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Unknown: {Music] Morton Marcus: My secrets cry aloud. I have no need for tongue. My heart keeps open house. My doors are widely swung. An epic of the eyes, my love with no disguise. My truths

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are all for known, this anguish self-revealed. I'm naked to the bone, with nakedness my shield. Myself is what I wear, I keep the spirits spare. The anger will endure, the deed will speak the truth in language strict and pure. I stopped the lying mouth,

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rage warps my clearest cry to witless agony. That was the first poem in the Collected Poems of one of the greatest American poets who ever lived, his name was Theodore Roethke and he was born on May 25th, 1908. And today on the

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Poetry Show, we're going to celebrate Theodore Roethke's 92nd birthday, maybe three weeks ahead of time, but certainly worthwhile. It is time that we not forget this poet whose works are disappearing from bookstore shelves, and who is certainly

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one of the purest American voices, one of the most deserving of the reputation he had for a short while and died at a rather young age. As I said he was born on May 25th 1908, and he died in 1963, so as you can tell he was five years short

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of sixty. And it was a great, great loss for the country. Roethke is interesting for several reasons: he is a free verse poet whose free verse is amazingly musical and has perfect modulation, both as song when he wants to be lyrical, or

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as speech when he becomes quietly meditative, especially in several long sequences of his last years, which are among the most extraordinary poems, I think, since Whitman, and very much resemble the work of Henry David Thoreau.

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The other reason besides, and I'm going to read both poems, he was a great metrical poet as well and wrote in rhymes and forms. The other reason that he is so American though is that he is anti-rational. He is an absolutely mystical, intuitive

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poet who is in love with nature, he follows Thoreau and Whitman in that way and so many other American poets, and yet is totally unique in his speech, his music, to study his poetry is really a rewarding and deeply felt experience. Again, he is a

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mystic and he finds the wonder of universal oneness in the most minute beings and experiences in life, as well as in the great experiences of life. He was born in Saginaw, Michigan and his family owned a greenhouse there and that really is the

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microcosmic center and metaphor for his life. Going into that greenhouse as a child, even in the dead of winter, and hearing, communing with the plants and their suspiration, their living breath, became part of his whole vision of the world and of the

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small, clinging forms of life. So tonight I'm going to read -- in many ways in chronological order -- from his poems. Another part of Roethke, however, is that he is very funny. And after these deep searches for the self, and when he talks about

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the self, he's really talking about the soul and looking for God in himself and in every aspect of life, he suddenly breaks out and writes these hilarious child limericks or rhymed poems that are just absolutely delightful.

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So in other words, besides everything I've said, he is multifaceted, as far as the way he speaks and the forms in which he speaks. So, nature poet, love poet, meditative poet, mystical poet, is what you have in the great Theodore Roethke. And he

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writes in traditional meters, rhymes for children, and then I think in the best free verse of, well, certainly one of the two of best free verse writers that have written in American poetry, he really is amazing. And since his death now, which of course,

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if you do quick mathematics, is thirty-five years ago. I am really hearing less and less people talk about him and it is really, he is really a poet we should not forget. His work has been collected and I hope you can still get it. There's none

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at the bookshelves in the bookstores, the Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke which came out within three years after his death. And then another book put out by Washington University Press, he taught at Washington University in Seattle, "On the

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Poet and His Craft: The Selected Prose of Theodore Roethke." How do you spell that name? I'll spell a few a few times so that you can start looking his stuff up: R-O-E-T-H-K-E. Again, that is our R-O-E-T-H-K-E. He is German American, a wonderful

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poet. And I'll just read you some of the things that he says here, and to show you from that sort of violent beginning poem that I read another kind of poem. He says this:

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Now I know there are any number of synonyms- No, that's not what I wanted to read, is it? No, it is not. So I lost that one, couldn't have, couldn't have, maybe could have. Okay. At any rate, he- yeah.

