well my old teacher (at u of maryland, '76-'80), the poet reed whittemore, died a few days ago. the death was not surprising: the man was born in 1919. he was a quiet and gentle person, so when the blades came out you were shocked. everyone got cut anyway. he was a wonderful teacher, and introduced us in the most vivid way to twentieth-century poetry, many of the great figures of which had been his friends/mentors/contributors to his magazines etc (e.e. cummings, for example; william carlos williams -probably his hero and closest poetic compatriot (his bio of williams was titled poet from jersey (just right for the extreme matteroffactness of both his subject and himself); ezra pound, whom reed talked about visiting in st. elixabeth's asylum). he supervised my honors thesis, which was a "theory of poetry" (for god's sake) and i was the poetry ed of the college literary magazine under his direction. i wrote many gigantically-ambitious poems that sucked, thinking of him as my only audience. i don't blame him for the suckiness. he tried to help, but i wouldn't listen.
his poems were maybe not the utter apex of the century, though he did get a lot of recognition too. they were extremely prosaic: flat, almost, in a way that became a fashion decades after he'd perfected the style. it was a sort of anti-poetry: in a way it was an argument that the tradition of poetry in english was pretentious, grandiose, affected; he always emphasized that the rhythms of ordinary language were poetic enough to be getting on with. he did hit many grand themes - god, truth, love, nature - but always to puncture their grandness or bring them down to earth. also he often just wrote a little joke. both on paper and in person, he was about the least pretentious major literary figure who ever existed. i don't think he thought that poetry could save the world.
ok ive been re-reading for the first time in twenty years or more his book the mother's breast and the father's house. it's amazing how so many of the lines come at me now with an air of extreme inevitability or so much familiarity that they seem like my own internal monologue. i'll type in a couple.
Haiku #1
A traditional haiku has seventeen syllables.
Hasn't it?
Rocks
Is the world a dream?
--The waking is always to facts that are like rocks
And lives that are like rocks
To poverty that is not an abstraction but a great rock
To sickness and loneliness and loss and emptiness
That are all rocks.
Is love a dream?
--It would be clever to say that one must climb up the other
rocks to arrive at the love rock.
Or that love is a rock hidden in life's moss
But to say such things is to be out of love
If there is love
and I think there is
It survives the saying only with difficulty
It needs prayer rather
I will not play with it
But of the rocks that are hateful to man and surround him
So that it is as if he were deep in a great rock canyon and calling
for help and only to rocks
Of such rocks it is safe to speak
They need to be hammered at through the ages by man in his
prison suit
They need to be broken up into smaller and smaller rocks.
A Teacher
"And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche."
He hated them all one by one but wanted to show them
What was Important and Vital and by God if
They thought they'd never have any use for it he was
Sorry as hell for them, that's all, with their genteel
Mercantile Main Street Babbitt
Bourgeois-barbaric faces, they were beyond
Saving, clearly, quite out of reach, and so he
G-rrr
Got up every morning and
G-rrr
Ate his breakfast and
G-rrr
Lumbered off to his eight o'clock
Gladly to teach.
It Is Not Clear
It is not clear
Where we go from here
Or for that matter
Who we're.
