History of My Reading/ The Zen of Sam

Sam Moon: official photo 1966 yearbook

"We think by feeling.  What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow."

Theodore Roethke

I took a poetry writing course from Sam Moon in the fall semester of 1965-66 and a playwriting course the following spring semester, both in  my second year at Knox College.  Sam was not only head of the Knox writing program—he was the Knox writing program that year. Harold Grutzmacher, who taught fiction writing, had left after the 1964-5 year, and Knox had not replaced him. Nor would there be a permanent replacement until 1967-68.

Contrary to current college propaganda, Knox had a writing program going back beyond Moon’s first year at Knox in 1953. Moon credited his predecessor, Proctor Sherwin with starting it. It's just a guess, but maybe the excuse for dating the current writing program as beginning in 1968 is that a creative writing major was added for students after that year.  But Knox already had a literature and composition major, which pretty much amounts to the same thing.  I ought to know. It was mine.

I have general recollections of the classes I took from Sam Moon, a little hard to separate from non-class conversations. There were just a few students each time, and I believe we mostly met in Sam’s office in Old Main, either near the window overlooking Alumni Hall and the campus, or clustered around his desk. The classes might entail examining the work of a published “professional” poet or fellow student work.

Sam Moon, probably in the 1950s

Sam Moon’s students tend to remember him for their one-on-one sessions or moments. This might be analyzing a poem by an established poet or the student’s own work, or a conversation about aspects of writing untethered to a particular work. When Sam retired, and later after he died, many came forward with stories of how he helped them, and in some cases changed their lives.

Sam Moon was certainly an encouraging and nourishing influence on me, from my registration and first semester throughout my time at Knox. Sam always read and talked to me about anything I showed him, or anything of mine that appeared in campus publications, whether I was in a course or not.

Though these one-on-one moments might happen in private or the Gizmo, some might be moments from a class, especially when the classes were as informal and intimate as I remember.

I’ll skip to spring because I do have a specific memory about my playwriting class. I’m reasonably sure I took this course in the spring because I used a line from Wallace Stevens as the title of a play I wrote (now lost) and I was reading Stevens that spring term for Doug Wilson's class.  I also used the verse in which the title appears as a quotation before the text of the play. (I liked those lines so well that at about the same time I wrote a song lyric around them, and with my songwriting partner's music, the Crosscurrents performed it.)

On the day the class discussed my play, I began by verbally correcting the quotation—I’d left out a word. It was a very small class—maybe a half dozen students. I remember that when I made the correction, several of those present—including Sam—feigned shock, joking that this additional word cast an entirely different light on the play.

I remember one student comment, which came from Mike Stickney. The protagonist of my play made a fairly long speech at the end. Stickney said that a more realistic and convincing speech at that point would be: “Oh, fuck.”

The professional plays we read were in One Act: Short Plays of the Modern Theatre (Grove Press), edited by Samuel Moon, who also wrote the thoughtful introduction.  He clearly enjoyed seeing plays as well as reading them.

 I’ve got textual notes on only one play: Yeats’ Purgatory, which was produced later in the Studio Theatre. I’m not sure which other plays we read as a class, but I am sure that I read Ionesco’s The Chairs, Thornton Wilder’s Pullman Car Hiawatha, Arthur Miller’s Memory of Two Mondays, and Hello Out There by William Saroyan, whose fiction I’d avidly read in junior high or high school when I came across his books in the public library. Plays by Strindberg, Pirandello,Tennessee Williams, Sean O’Casey, Jean Anouih, and Archibald MacLeish are also in the volume.  Perhaps I read them all.

These days, one act plays have almost disappeared, between the epics with multiple meal breaks and the ten minute (and now one minute) plays. Permit me to observe—as someone who has seen contemporary plays done across the country, at least until a few years ago—that today’s playwrights might benefit from the discoveries and disciplines of writing one act plays, and audiences might enjoy seeing them.  In any case, this book is still in print.

Sam Moon was also especially qualified to teach the poetry writing class in the fall. He was himself a poet who published in Chicago’s Poetry Magazine, historically one of the most important American periodicals for the poetry of the 20th century. Eliot, Pound, Joyce and especially Wallace Stevens all published there. (Examples of Sam's work here and here.) Though he was steeped in that history, he was foremost at Knox in bringing contemporary writing into the curriculum and the culture. He not only knew contemporary poetry, he knew the poets, on equal terms—as one of them.