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"I was going through, though I didn't realize it at the time, a stage that all contemplative men must go through. The poem I have just written about is a clumsy, innocent, desperate asseveration. I am not speaking of the empirical self when I

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talk about myself, I am not talking about the flesh-bound ego, it's a single word, "myself," the aggregate of the several cells, if you will, the spirit or soul, should we say the self, once perceived becomes the soul. This I was keeping

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spare in my desire for the essential but the spirit need not be spared, can grow gracefully and beautifully, like a tendril, like a flower. I did not know this at the time. This sense I tried later to describe metaphorically, many times."

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And then he quotes a poem called, "A Light Breather." Now remember the poem I began the show with, here is another way he can write with such delicacy and perfection. This is arguably thirty years after the poem I just read, which begins the

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Collected Poems. This is: A LIGHT BREATHER, and this is how he tries to describe the soul. The spirit moves, yet stays: stirs as a blossom stirs, still

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wet from its bud-sheath, slowly unfolding, turning in the light 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 the

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snail, still inward, taking and embracing its surroundings, never wishing itself away, unafraid of what it is, a music in a hood, a small thing, singing. And to me a poem that I've known for years, it is one of the most

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beautiful verbalizations of I think the human spirit itself, "a music in a hood, a small thing, singing." What he has also said in, "On the Poet and His Craft," is that his whole life has been a search for himself and he loses himself.

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Let me just give you an idea. Here is one of his famous poems, again, it is written in a totally different way and he said this about it: Let me say boldly now that the extent to which the great dead

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can be evoked or can come to us can be eerie and astonishing. Let me at the risk of seeming odd recite a personal incident. I was in that peculiar hell of the poet, a longish dry period, and it was 1952, I was forty-four and I thought I was

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done, no more writing for me. I was living alone in the biggish house in Edmonds, Washington. I had been reading and re-reading not Yeats, but Raleigh and Sir John Davies. I had been teaching the five-beat line for weeks in class. I knew quite a bit about

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it, but write it myself? No. So I felt myself a fraud. Suddenly, in the early evening, the poem, "A Dance," started and finished itself in a very short time, say thirty minutes, maybe in the greater part of an hour. It was all done. I felt I knew I had

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hit it. I walked around and I wept and I knelt down, I always do after I've written what I know is a good piece. But at the same time I had, as God is my witness, the actual sense of a presence, as if Yeats himself were in the room with me. The

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experience was, in a way, terrifying for it lasted at least half an hour. That house I repeat, was charged with a psychic presence. The very walls seemed to shimmer, I wept for joy, at last I was somebody again, he, they, the poets dead

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were with me. Now I know there are any number of cynical explanations for this phenomenon, auto-suggestion, the unconscious playing an elaborate trick, and so on, but I accept none of them. It was one of the most profound experiences of my

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life. Now, that is a poet talking out of total commitment and acceptance to the power of what the word does inside him and how it speaks through him. Whether you accept that or not, I don't

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know. I do think that if you are going to be a writer, or any kind of an artist, or going to do anything with that heightened level of complete commitment, that is the way you have to express yourself, and be. Let's get into some of these early

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poems of Theodore Roethke. I read to you, "Open House." He had around any number of collections, I'm gonna read first from the first one, just a few poems from the first one, I've already done one. Here is- the poems are called, "Open

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House," from 1941. Here's his description, and what I want to say is he's not an urban poet, if there are any poets that are urban, he has I think one poem in an office that he worked in. All the rest of the poems deal with nature, in nature is where

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you're going to find your soul. So he is not a political poet, he is not a social poet, he is, as I said, a mystic poet, in search of the oneness with whatever you want to call it, the spirit of the universe, the Godhead, the great clock,

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whatever. But here he is describing with this wonderful power of language two kinds of animals. And we'll come back to these descriptions again, I want you to realize in here though, the very strict rhyme scheme, and how it's a very, very closed

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formal poem, even though his language seems very accessible and very, very colloquial. THE HERON, and we see a lot of them around here, so think of the heron and how he captures it. You young poets out there,

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think of how he is looking at the heron and capturing details. The heron stands in water where the swamp has deepened to the blackness of a pool, or balances with one leg on a hump or marsh grass heaped above a muskrat hole. He walks the shallow with

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an antic grace. The great feet break the ridges of the sand, the long eye notes the minnow's hiding place. His beak is quicker than a human hand. He jerks a frog across his bony lip, then points his heavy bill above the wood. The wide wings

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flap but once to lift him up. A single ripple starts from where he stood. And here he describes a bat, again from this earliest of his books.

