“‘Each newcomer feels obliged to do something else, forgetting that if he himself is somebody he will necessarily do that something else,’ said Valéry. And Roethke told students to ‘write like somebody else.’ There are those usual people who try desperately to appear unusual and there are unusual people who try desperately to appear usual. Most poets I’ve met are from the latter and much smaller group. William Stafford, at his best as good as we have, is a near-perfect example. It doesn’t surprise me at all when the arrogant wild man in class turns in predictable, unimaginative poems and the straight one is doing nutty and promising work. If you are really strange you are always in enemy territory, and your constant concern is survival.”
Some thoughts of Richard Hugo’s on Roethke as a teacher of poetry.1 I’ve been thinking about this a bit, lately, off and on. It for one speaks truth to idiocy, thereby reinforcing conventional thinking about appearances. Sometimes I wonder why, you know, group thought tends to go against the grain (which almost doesn’t make any sense when you think about it), but I suppose I can see that some thoughts aren’t reductive. They’re simply inductive. It might not be that, Oh appearances are deceiving, but that so many people have been burned by appearances that they’re like, Yeah duh. And then I realize that I have some sort of mental aphasia that prevents me from synthesizing ideas about life from my own experience, and I feel like a pretty unintelligent person.
-
I’ve finally been getting around to making a text mixtape, a collection of essays online that I love/are great/etc, and this piece is on there. So I’m not going to link to it! You could Google it. But I’m going to put up this stunning piece of Internet curating later this year. Probably by the end of the year. ↩
