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.

The Daily Lear

--Words and drawing by Edward Lear

on the Lear Trail

The Daily Lear

--words and drawing by Edward Lear

The Daily Lear

--by Edward Lear

History of My Reading/ Seasons of Belief

"The law of chaos is the law of ideas,
Of improvisations and seasons of belief."

--Wallace Stevens: "Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas"

The poetry I was reading--mostly for the first time--in Mr. Spanos' course that spring of 1966 seemed overwhelmingly dark, portentous and ominous. "Between the idea/and the reality/Between the motion/And the act/Falls the shadow..."  "A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,/ I had not thought death had undone so many..." (T.S. Eliot.)

"There died a myriad,/and of the best, among them,/For an old bitch gone in the teeth,/ For a botched civilization..." (Ezra Pound)

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...And everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned..." (Yeats)

It was grim, and we took it seriously. Though written decades before, it colored our present world.

But it wasn't just in this course.  Existentialism, often in its gloomier assertiveness, was everywhere on campus that spring, if memory and the Knox Student are reasonably indicative.  My notebook says I was reading Sartre's novel Nausea, so it's likely I had already purchased my paperback copy of his No Exit and Three Other Plays, where I read the immortal line, "Hell is other people."  Existentialism was part of other campus experiences, like plays and movies, and courses in  philosophy, religion, theatre and some languages.

However formed by the past, these were explanations, poetic and otherwise, of what we felt happening in the world around us, and what this said about the human condition.  In particular, there was the ever more threatening escalation of the Vietnam War: another substantial increase in US troops had been announced in March.  But the continuing troubles on campus seemed threatening as well--the resurgent anxiety over the exodus of good teachers, the enervating politics over campus issues like women's hours and the planning committee.  These poems gave oracular context to an apocalyptic anxiety dampening and deadening our present, as it confirmed fears about a future deformed before it begins.

Fortunately for me, I was also taking another course, and reading poetry that was quite different.  It was Douglas Wilson's American Studies course in poets Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens.

Wilson had constructed such combinations before (Henry Adams and Mark Twain in my first year) and would again.  Whitman and Stevens were admittedly kind of an odd couple (although in Poetry and the Age (1955), poet and critic Randall Jarrell followed his essay on Whitman with his essay on Stevens.)  But together with how Wilson taught this course, it was a combination that saved the spring.

Our basic Whitman text was Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose (Modern Library 1950), edited and with an introduction by John Kouwenhoven.

 For Stevens we got his Collected Poems in hardback (the 1964 6th printing of the 1954 first edition, which I still have.)  We also had the paperback of his essays, The Necessary Angel. 

 There was more Stevens than made it into the Collected Poems, so late poems and other writings--I was particularly taken with his Adagia--were collected in Opus Posthumous.

 We had the Prentice-Hall selection of critical writings by various authors, edited by Marie Borroff (titled simply Wallace Stevens.)  I no longer have this book but wish I did.  This series on individual writers (Twentieth Century Views) was invaluable, and these days I pick up every volume I come across.

The "Children of Adam" and "Calumus" sections early in Leaves of Grass are particularly marked up in my copy, suggesting in-class analysis, though later underlinings could be either from class or my own reading.

Of my class work, two short papers survive, one on the key section 24, which includes discussion of Whitman's use of the word "kosmos" here as well as in a poem titled Kosmos.  I allude to a Leslie Fiedler interpretation, but it seems neither Fiedler nor I catch the relationship to the famous book by Alexander von Humboldt (Kosmos or Cosmos) which Whitman is known to have read.  (I know about it now mostly as a product of living next door to a university named after Humboldt.)

But I have even less surviving evidence from the Stevens half of the course.  Because I didn't want to deface the hardback, I bought a paperback of selected poems and marked that up. Unfortunately, it has quite recently disappeared.  None of my Stevens papers survive either, including one that Mr. Wilson thought was publishable.  He assigned a major poem to each of us, but I don't even remember which one I wrote about.

So partly by necessity I will be more general, though it is also appropriate, because the effect of this class then was more important than the details, and that applies as well to the lasting effects.

In some ways, Whitman and Stevens were hard sells.  Even Whitman defenders admit he wrote a lot of bad or at least embarrassing poetry, and Stevens is either criticized for the philosophical aridity of his late work or the frivolity of his early poems.  In terms of the poetry we were learning to value, Whitman was at best an anomaly and Stevens as a modern was questionable (Mr. Spanos for example found him wanting.)