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By day the bat is cousin to the mouse. He likes the attic of an aging house. His fingers make a hat about his head. His pulse speed is so slow we think him dead. He loops in crazy figures half the night among the trees that face the corner light. But

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when he brushes up against a screen, we are afraid of what our eyes have seen: for something is amiss or out of place when mice with wings can wear a human face. His next book, in which attention was really given to

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him, "The Lost Son and Other Poems." He begins this several sectioned, four-sectioned book with poems from the greenhouse experience. He goes back and he talks about the greenhouse, and the life in the greenhouse. And these are, in many cases, a lot

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of people's favorite poems because they evoke at once not only the vivid life of the greenhouse, but an intense music, a sense of something greater than just plants growing or plants dying. They really suggest the inner life of

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things, or the spiritual life of things, and none of this is better and I would have all of my classes and workshop study this poem, which is called, "Cuttings," and this is of course, when you take a cutting from a plant to make it grow.

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And just listen to the rhythms in this, listen to the consonants, which means the consonant sounds, the Bs, and the Cs, and the Ds, and the Fs, and the Gs, and the Ms, and Ns, and Ls, and then listen to the assonance, which is the vowel

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sounds, A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y, and listen to how they move together to create this intense music and this sense of anguished life that goes on, as life struggles to renew itself in the greenhouse, and these are of course his

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memories from being a child. CUTTINGS This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks, cut stems struggling to put down feet, what saint strained so much,

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rose on such lopped limbs to a new life? I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing, in my veins, in my bones I feel it. The small waters seeping upward, the tight grains parting at last. When sprouts break out, slippery as

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fish, I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet. Here's some others now. What we're operating on now -- even though we have rhymes and a lot of the other methodology and uses of poetic technology -- is really a poet now speaking in

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free verse. Here is: THE ROOT CELLAR Nothing could sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch, bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark, shoots

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dangled and drooped, lolling obscenely from mildewed crates, hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes. And what a congress of stinks! Roots ripe as old bait, pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich, leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against

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slippery planks, nothing would give up life: even the dirt kept breathing a small breath. And for you people who love orchids, here is his evocation of

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ORCHIDS 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

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lips move slowly, drawing in the warm air. And at night, the 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

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luminescent fingers, lips neither dead nor alive, loose ghostly mouths breathing. And what happens when a storm comes to the greenhouses. Here's his memory of what happens when big winds blow up. And since

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we're having some rainy weather with a little bit of wind out here today, this might seem very apropos. This is again more of the greenhouse poems by Theodore Roethke, and this is: BIG WIND

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Where were the greenhouses going, lunging into the lashing wind driving water so far down the river all the faucets stopped? So we drained the manure-machine for the steam plant, pumping the stale mixture into the nasty boilers, watching

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the pressure gauge waver over to red as the seams hissed and the live steam drove to the far end of the rose-house, where the worst wind was, creaking the cypress window-frames, cracking so much thin glass we stayed all night, stuffing the holes with

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burlap; but the greenhouse rode it out, that old rose-house, she hove into the teeth of it, the core and pith of that ugly storm, ploughing with her stiff prow, bucking into the wind-waves that broke over the whole of her, flailing her sides

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with spray, flinging long strings of wet across the roof-top. Finally veering, wearing themselves out, merely whistling thinly under the wind-vents; she sailed until the calm morning, carrying her full cargo of roses.

