Dakotas, the thin whine of telephone wires in the wind of a Michigan winter, the shriek of nails as old shingles

00:54:26.720 - 00:54:41.210

are ripped from the top of a roof, the bulldozer backing away, the hiss of the sandblaster, and the deep chorus of horns coming up from the streets in early morning. I return to the twittering of swallows above water, and that

00:54:41.210 - 00:54:56.810

sound, that single sound, when the mind remembers all, and gently the light enters the sleeping soul, a sound so thin it could not woo a bird. Beautiful my desire, and the place of my desire.

00:54:58.820 - 00:55:15.260

I think of the rock singing, and light making its own silence, at the edge of a ripening meadow, in early summer, the moon lolling in the close elm, a shimmer of silver, or that lonely time before the breaking of morning when the slow freight

00:55:15.260 - 00:55:30.530

winds along the edge of the ravaged hillside, and the wind tries the shape of a tree, while the moon lingers, and a drop of rain water hangs at the tip of a leaf shifting and awakening sunlight like the eye of a new-caught fish.

00:55:34.040 - 00:55:51.140

I live with rocks, their weeds, their filmy fringes of green, their harsh edges, their holes cut by the sea-slime, far from the crash of the long swell. The oily, tar-laden walls of the toppling waves, where the salmon ease their way into the kelp

00:55:51.140 - 00:56:11.240

beds, and the sea rearranges itself among the small islands. Near this rose, in this grove of sun-parched, wind-warped madronas, among the half-dead trees, I came upon the true ease of myself, as if another man appeared out of the depths of my

00:56:11.240 - 00:56:32.480

being, and I stood outside myself, beyond becoming and perishing, as something wholly other, as if I swayed out on the wildest wave alive, and yet was still. And I rejoiced in being what I was: In the lilac change, the whit reptilian calm, in the

00:56:32.480 - 00:56:46.730

bird beyond the bough, the single one with all the air to greet him as he flies, the dolphin rising from the darkening waves. And in this rose, this rose in the sea-wind, rooted in stone,

00:56:46.970 - 00:57:11.040

keeping the whole of light, gathering to itself sound and silence. Mine and the sea-wind's. Tonight we have been celebrating the birthday of Theodore Roethke, the great American poet whose birthday is tomorrow. He

00:57:11.040 - 00:57:30.120

was born on May 25th, 1908. He died in 1963, so this is the [Above text repeated from ere, starting at "The Lost Son: 25th year after his death. And I would like to leave you with one poem by him. I would urge you to go out and get his poems, there

00:57:30.120 - 00:57:45.720

are so many that I have not been able to read. He lived on the West Coast. He was a man who had a great vision of nature. He is really a West Coast poet. Though he came to Michigan, he stayed from 1947 until his death in 1962 at the University of

00:57:45.720 - 00:58:18.770

Washington, Seattle. He was an enormous influence on many poets, certainly the two poets who do the show, Joe Stroud an yours truly, Richard Hugo, Jame Wright, you can just name the he Return, part

00:57:56.580 - 00:58:12.930

by the dozens, he was a inspired teacher. And so he i our first birthday poet thi year and certainly I can't thin of a better one to start off ou birthdays with. Let me just tel you that we will be back nex week, Joe will be back nex

00:58:12.930 - 00:58:29.550

week, and that Plaza Books has provided a grant that helped make this last half hour of programming possible. Plaza Books is located on the Pacific Garden Mall in Santa Cruz, we appreciate their support. cut-off]

00:58:29.490 - 00:58:48.620

-slowly over the white snow. There were many kinds of cool air. Then came steam. Pipe-knock. Scurry of warm over small plants. Ordnung! Ordnung! Papa is coming! A fine haze moved off the leaves, frost melted on far panes. The rose,

00:58:48.700 - 00:59:08.570

the chrysanthemum turned toward the light. Even the hushed forms, the bent yellowy weeds moved in a slow up-sway. Five, and as that vision of life begin to come into the greenhouse, once more, marks his mind, he then remembers moving out on

00:59:08.660 - 00:59:28.030

that winter morning and getting a sense of the light and getting a sense of the beginning of spirituality that it will return, that there are these moments when you are one with the spiritual. Part Five, IT WAS BEGINNING WINTER It was

00:59:28.110 - 00:59:48.820

beginning winter, and in-between time, the landscape still partly brown. The bones of weeds kept swinging in the wind, above the blue snow. It was beginning winter, the light moved slowly over the frozen field, over the dry seed-crowns, the beautiful

00:59:48.900 - 01:00:08.520

surviving bones swinging in the wind. Light traveled over the wide field, stayed. The weeds stopped swinging. The mind moved, not alone, through the clear air, in the silence. Was it light? Was it light within? Was it light within light?

