Reviewed by Jessica Allen
2.22.07

Seen from afar, all writing seems easy. Final literary outputs, whether a long novel or short poem, always belie the amount of drafting and, more importantly, rewriting that must happen before a writer releases words into the world. Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke (1943–1963) demonstrates simply how much one must write to get it right.

When Roethke died in 1963 at age 55, he left much behind: award-winning volumes of poetry; a successful teaching career at Bennington and the University of Washington, among other schools; 277 notebooks; and 8,306 sheets of paper. David Wagoner, Roethke’s former student and colleague at UW, randomly chose twelve notebooks, then culled the jokes, observations, bits of verse, and aphorisms therein into 28 poems and 15 essays. (Copper Canyon originally published the volume in 1972.) The several facsimiles sprinkled throughout the book show just how difficult Wagoner’s task must have been: Roethke had terrible handwriting.

As editor, Wagoner matched metaphor with metaphor, theme with theme, and word with word in order to form essays and poems from disparate snippets. A curved dash separates fragments taken from different notebooks. The resulting poems have a cobbled together quality, as in this selection from the poem “Straw for the Fire”:

Me, I don’t want to die: I want to live to a long self-indulgent happy productive old age.

~

I sang a most uproarious song, A tune a dog could understand, Digging in this prodigious garden For a long-lost bone . . .

~ I was betrayed by my own hardihood.

~

All bushes can’t be bears.

The essay “The Turn of the Wheel” begins with five lines of poetry, then continues into aphorisms: “I dropped my watch into the stream of time. / It’s the before and after of time that I hate. / I do not wish a sense of the past: only a sense of the continuous. / Today anyone who thinks about what matters is ‘tortured.’”

Clearly the poems and essays are not meant to be read as polished works but instead as an attempt to capture Roethke’s creative process. As such, the poems have bits of prose, and the essays have snatches of verse. In his introduction, Wagoner explains that Roethke “let his mind rove freely . . . from the lame and the halting to the beautiful . . . seizing whatever he might from the language.” Roethke would read over his notebooks, selecting lines or images to work into pieces, which themselves would be typed and retyped over several drafts. Wagoner’s choices succeed in presenting a writer deeply invested in the craft of writing.

Here, Roethke tests out personae, probes themes, thinks through images, and performs the inevitable throat-clearing. The results sometimes astonish, leaving readers to lament what might have been, had Roethke chosen to shape the lines: “I’m waiting for the winter up my sleeve,” he writes in “The Stony Garden.” The essay “All My Lights Go Dark” states, “All forms darken. Things cannot know us.” Other lines (“She looked as if she had been basted lightly in butter”; “All ear and no brain / Make Teddy inane”) represent the detritus that conscientious writers must wade through in order to find their gems.

The poems and essays also display some of Roethke’s favorite themes, including his ambivalent feelings about women, the importance of both thinking and feeling, the way nature helps us access psychological states and “profound truth,” and the difficulties inherent in teaching poetry. He felt uncomfortable with the notion of students as vessels, simply waiting for the teacher to pour knowledge into their gaping ears. Instead, he envisioned the classroom dynamic as collaborative, in which students helped him better understand his poetry: “Our insights are mutual,” Roethke notes. Elsewhere, though, he claims that student papers “smell like old meat.”

Roethke helped usher in the era of confessionalism in contemporary American poetry. His struggles with alcoholism and depression provided fodder for his lyrics and opened the door for the raw, versified confessions of Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath just a few years later. The notebooks counter the romantic notion that poems spring fully formed from the poet’s head. “Almost all language is dead metaphor,” Roethke writes in “Poet’s Business.” It’s the writer’s job to find the spark to give words new life.