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And of course, without saying it, the greenhouse has become a ship ploughing through the storm, and that is a metaphor moving into a symbol of actually what life is, life in a universe that would attack it, but keeping to itself the precious

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breath. There are other poems on here, "Old Florist," "Transplanting Carnations," "Flower Dump." Here's one called, "The Child on Top of a Greenhouse," and I think certainly this is Theodore Roethke as a young boy doing

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what many boys and girls did when they were young, climbing to the top of a one-story, possibly two -- and hopefully no higher -- story building and seeing if they could fly. So here is:

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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 chrysanthemums staring up like accusers, up through the

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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! One of everyone's favorite poems of the greenhouse section is his

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remembrance of three old German women who worked in the greenhouse, and their names were: FRAU BAUMAN, FRAU SCHMIDT, FRAU SCHWARTZE, and they were wonderful women, but they also become the three fates. And here

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is this poem: 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,

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to straighten carnations, red chrysanthemums; the stiff stems, joined 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

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skirts billowing out wide into tents, their hands twinkling 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 that the cold kept asleep. All

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the coils, loops, and whorls. They trellised the sun; they plotted 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;

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now, when I'm alone and cold in my bed, they still 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

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sleep. But then there was the other Roethke, the Roethke with mental problems, because if he was a visionary and if he was a mystical poet, he would sometimes go off into violent

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rampages, tremendous drinking bouts, and was several times locked away in mental institutions. This is, "My Papa's Waltz," which maybe gives us the beginning of this as he remembers his father. And notice again, the methodology is

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strict, closed metrics and rhyme. In fact, this is a four-beat series of rhymed quatrains, AB, AB, a very much a ballad form. 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; and 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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And one of the only poems that he ever wrote, which in any way could be considered social. And again, it is the office poem I talked about and he calls it: DOLOR

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I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils, neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paperweight, all the misery of manilla folders and mucilage, desolation in immaculate public places, lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard, the

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unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher, ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma, endless duplication of lives and objects. And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions, finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica, sift,

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almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium, dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows, glazing the pale hair, the duplicate gray standard faces. And moving again to more poems, here is the third section of

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this book which is, as I said, called, "The Lost Son and Other Poems," which we will pick up and start to get into some of his very experimental poems, but this one still is not. Again, he goes back to a another animal, in this case the bird, the night

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crow. And listen how beautifully this has worked and how evocative, and how it is moving both as a description of a crow and something else at the same time. NIGHT CROW

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When I saw that clumsy crow flap from a wasted tree, a shape in the mind rose up; over the gulfs of dream flew a tremendous bird further and further away into a moonless black, deep in the brain, far back.

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And here's: A SIMPLE RIVER INCIDENT A shell arched under my toes, stirred up a whirl of silt that rippled around my knees. Whatever I owed to time slowed

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in my human form; sea water stood in my veins, the elements I kept warm crumbled and flowed away, and I knew I had been there before, in that cold, granitic slime, in the dark, in the rolling water.

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We are reading the poems of Theodore Roethke tonight, we will take a short musical break and come back. We are celebrating Roethke's 92nd birthday and we'll get into some much longer, more ambitious poems when we come back.

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And this is that part of the Poetry Show where we give you some public announcements. First of all KUSP and yours truly thanks our community of listeners for twenty-eight years of support. I also would like to tell you about two events that

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are happening down in the Monterey-Carmel area: On May 11th, at 7:30pm at the Carl Cherry Center for the Arts in Carmel, in conversation, poet and jazz critic, Bill Minor, and poet, literary critic, Elliot Roberts, will discuss the nature

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and craft of writing, creativity, the role of writing in one's life, and any other subject suggested by questions and comments from the audience. That is Bill Minor, who has been here, and Elliot Roberts, who has been here, and who will be

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back here within the next month, by the way, or next month and a half. They haven't been here for a long, long while. They are fascinating, energetic, provocative speakers but also marvelous, marvelous poets. For more information on that event,

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624-7491, call 624-7491. Then from May 12th to the 14th at the Asilomar Conference Center, "On Solid Ground, Writing as Self-discovery," facilitated by Elliot Roberts, a writing workshop which over the weekend will, in a positive, supportive