01:00:08.610 - 01:00:29.310

Stillness becoming alive, yet still? A lively understandable spirit once entertained you. It will come again. Be still. Wait. That is Theodore Roethke whose birthday we are celebrating today. He again was born on May 25th, 1908. And we will continue

01:00:29.390 - 01:00:47.860

reading Roethke after we take a small music break, and we'll be back then with some announcements. This is Mort Marcus again and I'd like to read you some announcements. First of all, the first half hour of this program was

01:00:47.940 - 01:01:07.560

presented by Stapleton's Natural Foods Grocery and KUSP wants to thank them for their support that helps to make that half-hour programming possible. Stapleton's Natural Foods Grocery specializes in organic and commercial produce at 415

01:01:07.650 - 01:01:27.020

River Street in Santa Cruz. On May 25th at 12:30, Elizabeth Sadoff joined "State of the Arts" as interviewer for the visual arts, an evening of Russian arts. Patrick Clark discusses the program scheduled at Cabrillo College opening on

01:01:27.110 - 01:01:47.060

June 6th through June 19th. So that's May 25th, tomorrow at 12:30 on "State of the Arts" right here on KUSP. Then at 12:45, "Pirates of Penzance" at Mountain Community Theater, the classic Gilbert and Sullivan Musical opens May 27th at MCT's

01:01:47.140 - 01:02:07.020

home in Ben Lomand and will be the subject from 12:45 to one o'clock. So tune in Elizabeth Sadoff tomorrow and "State of the Arts" right here at KUSP. While we are discussing the poetry of Theodore Roethke, and I would like to continue with

01:02:07.100 - 01:02:26.970

it, I see I'm not gonna have nearly the time I thought. But let me get on to some of the other kinds of poems that he wrote. First of all, some of the comic poems that he wrote, which are these little wonderful nonsense poems, and I'll read

01:02:27.060 - 01:02:47.760

several of those to you. And this is another sense of him, not so intense, but very, very humorous. And I will read these poems to you now.Here's: THE COW There once was a cow with a double udder. When I think of it now, I just have to shudder. She

01:02:47.840 - 01:03:08.210

was too much for one you can bet your life. She had to be milked by a man and his wife. One of my favorites, "The Sloth," a very strange animal and he- even in the sound not only of the rhymes, but of the rhythms and the words he chooses, really

01:03:08.290 - 01:03:28.580

gets this great sense of the sloth. Remember, that's the animal that hangs upside down on a branch of a tree and then just goes to sleep. It looks a little bit like a small bear. Here's what Roethke says about: THE SLOTH In moving slow he has no

01:03:28.660 - 01:03:48.700

peer. You ask him something in his ear, he thinks about it for a year. And then before he says a word there, upside down (unlike a bird), he will assume that you have heard. A most exasperating lug. But should you call his manners smug, he'll

01:03:48.780 - 01:04:08.330

sigh and give his branch a hug. Then off again to sleep he goes, still swaying gently by his toes. And you just know he knows, he knows. Another one called DINKY Oh, what's the weather in a beard? It's windy there, and rather weird, and

01:04:08.410 - 01:04:28.860

when you think the sky has cleared, why, there's Dirty Dinky. Suppose you walked out in a storm, with nothing on to keep you warm, and then step barefoot on a worm, of course, it's Dirty Dinky. As I was crossing a hot hot plain, I saw a sight that

01:04:28.940 - 01:04:49.070

caused me pain. You asked me before, I'll tell you again: it looked like Dirty Dinky. Last night, you lay a-sleeping? No! The room was thirty-five below, the sheets and blankets turned to snow. He'd gotten in: Dirty Dinky. You better watch the

01:04:49.150 - 01:05:09.440

things you do. You better watch the things you do. You're part of him, he's part of you. You may be Dirty Dinky. Also, he was very, very famous for his love poems, his wonderful, erotic love poems. And I'm going to read his most famous love poem