Among Whitman's embarrassing qualities is his insistence on writing in detail about the body; despite our 1960s advanced thinking, we were made wary of such discussion by the cultural mores we had absorbed.  And until Stevens got super serious in ways we could at least analyze, he wrote poems and lines that Randall Jarrell noted in 1955 are "ordinarily considered" nonsensical, like the verse of Edward Lear.  (Actually I love Edward Lear.)

Douglas L. Wilson 

On the other hand there were currents we felt in our time that, once we were given permission and a few keys to it all, made these verses attractive.  Both writers rebelled against a staid time ("The steeples are empty and so are the people," Stevens wrote.)  Whitman was revolutionary: "Unscrew the locks from the doors!  Unscrew the doors from their jambs!"

I can hear Wilson reading out this line.  Normally even-toned and even-tempered (though I can attest there was some wildness in him) he read them with glee.  He did not neglect the technical aspects, the historical and the textual complexities of these poems, but above all he enacted his enthusiasm, releasing the energy in the lines.

At 31, Doug Wilson was one of the younger teachers at Knox, and he likely understood the new cultural currents that might bring new life to these poets in our time.  But he had to push we stick-in-the-mud 19 and 20 year olds, skeptical and suspicious, to hear the poems sing, and feel their exuberance.  "I sing the body electric!"  That registered: there was no more potent symbol for the mid-1960s than the electric guitar.

Especially in the early poems in "Leaves of Grass," the ones in the original 1855 edition, Whitman is the personification of ebullience, even as he makes the physical sensations spiritual.  Wilson got us to hear these lines sing, and in the singing we heard the exuberance that becomes characteristically American--that runs through our literature from Whitman and Emerson to Thoreau and Twain, Thomas Wolfe and Faulkner, Henry Miller and Kerouac, Robert Bly and James Wright, and beyond the US to Hopkins and Garcia Marquez.  In particular, Whitman had an heir who was reaching the height of his contemporary fame: poet and prophet Allen Ginsberg.  Wallace Stevens was also such an heir, we were to learn, as he himself acknowledged in a poem.

 Wilson pointed out aspects of these poems that prompted insight and wonder.  His deep intelligence reassured us: it was academically okay to explore the visionary, the exuberant, the humanly transcendent, and maybe even the delightful. We knew poetry could be serious.  Now suddenly, poetry could be joyous.

from 1966 yearbook

Wilson's enthusiasm released a fundamental aspect of both Whitman and Stevens: the seriousness and importance of playfulness.  Looking back, I see that it was this quality that made the Beatles so deeply important to me, beginning this very school year.  It took seeing them in a comic movie (Help!) the previous summer to reveal the joy in their music to me.

Their playfulness was subversive and at times satirical, just as Stevens' could be desperate.  But this stubborn need for playfulness--also often satirical and desperate, a defense against despair-- became a strong current in my life, especially for the next several years. At times it was perhaps too strong and overwhelming for my own good and that of my work, but seemingly essential to my survival.

(I also note another Beatles connection: outside of class, Doug and I were talking about a song then new on the Gizmo jukebox, the Beatles' "We Can Work It Out." Doug said he admired the use of the 'long line' of the lyrics.  We were of course reading the conspicuous champion of the long line, Walt Whitman.  While I also admired that song, we differed on another--the biggest seller of 1965, "Wooly Bully" by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs.  Doug liked it.  I did not.)

For Whitman, play was one of the ceremonies of innocence:

"There was a child went forth every day
And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became
And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day
Or for many years or stretching cycle of years."

It is not a big jump from this to the identification both Whitman and Stevens found in aspects of nature and even other people, or the ultimate place they both gave to the Imagination.   

Just how committed they were to the imagination is suggested by the fact that the many places and scenes evoked in their poems were the products of two basically stay-at-home guys. Whitman wrote about many more places than he ever traveled to; he rarely strayed from New York, at least until the Civil War. Except for Florida vacations, Steven’s poems about places outside of Connecticut and Manhattan were often based on business trips as an official of an insurance company.  But the places and scenes became the essence of themselves and more than themselves, through imagination, and the skills of the singers.  Whitman made poetic music never heard before, and Stevens' music carries even his most abstract poems.