The major anthologies of contemporary poets I remember—either assigned or recommended—were Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Donald Hall, and The New American Poetry, edited by Donald M. Allen.

The Allen anthology had the larger and broader selection, and remains a very good representative of post-World War II American poetry up to 1960 or so, especially as it includes both poets who became famous, and poets that have slipped into obscurity. (In 1973, Allen and Warren Tallman added a companion volume, The Poetics of The New American Poetry, with statements of purpose by some of these contemporary poets plus relevant pieces by their forerunners, including Walt Whitman.)  The anthology included representatives of the various "schools:" the Beats, Black Mountain, New York, etc.

The Hall anthology was smaller (even the book itself was a smaller-sized paperback) and somewhat more focused. I bought the first edition (1962). (I also have the second edition of 1971, which was revised and enlarged.)

first edition cover

In Hall's first edition--which we probably used for this course--I made check marks before the names of certain poets and poems.  I don't know if these indicate what we read for this class, or just my preferences, but they are what I remember reading.  The poets marked are Robert Lowell, Denise Levertov, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, James Wright and Gary Snyder, with individual poems by Louis Simpson and Donald Justice.  (Others in this anthology I didn't read at the time became important to me later: first Galway Kinnell, then William Stafford and most recently W.S. Merwin.)

I marked these sentences in Hall's introduction: "Yet typically the modern artist has allowed nothing to be beyond his consideration.  He has acted as if restlessness were a conviction and has destroyed his own past in order to create a future."

According to many of these poets, and Sam Moon as well, the major inspiration for postwar American poetry came from William Carlos Williams. Born in New Jersey in 1883, he practiced medicine there for the rest of his life, while becoming the foremost advocate for an American approach to modern writing. His work was eclipsed for awhile by the stardom of T. S. Eliot, but he emerged as the single most important influence on the new American poetry we were reading in the 1960s.

Though it was poet Archibald MacLeish who came up with the foundation sentence, “A poem should not mean but be,” William Carlos Williams was the exemplar of that credo. This I learned from Sam Moon. My copy of Williams’ Selected Poems comes from this year, and I would subsequently acquire his masterpiece Patterson, as well as several books of his prose.

Jay Matson, who was a senior when I was a freshman, recalls reading a number of poets in his classes with Moon, including American poet Theodore Roethke, who died in 1963.  Jay and Sam worked together examining Roethke's poem "The Waking" (the quotation at the top of this post is the second verse.)  I was surprised to learn this, because Roethke was not a fashionable poet in my years, though his reputation has grown since.

Personally I was drawn to his work--especially "The Waking," "Elegy for Jane," "The Far Field" and "Wish For a Young Wife," and his children's poems.  There was something about him I understood, and I liked the music.  Now I also see how at least some of Roethke might appeal to Sam Moon.

 I believe I discovered Roethke on my own, in a magazine I read in the Knox library. But maybe I'm wrong about that--maybe it was Sam Moon.  In any case, I remember acquiring one of Roethke's books, Words For The Wind, and got the first edition of his Collected Poems, published in 1966.

That's the thing about influential teachers--or any teachers: we don't always remember what they taught us.  Perhaps the best lessons are the ones we thought we'd always known, or found ourselves.

A major aspect of Sam Moon's contribution--and one that many remember--was the writers he brought to Knox.  Many were poets who knew him as a poet.  But he also brought fiction writers and other contemporary artists.  They weren't always well-known--yet.  His first guest writer was the 29 year old Philip Roth, who hadn't yet published his first novel.  Gary Snyder was barely back from Japan when Sam brought him to Knox for a week.

Archibald MacLeish visited before my time, and Galway Kinnell after it, but during my years I saw and heard fictionists Grace Paley and Richard Yates, poets Mark Van Doren and W.H. Auden, as well as poets who were in those anthologies: Robert Creeley, David Ignatow, Denise Levertov, Snyder, Robert Bly and James Dickey.

We got to experience these writers often in several contexts.  We heard them reading their work and answering questions, often in the Commons Room of Old Main.  We saw some of them in the classrooms as well, and around a lunch table or informally around campus, and often at an evening party in their honor.

Both Bly and James Dickey were on campus in the spring of 1966.  Bly came first: mesmerizing, flamboyant, opinionated and unlike anyone else.  He read his work in a very individual way.  He must have enjoyed himself at Knox, for he came back a year or two later.