01:05:09.520 - 01:05:30.050

and maybe one of the great love poems of the Western world. And it's a humorous love poem called, "I Knew A Woman." And it's some intensely rhymed, but what's so interesting is that he is using very strange images for love poems. And not only is he

01:05:30.140 - 01:05:49.680

using strange images, but he gives this wonderful sense of the male who is speaking as the victim of the female. She is the leader in the sexual relationship and at the same time, she's not only the leader, but he very gently goes along

01:05:49.760 - 01:06:10.050

with whatever she wants to do. Listen to these wonderful images though, and enjoy this very, very witty, self-mocking poem and which is extremely erotic. And yet the words really can be taken two or three ways, so he is punning all the time. And

01:06:10.130 - 01:06:30.340

here it is. It's called: I KNEW A WOMAN. I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, when small bird sighed, she would side back at them. Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one: a shape a bright container can contain. Of her choice virtues

01:06:30.420 - 01:06:49.550

only gods should speak, or English poets who grew up on Greek (I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek). How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin, she taught me turn, and counter-turn, and stand. She taught me touch, that

01:06:49.630 - 01:07:10.080

undulant white skin. I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand, she was the sickle. I, poor, I, the rake, coming behind her for her pretty sake (But what prodigious mowing we did make). Love likes a gander, and adores a goose: Her full lips pursed,

01:07:10.170 - 01:07:30.370

the errant note to seize. She played it quick, she played it light and loose. My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees. Her several parts could keep up pure repose, or one hip quiver with a mobile nose (She moved in circles, and those circles

01:07:30.450 - 01:07:50.820

moved). Let's seed be grass, and grass turn into hay: I'm martyr to emotion not my own. What's freedom for? To know eternity. I swear she cast a shadow white as stone. But who would count eternity in days? Those old bones live to learn her wanton

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ways (I measure time by how a body sways). And let me read you another one. The suggestions in these poems is wonderful. For example, when he does that great line, everyone loves a gander and a goose. The word goose in there, of course, can be taken

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in several different ways as so many of the poems can. Here's another poem called, "Words for the Wind," which is the title of one of his songs and you can really hear the lyricism he can get in these poems. Here's: WORDS FOR THE WIND Love, love,

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a lily's my care, she's sweeter than a tree. Loving, I use the air most lovingly: I breathe. Mad in the wind I wear myself as I should be, all's even with the odd, my brother the vine is glad. Are flower and seed the same? What do the great dead

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say? Sweet Phoebe, she's my theme: She sways whenever I sway. "Oh love me while I am, you green thing in my way!" I cried, and the birds came down and made my song their own. Motion can keep me still: She kissed me out of thought as a

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lovely substance will. She wandered, I did not. I stayed, and light fell across her pulsing throat. I stared, and a garden stone slowly became the moon. The shallow stream runs slack, the wind creaks slowly by, out of a nestling's beak

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comes a tremulous cry I cannot answer back. A shape from deep in the eye, that woman I saw in a stone, keeps pace when I walk alone. And that's one of four prose- of poems called, "Words for the Wind." Since time is going so quickly here, I'm just

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going to keep moving on to other poems. At one point, he wrote five poems called, "Meditations of an Old Woman," in which he became an old woman thinking about her life and he had written one poem earlier on the theme of an old woman, and he

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had gotten this from William Carlos Williams poem called, "The Widow's Lament in Springtime." And what he did was, that was a rather short poem, around 20, 25 lines. What he did was, he extended it to these very, very long poems

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about an old woman thinking about her death and about the life around her and how she is losing her touch with life, her sensuous touch or creative touch with life, because she is very close to death. And I will just read one of those, which is

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called I'M HERE and is the second meditation of an old woman. So here, he takes on the mask of an old woman. Is it enough? The sun loosening the frost on December windows, the glitter of wet in the first of morning? The sound of voices,

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young voices mixed with sleighbells, coming across snow in early evening? Outside, the same sparrows bicker in the eaves. I'm tired of tiny noises. The April cheeping, the vireo's insistence, the prattle of the young no longer pleases. Behind

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the child's archness lurks the bad animal. How needles and corners perplex me! Dare I shrink to a hag, the worst surprise a corner could have, a witch who sleeps with her horse? Some things are worse. I was queen of the vale for a short