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environment, explore the various ways writing as part of our daily lives can bring us insight and great joy. So, that is on May 12th, that will follow the May 11th talk between Elliot and Bill, and from May the 12th to the 14th, Elliot will give this

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workshop. For more information on that event and for reservations, call 510, that's 510-527-5004. I'll do that again, area code 510-527-5004. Also on the 20th of May, and this will be announced again by my cohorts, I'm sure, there is

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going to be a five or six hot minutes, two shows from 8 to 10pm at the Bulkhead, and that will be dozens of poets and performers guaranteed to get you off in a matter of minutes with a language of love and lust, so do keep that in mind. For more

00:33:40.040 - 00:33:59.630

information on that, call 466-9770, and that will take place two shows 8 to 10pm at the Bulkhead on the 20th of May. We mustn't certainly forget that following this show immediately, and I will announce this right before I leave I'm sure, "From

00:33:59.630 - 00:34:13.550

the Booksshelf" with our very own Billie Harris, who brings us literature professor, Karen Yamashita, reading an excerpt from her book, "The Tropic of Orange," the wonderful Karen Yamashita. Do listen to that, she's one of the really fine

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writers up at UC. And not least, I hope you are all aware of the website at KUSP. And in fact, just choosing from one of these, you can now get a five day weather forecast on the Central Coast at our website, and what is that website? KUSP.org. And

00:34:36.050 - 00:34:53.540

if you don't know how to spell org, it's O-R-G. And I think we need to do something about, inform each other about this weather, which was not supposed to happen, and it's still coming down outside. Okay, and I've just been handed something else

00:34:53.540 - 00:35:07.710

that says- oh, okay, it's just a little message, don't mean anything. Back to Theodore Roethke. Tonight, we are celebrating the birthday of Theodore Roethke early because as you know, it's

00:35:07.710 - 00:35:27.030

one show every three weeks, and I will not be here right before his birthday. He was born May 25th, 1908 and he died in 1963. I started the show by saying I think he's one of the great American poets. And I have been reading poems by him, early

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poems into the middle period, and I will now pick up the pace as we move into a series of poems called, "The Lost Son and Other Poems," which are amazing poems, and which still perplex a lot of people and absolutely excite others. It is an attempt

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by Roethke to actually go out on a spiritual but very physical journey and find the soul he has lost, and it has been described as an attempt to find the birth of the self before consciousness. So in other words, it's an attempt to find

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things that are in the pre-conscious world, and at one point he even goes back and becomes an unborn child. But here's the most famous poem from that, "The Lost Son," itself. And again, Woodlawn is the the area in Michigan where the

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greenhouse was, where he grew up. And that has influenced his work so much, if you've been listening to the first part of the show, the idea of life going on in all seasons, struggling to maintain life even the frailest of plant life, the smallest of

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animal life, so here is part at least of, "The Lost Son." And notice how it gets into riddles, and child's talk, and gibberish, but the beginning is just so gorgeous. I don't know how many things I've stolen from this but probably around three dozen

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pieces of imagery and music and rhythm. THE LOST SON 1. THE FLIGHT At Woodlawn I heard the dead cry: I was lulled by the

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slamming of iron, a slow drip over stones, toads brooding in 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

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my hard time. Fished in an old wound, the soft pond of repose; nothing nibbled my line, not even the minnows came. Sat in an empty house watching shadows crawl, scratching. There

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was one fly. Voices 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,

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where and to whom? 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, you will find no comfort here, in the kingdom of bang and

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blab. Running lightly over spongy ground, past the pasture of flat stones, the three elms, the sheep strewn on a field, over a rickety bridge toward the quick-water, wrinkling and

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rippling. Hunting along the river, down among the rubbish, the bug-riddled foliage, by the muddy pond-edge, by the bog-holes, by the shrunken lake, hunting, in the heat of summer.

