But for a badly timed heart attack — and the suspicion that if a Bainbridge Island swimming pool (now sand garden) hadn’t gotten him, something else would have — Theodore Roethke might have celebrated his 101st birthday yesterday. (Roethke shares a birthday with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Miles Davis, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Imagine all four at the cake table.) A week earlier, in the University of Washington’s Roethke Auditorium, Paul Muldoon described Roethke as “a poet who meant a huge amount to me.” He read two of Roethke’s best-known poems, “The Waking” and “I Knew a Woman.” And he read a dozen or so of his own poems — poems that veered from understated to rococo to loco. It was an exhilarating reading; the Garden Master, I’m sure, would’ve dug it.
Highlights from the evening included readings of “Anseo” (it means “here,” in Irish); “Cauliflower,” which was introduced as “a sestina-ish type of sestina”; and “The Loaf,” in which the refrain — “with a pink and a pink and a pinkie-pick” — falls somewhere, according to Muldoon, “between sense and nonsense.” (John Skoyles has smart things to say about “The Loaf” in this 2006 Atlantic article. Comparing strategies in poetry to strategies in war, he quotes T. E. Lawrence: “Nine-tenths of tactics are certain, and taught in books: but the irrational tenth is like the kingfisher flashing across the pool, and that is the test of generals.”)
Dipping into The Annals of Chile, Muldoon read “The Birth,” an abecedarian-ish type of abecedarian. The scene is the hospital; his daughter Dorothy is hauled
into the inestimable realm of apple-blossoms and chanterelles and damsons and eel-spears
and foxes and the general hubbub
of inkies and jennets and Kickapoos with their lemniscs
or peekaboo-quiffs of Russian sableand tallow-unctuous vernix, into the realm of the widgeon —
the “whew” or “yellow-poll,” not the “zuizin” —
Here’s Muldoon, from a 2003 Irish Times interview: “Form is a straightjacket in the way that a straightjacket was a straightjacket for Houdini.”
Near the end of the reading, the poet and rock lyricist recited two songs that he sometimes performs with Rackett, his “three-car-garage band.” (Muldoon writes the lyrics, flashes the hair, and plays a “rudimentary rhythm guitar.”) I’d heard “Saab with Sandi” in Chicago a few months earlier; “Sideman” was new to me. “I’ll support you at Wembley, I may require some assembly, but I’ll be your sideman, baby, I’ll be by your side. . . . I’ll be at Ticonderoga, I’ll be there for you at yoga, I’ll be your sideman, baby, I’ll be by your side.” I like imagining Muldoon and Roethke, side by side, linked by sense and nonsense, greenhouses and green fields. Muldoon’s father, after all, was a market gardener.