Immediately after his reading, I bought Bly's latest collection, Silence in the Snowy Fields, which furnished most of the poems he read.  I also amused a few credulous souls by imitating his delivery.  Bly probably talked about Pablo Neruda and James Wright on this occasion, which led me to these poets.  And I would keep my eye on Bly and his work for some years to come.

James Dickey's first public event on campus was just a few days after Bly's last.  It's possible their paths crossed in Galesburg, although it might not have been comfortable if they did.  Bly, who had praised Dickey's earlier work, wrote a review excoriating Dickey's latest collection, Buckdancer's Choice, not only in poetic but in moral terms. (It's not clear when this review was first published, but it is included in Bly's 1990 book, American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity, with a date of 1967.)

Nevertheless Buckdancer's Choice won the National Book Award for poetry, and Dickey was appointed the United States Poet Laureate in 1966. This was several years before his novel Deliverance and the subsequent movie made him rich and famous.

Dickey was on campus, as many writers were, partly to make the final choices for that year's student writing awards.  I was completely surprised when he named me as the third prize winner in poetry.  That could be why I remained in a fog as he talked about my poems, and read one of them--he even paused and grinned over a line or image he liked. (I actually may remember it: "my eyes from cold coffee run to her.") He described them partly in terms of other poets, some of whom I knew but others I'd never read.  I had to resist the temptation to write the names down then and there, but that would have given me away. I did try to remember them however, so I could read the work that had apparently influenced me.

Physically a big man, Dickey made a big impression, though not all of it good.  He had a dazzling smile and was ebulliently theatrical, pouring on the southern charm.  He entertained a group of us at lunch--his imitation of how the original King Kong turned his head was uncanny.

 But some who spent more time with him were not so charmed. His constant self-referencing act wore thin.  More than one person (and I was one) noticed his less than subtle lechery at parties.  Who could forget him asking every female student he met her age, and then drawling at them "That's a fahn age for a woman," often ending with an invitation to leave the party with him?

It's hard to overestimate the value of these writers and artists visiting campus. Physical presence is exciting for everyone--we may have been excited to briefly meet Robert Bly, but Bly had once been thrilled to briefly meet T.S. Eliot.  It's true that sometimes seeing and hearing a poet read actually ruins the experience of reading them .The voice in person is not the voice in your head. (Judging from recordings on YouTube, I suspect I would have felt that way about Roethke.)   But most times it adds dimensions to the printed words.

 Some of these experiences at Knox opened new doors and provided new choices for student writers and readers by bringing sound to the words, and the words to life.  They provided models, and gave at least some hint of what it was like to be writing in our time, and in the various places and situations we might end up.  We may have looked upon some as heroes, but we also got glimpses of their human weaknesses.  Some were living cautionary tales. But the good and bad were proportions in most.

 Seeing and hearing them in the same room, meeting them even briefly in different circumstances, eventually enabled me to relate personally to writers and artists I met, at Knox and then afterward.  I had the confidence to meet them on equal terms, not equal as writers but as intelligent human beings with common interests, and certain common writing experiences.

Robin Metz and Sam Moon

Sam Moon taught at Knox College from 1953 until 1984.  Together with Robin Metz, who joined the faculty in 1967 as a fiction writer, he presided over the expansion of the writing program that continued after his retirement.  Big writing programs are a national trend but Knox has been one of the exemplars.

I last saw Sam on a brief visit to Galesburg more than a decade after I'd left, a few years before he retired.  Apart from Doug Wilson (my host) and Robin Metz (who was invited to lunch but didn't show), he was the only teacher at Knox I sought out.  I walked up to his Old Main office, knocked on the door and opened it.  I'd forgotten the rule--if the door is closed, it means there's a class in session.  I stood at the entrance, seeing across the room a familiar scene as if it were a sepia print: Sam at his desk in the far corner with a semi-circle of students clustered close around him, all heads bent to a text.  He said sharply that this was a class.  I mumbled an embarrassed apology and began backing out the door.

Then I heard his voice again, in a different tone: "Is that Bill Kowinski?"  We agreed to meet in the Gizmo after his class. I don't remember what we talked about, but except for the changes in the Gizmo (all for the worse, in my opinion), it was another familiar scene.  A few years later I was one of his former students to be asked to write a tribute, to be collected with others and presented to Sam on his retirement.