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Is it the shape of a rat? It's bigger than that. It's less than a leg and more than a nose, just under the water it usually goes. Is it soft like a mouse? Can it wrinkle his nose? Could it come in the house on the tips of its toes?

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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 as an otter with wide webby toes just under the water it usually goes.

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[2. THE PIT] Where do the roots go? Look under the leaves. Who put the moss there? These stones have been here too long. Who stunned the dirt into noise? Ask the mole, he knows. I feel the slime

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of a wet nest. Beware Mother Mildew. Nibble again, fish nerves. [3. THE GIBBER] At the wind's mouth, by the cave's door, I listened to

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something I had heard before. Dogs of the groin barked and howled, the sun was against me, the moon would not have me. The weeds whined, the snakes cried, the cows and briars said

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to me: die. What a small song. What slow clouds. What dark water. Hath the raine a father? All the caves are ice. Only the snow's here. I'm cold. I'm cold all over. Rub me in father and

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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?

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From the mouths of jugs perched on many shelves, I saw a substance flowing that cold morning. Like a slither of eels that watery cheek as my own tongue kissed my lips awake.

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And that's just part of "The Lost Son," and you can tell the changes in mood and imagery that come as he begins the search back into the self to find the soul. And I guess what I should read from here, there really are some beautiful love poems that I

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could read, but I want to go on to some of these long meditation poems. What he does is he starts to get into persona poems, he starts to get into masks, he begins to read Yeats and he reads a whole lot of poems in Yeats' rhythms. And then he gets

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into, he had done one poem before, which are imitations of a poem that William Carlos Williams wrote called "A Widow's Lament in Springtime," and he writes one poem and then several years later, he comes back and he writes five long meditations,

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which if you read nothing else by him you should read, They're called, "Meditations of an Old Woman." And I will read this; this is from, "Words for the Wind," his Pulitzer Prize winning book from 1958, which considers- there's a lot of

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lighter pieces on animals, like the sloth, I'll read you that, just a book of such variation, it's astonishing. And maybe what I could have done tonight was just read from this book alone, not his last book. But here's just one. This is, "The Sloth,"

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and just- he's writing children's poems now, which you seem to hear some of in "The Lost Son," but here is his humor, which is so much the complex voice and methodology he used. Here's:

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THE SLOTH In moving slow he has no peer. You ask him something in his ear- [Comment] Sorry.

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In moving slow, he has no 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

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call his manners smug, he'll 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. And there are a whole lot of poems like that that begin,

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"Words for the Wind," the 1958 book. This is followed by a section-section of beautiful "Love Poems," very sensual love poems, that are really wonderful. Then, some "Voices and Creatures," in which you don't have only children's tales

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and finally, moving into "The Dying Man," five poems, really six poems, in Yeats' rhythms and beautifully, beautifully done poems very, very much praised by critics. And finally into these five "Meditations of an Old Woman." And I will read you, I

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think we're getting time for me to just read you one of them, and we will go on from there. So here is the fourth meditation. And now he is starting to get into this meditative mold. He isn't running through fields searching for himself, he is

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very, very quietly searching for himself in so far as he is looking for, how shall I put this- yeah, there it is. He is just looking and meditating very quietly on things, but here now he is a woman, and he is trying to understand what it is like to

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be a female consciousness, in this case, a widow. And this is her: FOURTH MEDITATION, there are five of them. 1.

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I was always one for being alone, seeking in my own way, eternal purpose; at the edge of the field waiting for the pure moment; standing, silent, on sandy beaches or walking along green embankments; knowing the sinuousness of small waters: as

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a chip or shell, floating lazily with a slow current, a drop of the night rain still in me, a bit of water caught in a wrinkled crevice, a pool riding and shining with a river, dipping up and down in the ripples, tilting back the

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sunlight. Was it yesterday I stretched out the thin bones of my innocence? Oh the songs we hide, singing only to ourselves! Once I could touch my shadow, and be happy; in the white kingdoms, I was

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light as a seed, drifting with the blossoms, a pensive petal. But a time comes when the vague life of the mouth no longer suffices; the dead make more impossible demands from their silence; the soul stands, lonely in its choice, waiting, itself a

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slow thing, in the changing body. The river moves, wrinkled by midges, a light wind stirs in the pine needles. The shape of a lark rises from a stone; but there is no song. 2.