In her study on the phenomenon titled Exuberance: The Passion for Life, Kay Redfield Jamison notes, "The exuberance of play is, in some respects, a joyous improvisation on the knowledge newly acquired through exploration."  That suggests the flavor, not only of Whitman and Stevens, but of this class.  I recall a sense of communal excitement unmatched in any other course I took at Knox.

In a talk he gave in 1994, Wilson spoke of his introduction to Wallace Stevens' work in graduate school, and his particular fondness for a couple of poems in Harmonium (Stevens' first book): "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" ("Only, here and there, an old sailor,/Drunk and asleep in his boots,/Catches tigers/In red weather.") and “Anecdote of the Jar” (I placed a jar in Tennessee...)  He conveyed that to us as well.

Wilson credited Knox student James McCurry for involving him in Stevens' later, longer philosophical poems, through McCurry's honors project in the year previous to our course.  One of these poems, "Credences of Summer," frames the rest of his talk. There's a considerable body of critical work on Stevens now, but little existed when McCurry wrote his paper, Wilson said. That suggests it still didn't exist when we took this course. We were explorers in more ways than we knew.

Reading Whitman now I realize again that one purpose of this course I took at 19 would be that I would have motive and context to read him again in my 70s. But that impetus does not come from the poet alone—the context of enthusiasm and exuberance is as much a creation of Wilson’s teaching as it is in the long gray lines on the page.

Much more than Whitman, however, I’ve been reading Stevens for more than 50 years. In all that time, the experience of his poetry has been linked directly back to Doug Wilson and that class. There isn’t one without the other.

One of Valjean's children's books

I’m not the only one who was so inspired. Classmate Ted Szostkowski told Doug that he still reads Stevens, and has interested his daughter in reading him, too. The class meant a lot to Valjean McLenighan, my friend over the years. She noted this on the blog she started during her terminal illness, when she had dinner with Doug and Sharon Wilson in Chicago. After she died, a friend’s eulogy mentioned that one of her favorite poems was Stevens’ “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.” Its last lines:


“We say God and the imagination are one...
How high the highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.”

We were there together—around a long table, we felt these discoveries as a communal experience. And with former faiths assaulted all around, with things falling apart, we heard Whitman and Stevens sing of individual experience and the imagination as the human credo. So that this spring could be a season of belief.

Douglas L. Wilson remained teaching at Knox, through the crazed 60s and the apocalyptic anger that peaked in the early 70s, through the 80s when students not studying to become lawyers were studying to become doctors, and into the 1990s.  He also directed the Knox library for awhile, and spent four years at Monticello, where he was the founding director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies.

But his most prominent achievements are the many books and articles he wrote, edited or co-wrote with Knox history professor Rodney Davis on the life of Abraham Lincoln, under the aegis of the Lincoln Center they co-founded.  Wilson received multiple honors for Honor's Voice (1999) and Lincoln's Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words (2006.)

Wilson's work is characterized by meticulous and judicious scholarship and clear writing with subtle structures of narrative. Besides being interesting and entertaining to read,  Honor's Voice for example is practically a guidebook on how to evaluate historical testimony, then how to carefully and creatively use it to adjust previous assumptions and gain new insights.  Lincoln's Sword is not only absorbing as history; as a book on writing I find it inspirational.

 In 1998 Wilson and Davis edited  Herndon's Informants, a collection of testimony about Abraham Lincoln solicited from his former friends by Lincoln's law partner, William H. Herndon.  This book so entranced novelist George Saunders that he used it extensively in his novel Lincoln in the Bardo, mentioning the book and its editors several times in the text.  This novel won a Pulitzer, a National Book Award and the Man Booker Award in the UK.  (Wilson learned of Saunder's praise from former student Barbara Cottral Bean.)

Wilson published his first book decades earlier when I was still at Knox: The Genteel Tradition,  nine essays by George Santayana that he edited, and for which he wrote a contextual introduction.  I have a generously signed copy. Wilson was active in college matters in those years, and was a member of the Faculty Committee on Student Affairs, including the year I was a student member. He had a great deal more patience and tact than I ever could manage.