The Sam Moon I knew was modest and unassuming, with a lively sense of humor.  I can't say I knew him well.  But I am still discovering the Sam Moon I didn't know.

a Cortland, New York landscape

According to Jay Matson (who knew Sam a lot better over the years), Sam and his wife Doris stayed in Galesburg for some years after his retirement, and spent summers at their place on Lake Huron in Canada, where Doris was from.  They moved to southern New York state when Doris became ill, to be near their daughter Vicky.

Sam remained in Cortland, New York after Doris died, and eventually reconnected with an old love, with whom he shared some years intermittently at her home in Colorado, as well as his homes in Canada and New York. Sam weathered his last illness in Cortland. He died in 2011 at the age of 89.  He'd spent 31 years at Knox, but after he left he had  27 years of another life away from it.

Even in his Knox years, Sam had a more complicated personal life than most people knew.  One of the smaller things I didn't know about Sam is that he was an avid swimmer, and wrote a series of poems about it while at Knox.

After he retired, he published a book in 1992 that wasn't poetry or about plays or literature or teaching: it was about Henry Goulding, the man who ran a trading post in the Four Corners area of the southwest, and his relationship to the Navajo.  According to Doug Wilson, he worked on this book for some 20 years.  The novelist William Eastlake had a ranch in the area, and wrote about the people there in his early books. Sam brought him to teach a term of fiction-writing at Knox my junior year, so I wonder if he had anything to do with this.  The title of the book is Tall Sheep and it is available on Amazon.  I look forward to reading it.

Sam got interested in Buddhism, as many of us did in the 60s, but he went deeper into it.  Initially intrigued by reading Thoreau (again, according to Wilson) and by John Cage (who he brought to Knox several times) and (my guess) by Gary Snyder, he went beyond the philosophy to the practice of Buddhist meditation.

He also translated the Tao Te Ching by Lao T'zu, with a long commentary on the work and his translation.  For awhile after his death no one seemed to know what had become of this project, but eventually Sam's daughter found the manuscript and sent a copy to Jay Matson, who sent one to me.  It's wonderful.

After Sam's memorial at Knox in 2012, three of his former students--David Gustafson, Jay Matson and Dave Lunde--set about collecting some of his work and creating a book, A Little Farther: Selected Works of Samuel Moon. The cover was designed by Sam's daughter Victoria Moon Delaney, and Doug Wilson wrote a short biographical sketch of Sam.

The book begins with those swimming poems, and though other poems are undated, some (like "Man in the Landscape") are identifiably from his Knox years.

 But about half of the book is given over to his last work, a beautiful and unusual prose piece called "The Dunes."   It's a fable about a meditation circle held by animals in the woods, presided over by a cat.  Though it reminds me of animal teaching stories in many traditions, it is also strikingly original.  Within the terms of its world it deals realistically with spiritual questions, inspired by the natural world.

Most conspicuously it has profound things to say about single-point meditation (which usually involves paying total attention to the breath of the present moment, as in Zen meditation)  and the Buddhist concept of emptiness.  It's in short chapters, and lately I've been reading one aloud before each of our evening meditations.

"The Dunes" also incorporates lines from those swimming poems, which suggests that Sam had been living a version of meditation for a very long time. Someone asked Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen master who founded the San Francisco Zen Center, why he meditated.  To prepare for old age and death, he replied.  Judging from "The Dunes," Sam Moon was about as prepared for death as a man could be.

Unfortunately the book is hard to find.  The Knox Bookstore carried it before it sold itself out to a notorious national chain and stopped being an actual bookstore.  It was published by Village Books in Bellingham, Washington, but I can't find it on their website. Jay Matson has a few copies, and he thinks that David Gustafson does as well.  At the moment, they're your best bet.

These three teachers--William Spanos, Doug Wilson and Sam Moon--formed my second year of college and a great deal of my subsequent life, with their teaching, their example and the worlds they opened to me through the books and writers we read.  Other teachers of this year, notably Donald Torrence and Phil Haring, made their mark as well.

What remains to tell about this year surrounds and permeates these experiences.  There was a dark side to the intensity of this year, but also new friends and acquaintances, and the experiences I shared with them, which included books we read that weren't part of any classes.

And then there's summer, and one of the strangest days of my life.  Laters.