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What is it to be a woman? To be contained, to be a vessel? To prefer a window to a door? A pool to a river? To become lost in a love, yet remain only half aware of the intransient glory? To be a mouth, a meal of meat? To gaze at a face with a fixed

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eyes of a spaniel? I think of the self-involved: the ritualists of the mirror, the lonely drinkers, the minions of benzedrine and paraldehyde, and those who submerge themselves deliberately in

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trivia, women who become their possessions, shapes stiffening into metal, match-makers, arrangers of picnics -- what do their lives mean, and the lives of their children? The young, brow-beaten early into a baleful silence, frozen by a father's

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lip, a mother's failure to answer. Have they seen, ever, the sharp bones of the poor? Or known, once, the soul's authentic hunger, those cat-like immaculate creatures for whom the world works?

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What do they need? Oh more than a roaring boy, for the sleek captains of intuition cannot reach them; they feel neither the tearing iron nor the sound of another footstep -- how I wish them awake! May the high flower of the hay climb into

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their hearts; may they lean into light and live; may they sleep in robes of green among the ancient ferns; May their eyes gleam with the first dawn; may the sun gild them a worm; may they be taken by the true burning; may they flame into

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being! I see them as figures walking in a greeny garden, their gait formal and elaborate, their hair a glory the gentle and beautiful still-to-be-born; the descendants of the playful

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tree-shrew that survived the archaic killers, the fang and the claw, the club and the knout, the irrational edict, the fury of the hate-driven zealot, the meanness of the human weasel, who turned a corner in time, when at last he grew with

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thumb; a prince of small beginnings enduring the slow stretches of change, who spoke first in the coarse short-hand of the subliminal depths, made from his terror and dismay a grave philosophical language; a lion of flame, pressed to the

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point of love, yet moves gently among the birds. 3. Younglings, the small fish keep heading into the current. What's become of care? This lake breathes like a rose. Beguile

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me, change. What have I fallen from? I drink my tears in a place where all light comes. I'm in love with the dead! My whole forehead's a noise! On a dark day I walk straight toward the rain. Who else sweats light from a stone? By singing we defend;

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the husk lives on, ardent as a seed; my back creaks with the dawn. Is my body speaking? I breathe what I am: first and last of all things. Near the graves of the great dead, even the stones speak.

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And Roethke goes on in that book which as I said is called, "Words for the Wind," and won the Pulitzer Prize. He goes on from that book into another book called, "I Am Says the Lamb," which is a series of children's poems, nonsense poems, really,

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is what he calls them. Very, very funny some of them -- "The Yak," "The Donkey," "The Ceiling," "The Chair" -- really wonderful. He goes on suddenly, that's 1961, he goes on suddenly, in 1964 and produces his last book, "The Far Field,"

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which is really my favorite among them all. It contains the "North American Sequence," then more "Love Poems," then "Mixed Sequence," marvelous things in "Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical," which has one of his most anthologized poems, "In

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a Dark Time." I would like to read you and I think I have time, things like, "The Far Field," which is the title poem. Another one here is, "The Journey to the Interior," and these now are very much in the voice of a man, an old man who

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knows he's going to die, though, as I said, he was not very old. I'll read you the beginning of one and the end of another. Here is the beginning of, "Journey to the Interior," and notice how it's talking about two things at once. Again, if you're

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interested in following this out, there are a lot of anthologies with his work in it, but more than that, there is this Collected Poems, which I'm sure you can order, though it is not around. Here his, "Journey into the Interior," from his

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last published book, there are posthumous poems in this Collected Poems that were not collected. And here's how it goes, and again, one of the things I haven't mentioned about him besides the fact that he was a mystic, besides the fact that