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while, living all my heart's summer alone, ward of my spirit running through high grasses, my thighs brushing against flower-crowns; leaning out of all breath, bracing my back against the sapling making it quiver with my body. At the

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stream's edge, trailing a vague finger, flesh awkward, half-alive, fearful of high places, in love with horses, in love with stuffs, silks, rubbing my nose in the wool of blankets, bemused, pleased to be, mindful of cries, the meaningful

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whisper, the wren, the cat-bird. So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, an intolerable waiting, a longing for another place and time, another condition. I stayed: a willow to the wind. The bats twittered at noon, the swallows

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flew in and out of the smokeless chimneys, I sang to the edges of flame, my skin whiter in the soft weather, my voice softer. I remember walking down a path, down wooden steps toward a weedy garden and my dress caught on rose briar. When I bent to

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untangle myself, the scent of the half-open buds came up over me. I thought I was going to smother. In a slow coming out of sleep, on the sill of the eyes, something flitters, a thing we feel at evening or by old doors, or when we stand at

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the edge of a thicket, and the ground chill comes closer to us. From under the dry leaves, a beachy wetness. The bonnie delighting in thresholds rocks in and out of itself. A bird small as a leaf sings in the first sunlight. At a time I was

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so sick, the whole place shook whenever I got a chill. I closed my eyes and saw small figures dancing, a congress of tree shrews and rats romping around the fire, jumping up and down on their hind feet, their four paws joined together like hands. They

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seemed very happy. In my grandmother's inner eye, so she told me when I was little, a bird always kept singing. She was a serious woman. My geranium is dying for all I can do. Still leaning toward the last place the sun was. I've

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tried I don't know how many times to replant it. But these roses I can wear them by looking away. The eyes rejoice in the act of seeing and the fresh after-image, without staring like a lout or a moping adolescent, without commotion.

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Look at the four trees at the end of the garden. The flat branch of that hemlock holds the last of the sun, rocking it like a sun-struck pond and a light wind. I prefer the still joy, the wasp drinking at the edge my cup, a snake lifting its head, a

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snail's music. What's weather to me? Even carp would die in this river. I need a pond with small eels and a windy orchard. I'm no midge of that and this. The dirt glitters like salt, birds are around. I have all the singing I would, I'm not far

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from a stream. It's not my first dying. I can hold this valley loose in my lap, in my arms. If the wind means me, I'm here, here. And as we move to [unintelligible], I'd like to read one of the more important poems, two more poems of

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Theodore Roethke whose birthday we are celebrating one day early today. And it is from his final sequence which includes just incredible poems, called- from, "Journey to the Interior." It was published as a group of poems which were called, "The

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Far Field," in 1964, and include poems like, "The Longing," certainly, "Journey to the Interior," which is not only to the interior of the country, but to the interior of his unconscious, "Along Waters," "The Far Field," the name of it

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itself and some other wonderful poems. And this whole sequence really comes to a final kind of end for him. In his 1962 poem called, "The Rose," he's one year away from his death now, and I'd like to read it for you. And, "The Rose," like the light

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becomes a symbol of his always being in continuance as he goes once more onto a journey in a very specific place, looking for the spiritual light. THE ROSE There are those to whom place is unimportant, but this place, where sea and fresh water meet,

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is important. Where the hawks sway out into the wind, without a single wingbeat, and the eagles sail low over the fir trees, and the gulls cry against the crows in the curved harbors, and the tide rises up against the grass nibbled by sheep and

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rabbits. A time for watching the tide, for the heron's hieratic fishing, for the sleepy cries of the towhee, the morning birds gone, the twittering finches, but still the flash of the kingfisher, the wingbeat of the scoter, the sun a ball of

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fire coming down over the water, the last geese crossing against the reflected afterlight, the moon retreating into a vague cloud-shape to the cries of the owl, the eerie whooper. The old log subsides with the lessening waves, and there is silence. I

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sway outside myself into the darkening currents, into the small spillage of driftwood, the waters swirling past the tiny headlands. Was it here I wore a crown of birds for a moment while on a far point of the rocks the light heightened, and

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below, in a mist out of nowhere, the first rain gathered? As when a ship sails with a light wind, the waves less than the ripples made by rising fish, the lacelike wrinkless of the wake widening, thinning out, sliding away from the traveler's eye.

