New from Marsh Hawk Press:
On Becoming a Poet: 25 Original Essays & Interviews
Edited by Susan Terris
Sandy McIntosh’s Chapter One Series presents 25 writers at their most candid and expansive about how they became who they are. The writers who talk about their education or self-education – in effect a Bildungsroman in miniature — include Jane Hirshfield, Phillip Lopate, Arthur Sze, Tony Trigilio, Geoffrey O’Brien, Alfred Corn, and other redoubtable figures.
Here’s a brief excerpt from “Mr. Rogers and Me,” Denise Duhamel’s contribution to the volume, a memoir of her introduction to poetry. In this segment we read of the intoxicating influence of Dylan Thomas and what it was like to have Bill Knott as a teacher:
I went to the University of Rhode Island, the big state school, voted “best party school” by Playboy in 1979, the year I was accepted. I was terrified of frat parties after I saw a flaming couch being thrown out of a frat house window. I had a dorm roommate who blared Cheap Trick cassettes. She was fond of singing “I Want You To Want Me” off key into her hairbrush while doing dance moves. Because of the noise and the smoke from her joints, I spent a lot of time in the bookstore and library. It was there that I found Kathleen Spivack’s The Jane Poems, a series of very small poems under fifteen lines about an “every woman” named Jane. I had a poetry awakening, bringing me back to A Child’s Garden of Verses. It was then that I started going through the poetry section of the university library, teaching myself what I could. I fell in love with Dylan Thomas, especially the ending of “Fern Hill”— “Time held me green and dying/ Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”
Just as I was learning that poems didn’t have to rhyme, that they were alive with the now, my sister was in a terrible car accident. I made it through just one year of the University of Rhode Island and went home, where my sister was now the one in the hospital. It was only then that I started to have an understanding of what my parents had been through with me, driving to Providence every day for visits, rearranging their work schedules and so on. My sister was in a coma from which we were not sure she would return. She missed the end of her senior year of high school, where she was decidedly popular, slim, and an A student to boot. I remember the stitches all over her face, the dry shampoo the nurses used to try to get the blood out of her hair. My parents and I spoke to her because the doctor said that it was possible that on some level she could hear us. I wrote terrible poems that I recited to her, realizing I didn’t ever want to go back to the University of Rhode Island. When she came out of her coma, my sister asked for ice cream. When the doctor asked questions, she could tell him her name and recite our home phone number. She didn’t know what year it was, though she said she’d just turned six. The experience was terrifying in just about every way, but slowly her memory came back and she aged herself back to seventeen.
I moved back in with my parents and sister, resuming my high school job at a shoe store next door to the city’s library. I’d go there on my lunch break to the poetry stacks. It was on one such break that I saw a flyer about a study abroad program in Wales. I knew that was where Dylan Thomas was from and made my application. I left in January of 1981 to study in Trinity College in Carmarthen, Wales. It was the first time I’d been on an airplane, the first time I had a passport, the first time I had traveler’s checks pinned in my bra. My uncle had given me $800 to cover the costs not met by my shoe store savings and financial aid. Once in Wales, I took a class with Raymond Garlick, a poet in his own right, who taught a class in Welsh Studies. He was an expert on Dylan Thomas and we visited Thomas’s grave at St. Martin’s. I remember reading more than writing, as I’d lost the confidence and ease with which my ten-year-old self composed narratives. But read I did. I could recite Thomas’s “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower” by heart.
After I returned home, I transferred to Emerson College in Boston where there was an actual major in Creative Writing. In my first Emerson class, I felt like I was with my people, the misfits, the outliers, the weirdoes who, like me, were trying to figure it all out. I was especially excited to meet Bill Knott, whose work reminded me of Thomas’s in its unapologetic passion and strange juxtapositions. The first time I met Bill was at a poetry reading at a Boston bookstore. I got to the bookstore early and recognized Bill from his author’s photo though I’d yet to take a class with him. I approached to ask if he was Bill Knott and he said, “I am most definitely NOT Bill Knott” and walked away fidgeting. After the reading, I waited in line to get my book signed and said, “You ARE Bill Knott.” He proceeded to cross out whole poems in a purple pen and complained I’d bought his weakest book to date.
At Emerson, Knott’s office door was papered with rejection letters. His briefcase was a brown paper bag from a grocery store. He was an outlier in the best sense of the word—not part of any poetry school, not wanting to be part of any school. He was generous to a fault and when my first book came out, he bought twenty copies full price and passed them out to his students as gifts. He told his undergraduate student that we should be sending out our poems. And one of his assignments was to produce a rejection letter…or an acceptance…from a literary magazine by the end of the semester. Over the years we kept in touch and he’d often send chapbooks he’d made himself with a rubber band as a makeshift spine.
— Denise Duhamel
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Author: The Best American Poetry
