Memories of the Iowa Workshop

I wrote this as a response to a wonderful reminiscence of Iowa Workshop days by Lewis Turco, at his Poetics and Ruminations blog. But while there was a comments box, I couldn't find a button to submit the comment, so I've transferred it over here.

His reminiscence included this paragraph:

If these on-campus events are vivid, so are scenes like the one that took place at an M.L.A. convention in Chicago a few years later when, after the annual Iowa get-together, a bunch of the poets from various eras adjourned to my room for an all-night one-upmanship word-game marathon. -- Don was there, and Bob Dana, Steve Parker I think, and several others. Toward morning, Justice, who was lying on the bed -- or, rather, dripping half off it -- whenever a particularly good bon mot was passed, grunted feebly in a gesture of humor appreciated. I believe we kept it up so long largely to see if we could elicit just one more grunt of approval from Don Justice.

My response:

Lew - I was one of the others at that marathon wordplay night in Chicago -- in fact, that was the night we first met. You had left the Workshop before I got there, and I had inherited your title of World's Most Egregious Punster. So when word came that you were on your way up to the suite, there was a hush of expectation, reminiscent of an old Western saloon before the meeting of two legendary gunfighters. As I recall, we did not disappoint.

Don Justice ended up back at the suite, as you recall, but much much earlier in the evening, some of us had been sitting around -- Marvin Bell, Steve Parker, Nick Crome, Tod Perry, among others -- and the conversation came around to Justice. A little sozzled and sentimental, we began talking about how sad it was that poets were not more honored -- here was Donald Justice, one of the great 20th Century poets, in Chicago, and was there any ceremony to honor him? No! He was unsung and un-honored. So we would do something about it. We would arrange a testimonial.
At that moment, the door opened, and there stood Don, resplendent in tuxedo. "Sorry I can't spend the evening with you, gentlemen -- the French Ambassador is taking me to dinner at Maxim's."

Donald Justice

Poet of the Month at the East Hampton Public Library website.

"It was easy," I said.

There's a connection insisting its way in here, try as I will to stop it. My spellcheck red-flags "Villanelle," and one of the alternatives it offers is "Spillane."

There has to be a villanelle in that somewhere, and I'll work on it -- even though the trochee-iamb of "Mickey Spillane" is unpromising - maybe anapests? Or a catelectic line with a two-unstressed-syllable patter?

This is the story of Mickey Spillane

...that sort of thing?

Anyway, connections between poetry and Mickey Spillane won't let go of me. I'm working on a series of chapbooks based on film noir stills, and I suddenly remembered I had done a series based on Mickey Spillane paperback covers. I wondered if I could find them in a file somewhere, so I Google-Desktopped "Spillane," and the first place I was directed to was a list of literary contemporaries of Donald Justice.

"How c-could you?" she gasped.
I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in.
"It was easy," I said.

ABC WXYZ -- The cat's in the cupboard but he can't see me

Mike Snider is gracious enough to say nice things about my "Barefoot in Florence," my ABC villanelle for Anny Ballardini (see a couple of entries below), and to extend the fledgling tradition with an ABC villanelle of his own.

I do seem to be inventing forms these days, without really setting out to do so. But I've always been a tinkerer, I guess. At Iowa, in my frighteningly extreme youth, the first time I tried to write a sestina, I didn't know how to do it, and so instead of making the second stanza FAEBDC, I just made it BCDEFA. I suppose I could have claimed that as an innovation, but it was just dumb. But in the same poem I did something else deliberately, that I hadn't thought of as an innovation, but Don Justice was very generous in praise of -- the Walking Enjambment. The first line of the first stanza was enjambed into the second line, then the second line of the second stanza into the third line, and so on. When I got to the last stanza, of course, there was no place for the enjambment to go, so I hit upon the perfect terrible idea of enjambing it in a circle, putting a caesura at the beginning of the first line of the last stanza, as if it had been enjambed from somewhere or other. Fortunately, no one noticed that, and Justice complimented the gracefulness of just letting the device disappear.

It's a device I haven't overused, I hope, but I did use it again in The Map of the Bear, which you can find on my page on Anny's Poet's Corner. There, I took the refrain line, "The only map is the map of the bear," and enjambed it on a different foot at the end of every stanza, so one foot of it appears at the end of the first stanza, two at the end of the second, three at the end of the third, and the whole line, unbroken, at the end of the poem.

And then there are my 5/4 syllabic poems, which are featured in my new chapbook "Take Five: Poems in 5/4 Time."

Here's the youthful sestina:

IF YOU'S WHITE

"They are developing some very strong feelings about this music -- so much so that I have heard some white country blues singers say, `I want to be Negro.'"

John Cohen, Sing Out!


A young man with dark sweater and a white
Face, in the sidewalk shadows of New York,
Shading his eyes to dim his skin toward black,
A battered (by choice) guitar held in his hands
While in his mind he sees a soulful blues
Moaning along the highways of the South.

There is no earth--it's barren in New York--
He tries to pluck a bass string with a black
Thumb, but the sterile whiteness of his hands
Is not for digging roots and picking blues
That grow along the highways of the South.
He pulls up milkweed, fluffy, dry and white.