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he worked in all these different forms, he was mostly a nature poet and found what he was looking for, the unity of life, the spirit in nature. He was a West Coast poet and when he moves from Michigan, teaches back East for a while, moves

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from Michigan into Washington, was really the great poet for a lot of people, a great teacher, at the University of Washington for most of his adult life. And so you will recognize some of these landscapes as being West Coast. And here is the beginning

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of: THE JOURNEY TO THE INTERIOR In the long journey out of the self, there are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places where the shale slides

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dangerously and the back wheels hang almost over the edge at the sudden veering, the moment of turning. Better to hug close, wary of rubble and falling stones. The arroyo cracking the road, the wind-bitten buttes, the canyons, creek swollen in

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midsummer from the flash-flood roaring into the narrow valley. Reeds beaten flat by wind and rain, gray from the long winter, burnt at the base in late summer. Or the path narrowing, winding upward toward the stream with its sharp stones, the

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uppland of alder and birchtrees, through the swamp alive with quicksand, the way blocked at last by a fallen fir-tree, the thickets darkening, the ravines ugly. I remember how it was to drive on gravel, watching for

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dangerous down-hill places, where the wheels whined beyond eighty -- when you hit the deep pit at the bottom of the swale, the trick was to throw the car sideways and charge over the hill, full of the throttle. Grinding up and over the narrow

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road, spitting and roaring. A chance? Perhaps. But the road was part of me, and it's ditches, and the dust lay thick on my eyelids, who ever wore goggles? Always a sharp turn to the left past a barn close to the roadside, to a scurry of

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small dogs and a shriek of children, the highway ribboning out in a straight thrust to the North, to the sand dunes and fish flies, hanging, thicker than moths, dying brightly under the streetlight sunk in coarse concrete, the towns with their

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high pitted road-crowns and deep gutters, their swollen stories of silvery pine and weather-beaten red courthouses- And he goes on and on and on. Here is the beginning of, "The Far Field," and again, these are

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journeys and journeys, that the poems are much longer that I'm reading. This is just the beginning of, "The Far Field," and notice how this journey is really a journey to death in many ways, a journey to beyond the limits of the self, beyond

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the limits of reason, though it is at the same time, just the physical description of what is being described here. THE FAR FIELD, which is the title of this book. I dream of journeys repeatedly: of flying like a bat deep into a

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narrowing tunnel, of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula, the road lined with snow-laden second growth, a fine dry snow ticking the windshield, alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic, and no lights behind in the blurred

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side-mirror. The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone, ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut, where the car stalls, churning in a snowdrift until the headlights darken. And that is just the beginning of the long poem, "The Far

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Field," again, a meditation on himself. What we have been doing tonight is reading the poems of Theodore Roethke, that last name is spelled, R-O-E-T-H-K-E, who was born on May 25th, 1908, and died in 1963. And this being the beginning of May, I wanted to

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have a birthday for Theodore Roethke. Let's celebrate his birthday the whole month. If this book is not available, it was put out by Doubleday, I hope it still is. It was put out in paperback as well as hardback, "The Collected Poems of Theodore

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Roethke." To go along with that, the University of Washington I'm sure still has out, "On the Poet and His Craft: The Selected Poems of Theodore Roethke." and I would like to end, there is also a film that was done by San Francisco State on Theodore

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Roethke, and it shows him reading, and it really gives a sense of the man. And I would like to end this program today by giving you the last poem he reads in that film. And the last poem, really, in the Collected Poems, though it's the last poem

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in, "The Far Field," his last book of poetry. And it just combines everything, the vision, the rhymes, and everything that he wrote in what is really the essence of Roethke and to me what poetry is all about. And what a way to go out. And this i

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it. It's called ONCE MORE, THE ROUN What's greater, pebble or pond? What can be known? The unknown. My true self runs toward a hill, more! Oh, more! Visible.

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Now I adore my life with the bird, the abiding leaf, with the fish, the questing snail, and the eye altering all; and I dance with William Blake for love, for love's sake; And everything comes to one, as we dance on, dance on, dance on.