Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke, 1943-63 - Softcover

Roethke, Theodore

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0295957530 ISBN 13: 9780295957531

Publisher: University of Washington Press, 1980

Synopsis

“There are only two passions in art; there are love and hate—with endless modifications.”—Theodore Roethke

At his death, Theodore Roethke left behind 277 spiral notebooks full of poetry fragments, aphorisms, jokes, memos, journal entries, random phrases, bits of dialogue, commentary, and fugitive miscellany. Within these notebooks, Roethke allowed his mind to rove freely, moment by moment, moving from the practical to the transcendental, from the halting to the sublime.

Fellow poet and colleague David Wagoner distilled these notebooks—twelve linear feet of bookshelf—into an energetic, wise, and rollicking collection that shows Roethke to be one of the truly phenomenal creative sources in American poetry.

From “A Psychic Janitor”:

I’m sick of fumbling, furtive, disorganized minds like bad lawyers trying to make too many points that this is an age of criticism: and these, mind you, tin-eared punks who couldn’t tell a poem from an old boot if a gun were put to their heads . . .
Cover art by United States Poet Laureate Ted Kooser.

About this title

About the Author

Roethke (1908-1963) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954 for The Waking, and received the National Book Award for Words for the Wind in 1957. He was a demanding and beloved teacher who taught at many colleges and universities, including Lafayette, Penn State, Bennington, and the University of Washington. David Wagoner was a student, friend, and colleague of Theodore Roethke's. He is the author of over a dozen books of poetry and fiction, a longtime editor at Poetry Northwest, and Professor of English at University of Washington.

From Booklist

Theodore Roethke (1908-63) is long enough gone yet still fervently enough revered to be pronounced one of the great American poets. He left behind 277 notebooks. Out of the fragments entered in them, he constructed his poems, but there is more than poem fodder in them, as Roethke's former student and colleague, David Wagoner, reveals in his arrangements of some of their contents into sequences or chapters of "Poetry" and "Prose," as he modestly calls the two batches of his assemblages. Prose, verse, and lots of one-liners that are by turns comic, reflective, reactive, philosophical, and more appear in both kinds of assemblage. Those denominated poetry are primarily concerned with the stuff of lyrical meditation--the world, time, death, love, beauty, God--whereas those called prose find Roethke ruminating on his vocations as poet and teacher. In the introduction, Wagoner imparts that Roethke greatly admired Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," and, indeed, there is a Blakean brilliance of paradox and image in these jottings. A gratifying addition to Roethke's canon and to American literature. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Publication date: 1980
• ISBN 10: 0295957530
• ISBN 13: 9780295957531
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 262
• Editor: Wagoner David