The woman that he's living with is black,
He sees the race's character in her hands;
The suffering that goes to breathe the blues
Alive, in the fields and road gangs of the South
Whispers beyond the range of any white--
Although she's never been outside New York.

He'll tell you, "Man, just look at that spade's hands!
They look like they were born to play the blues!
(You know the way they breed 'em in the South.)
There's nothing wrong with him except that white
Soul, from the shallow spirit of New York
That robbed him of his birthright (which was black).

Sometimes a weary voice sings him a blues.
It may have drifted upward from the South,
He scarcely hears it: "Fella, be glad you're white!
You can buy better guitars up in New York
To sing about what happens to a black
Man, with cold iron shackles on his hands."

The kind of thing that happens in the South,
And hate the cops--that's safer if you're white,
Yes, fella, even up here in New York.
This is the time, you're thinking, to be black;
Well, if that's so, you have it on your hands."
"Was that an eight-bar or a twelve-bar blues?"

He sits in a White Castle in New York,
A cup of black coffee warming his cool hands
Too frigid for a blues bred in the South.

Belle and Ginger

It’s not hard to slip into thinking of Donald Justice – his generosity, his vast knowledge, the deep impression he made on all who were lucky enough to be his students; and mostly, his poetry.

I slipped into thinking about Don this past couple of weeks, teaching a unit on poetry in the 1950s. I’m doing the poetry culture wars of that era. Right now we’re on the Hall-Pack-Simpson New Poets of England and America anthology, hugely influential in those days of my youth, hugely forgotten today – out of print. I had to tell my students to order used copies from Amazon or Bookfinder, another Internet boon to teaching. Next we’ll move on to Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, the angry counter-anthology that flung the barbaric yawp of the Beats into the faces of the American poetry-consuming public, not that there’s ever been one. The Donald Allen anthology is still in print, and monstrously expensive, at 20 bucks a pop, which would seem to indicate that this particular culture war was won by the Beats, and it probably was, when Robert Lowell, poster boy for the Academics, crossed over to the other side. Actually, that signaled a truce more than a surrender – a cessation of hostilities.

And hostilities they were. Here’s Kenneth Koch, from his long poem “Fresh Air”:

Where are young poets in America, they are trembling in publishing houses and universities,
Above all they are/ trembling in universities, they are bathing the library steps with their spit, They are gargling out innocuous (to whom?) poems about maple trees and their children,
Sometimes they brave a subject like the Villa d’Este or a lighthouse in Rhode Island,
Oh what worms they are! They wish to perfect their form.

On the other side…certainly one would never find Donald Justice engaged in a similar diatribe, but when I once mentioned to him that I had sent a group of poems to Evergreen Review, his response was a raised eyebrow. This was maybe 1964…I suspect the same response would not have been forthcoming a few years later.

My assignment in teaching an anthology of poems is generally something like this:

When I get a new anthology of poetry, I don’t sit down and read it cover to cover. I’ll skim through it first, letting my attention stop where it will, where my eye is caught by a phrase, a line, an image…whatever.

So that’s what I want you do. Graze through the anthology, and bring into class a poem that you like, and be prepared to talk about what you respond to in it.

I first did this a few years ago with an anthology of World War II poets, and I loved the response I got. I also love that I never know what I’m going to be discussing – there’s no predicting or controlling what students will bring in. Interestingly, in both sections, more than one student chose Donald Hall, and more than one chose Vassar Miller.

None, this time through, for Donald Justice. But I went back to the work in that early anthology, and I was particularly glad to re-make the acquaintance of this poem:

Beyond the Hunting Woods

I speak of that great house
Beyond the hunting woods,
Turreted and towered
In nineteenth-century style,
Where fireflies by the hundreds
Leap in the long grass,
Odor of jessamine
And roses, canker-bit,
Recalling famous times
When dame and maiden sipped
Sassafras or wild
Elderberry wine,
While far in the hunting woods
Men after their red hounds
Pursued the mythic beast.

I ask it of a stranger,
In all that great house finding
Not any living thing,
Or of the wind and the weather,
What charm was in that wine
That they should vanish so,
Ladies in their stiff
Bone and clean of limb,
And over the hunting woods
What mist had made them wild
That gentlemen should lose
Not only the beast in view
But Belle and Ginger too,
Nor home from the hunting woods
Ever, ever come?

In the middle of writing this entry, I wandered over to Joe Duemer’s Sharp Sand blog, and his current entry in which he discusses revisiting James Wright’s “A Blessing,” which the years have not treated kindly. What seemed powerful and insightful now seems drenched in sentimentality.

Justice starts off his poem with the emotional distance and detachment of a form-perfecting worm, and tells us of a time historically, socially and emotionally distant, but at some point we realize that we have been pulled into it. Wright gives us, much too soon, the eyes of those two Indian ponies darkening with kindness. Justice gives us the lost dogs, Belle and Ginger, only at the end of the poem – two named creatures, the only ones in the poem, and what risks sentimentality more than the sad end of a beloved dog? But we’ve gotten there incrementally. The jessamine and roses give way to ladies clean of limb, and all vanish. The ravenous red hounds of the hunt become Belle and Ginger, and they vanish too. And so much emotion, so much loss, makes its way through that quiet, modulated voice.

Thank you, Don, once again, for everything, and most of all for your art. Thank you not for the first time, and not for the last.