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The prow pitching easily up and down, the whole ship rolling slightly sideways, the stern high, dipping like a child's boat in a pond, our motion continues. But this rose, this rose in the sea-wind, stays, stays in its true place,

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flowering out of the dark, widening at high noon, face upward, a single wild rose, struggling out of the white embrace of the morning-glory, out of the briary hedge, the tangle of matted underbrush, beyond the clover, the ragged

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hay, beyond the sea pine, the oak, the wind-tipped madrona, moving with the waves, the undulating driftwood, where the slow creek winds down to the black sand of the shore with its thick grassy scum and crabs scuttling back into their

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glistening craters. And I think of roses, roses, white and red, in the wide six-hundred-foot greenhouses, and my father standing astride the cement benches, lifting me high over the four-foot stems, the Mrs. Russells, and his own elaborate

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hybrids, and how those flowerheads seemed to flow toward me, to beckon me, only a child, out of myself. What need for heaven, then, with that man, and those roses? What do they tell us, sound and silence? I think of American sounds in the

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silence: on the banks of the tombstone, the wind-harps having their say, the thrush singing alone, that easy bird, the killdeer whistling away from me, the mimetic chortling of the catbird down in the corner of the garden, among the raggedy

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lilacs, the bobolink skirring from a broken fencepost, the bluebird, lover of holes in old wood, lilting its light song, and that thin cry, like a needle piercing the ear, the insistent cicada, and the ticking of snow around oil drums in the Dakotas,

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the thin whine of telephone wires in the wind of a Michigan winter, the shriek of nails as old shingles are ripped from the top of a roof, the bulldozer backing away, the hiss of the sandblaster, and the deep chorus of horns coming up from the

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streets in early morning. I return to the twittering of swallows above water, and that sound, that single sound, when the mind remembers all, and gently the light enters the sleeping soul, a sound so thin it could not woo a bird.

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Beautiful my desire, and the place of my desire. I think of the rock singing, and light making its own silence, at the edge of a ripening meadow, in early summer, the moon lolling in the close elm, a shimmer of silver, or that lonely time

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before the breaking of morning when the slow freight winds along the edge of the ravaged hillside, and the wind tries the shape of a tree, while the moon lingers, and a drop of rain water hangs at the tip of a leaf shifting and awakening sunlight

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like the eye of a new-caught fish. I live with rocks, their weeds, their filmy fringes of green, their harsh edges, their holes cut by the sea-slime, far from the crash of the long swell. The oily, tar-laden walls of the toppling waves, where the

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salmon ease their way into the kelp beds, and the sea rearranges itself among the small islands. Near this rose, in this grove of sun-parched, wind-warped madronas, among the half-dead trees, I came upon the true ease of myself, as if

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another man appeared out of the depths of my being, and I stood outside myself, beyond becoming and perishing, as something wholly other, as if I swayed out on the wildest wave alive, and yet was still. And I rejoiced in being what I was: In the lilac

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change, the whit reptilian calm, in the bird beyond the bough, the single one with all the air to greet him as he flies, the dolphin rising from the darkening waves. And in this rose, this rose in the sea-wind, rooted in stone, keeping the

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whole of light, gathering to itself sound and silence. Mine and the sea-wind's. Tonight we have been celebrating the birthday of Theodore Roethke, the great American poet whose birthday is tomorrow. He was born on May 25th, 1908. He died

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in 1963, so this is the 25th year after his death. And I would like to leave you with one poem by him. I would urge you to go out and get his poems, there are so many that I have not been able to read. He lived on the West Coast. He was a man who had

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a great vision of nature. He is really a West Coast poet. Though he came to Michigan, he stayed from 1947 until his death in 1962 at the University of Washington, Seattle. He was an enormous influence on many poets, certainly the two poets

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who do the show, Joe Stroud and yours truly, Richard Hugo, James Wright, you can just name them by the dozens, he was an inspired teacher. And so he is our first birthday poet this year and certainly I can't think of a better one to start off our

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birthdays with. Let me just tell you that we will be back next week, Joe will be back next week, and that Plaza Books has provided a grant that helped make this last half hour of programming possible. Plaza Books is located on the Pacific

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Garden Mall in Santa Cruz, we appreciate their support. [cut-off].