I also note that in a 1969 essay in the student publication Catch (which seems in that year to be a substitute for both Dialogue and the literary journal that must not be named) he went after distribution requirements (which, he wrote, have lost credibility) and in particular the math and language requirements.  "If the members of the faculty were to be judged as educated persons by such a test (say ability in one language and calculus), does anyone doubt what the result would be?  Nothing less than the 'Emperor's New Clothes' played out in academic regalia."

He also notes that the advisory study titled the North Central Report had pointedly asked if these requirements aren't "mere political devices."  I believe Knox did dump these requirements, at least for awhile.  Had they done so a little earlier, I might actually be a Knox graduate.

Doug Wilson and I have corresponded intermittently throughout the years, and we do so now. His friendship and guidance when I was a student, his calm good humor and his intelligent enthusiasm were vital to me.  His belief in me as a writer was encouraging then, and his belief in my writing now (at least, before this post) I keep as a kind of secret award from a highly credible source.

As for my recurring exploration of Wallace Stevens, or at least enjoyment of his music, this has required a few additions to my book collection. Just this year I read Paul Mariani’s revelatory if uneven biography of Stevens, The Whole Harmonium.  A review of Mariani's book in the New Yorker had this choice quote: "And if a primary function of poetry is to expand and enrich the scope of a native language, Stevens has no equal in American English except Walt Whitman."

Some years back I lucked out by coming upon a copy of Wallace Stevens: Musing the Obscure by Ronald Sukenick, one of my favorite contemporary fictionists since the 70s. Published in 1967, this book was his doctoral thesis at Brandeis, and contains his interpretations (or "readings") of many poems (coincidentally or not, Mariani’s often coincide.)

I've got Stevens’ Collected Poems in paperback now as well as the old hardback. But I usually kept at bedside and at times carried in my backpack the compact paperback called Palm at the End of the Mind, a generous selection (with chronology) edited by his daughter Holly Stevens, which I also got at Knox. Eventually I wore it out, until the binding disintegrated (the line across 'End of' in the scan above is a rubber band.) Just recently I acquired a newer edition, which is a little larger but almost as handy (though the chronology of poems is left out of the table of contents, alas.)  I've also replaced my old--and now MIA--Opus Posthumous with the revised and expanded edition.

inside title page,1931 edition

I’ve got a hardback copy of Stevens' letters, and the pride and joy of my collection: a 1931 second edition of his first book, Harmonium. It’s a library discard so not quite auction-worthy, but the price certainly was right. I got it for a dime, discarded by the public library of my childhood. Tells a story right there.

Here's another story: the first edition of Harmonium sold so poorly (about 100 copies) that it was remaindered, and priced at the original bargain basement of Filene's department store in Boston at 11 cents.

The Daily Lear

The Daily Lear

--Edward Lear

History of My Reading/Man, God, Art: Spanos

My second year at Knox I took two literature courses--really one year-long course--from William V. Spanos.  The one in the fall semester was probably my very first college literature course, and I could not have chosen a better starting point: I learned how to read a poem.

I've mentioned Mr. Spanos before--his vigorous remarks at our freshman orientation sessions on the Two Cultures, and his friendship with Fred Newman.  This was the first time--and the last time--I had the opportunity to take a class with him.  He was leaving Knox at the end of the year.

William V. Spanos, 1966
Yearbook photo

His forceful manner of speaking, the singular vocabulary, the peculiar resonance of his suddenly booming voice that made it seem deeper in pitch than it actually was, and his air of authority (as well as his black hair and beard) that made him seem taller than he actually was--all contributed to making him an unmistakable figure.

He was easy to spot, and easy to parody.  Mike Hamrin in a fake black beard did a good job for one of the Mortarboard satirical skits, in a scene set at the Gizmo picnic table where faculty met, next to his friend Doug Wilson (played in this case by himself.)

His unique characteristics were on full display in his classroom, along with his repertoire of mannerisms.  The one I remember best was a twisting of his hand, fingers slightly splayed, as he worked his way to a complex point: he appeared to be changing a phantom light bulb, or screwing the lid off an invisible jar hovering upside down above his shoulder.

Though he perpetually seemed to be slightly angry about everything, and his glowering intensity and insistence on taking everything so seriously could be intimidating, he could also be kind, compassionate and companionable.  He may not have had much of a sense of humor about anything else, but fortunately he did have one about himself.

I got to know him and his wife a little that year, went on a road trip to Wisconsin with him, socialized a bit and served as babysitter a few times in their home.  But even now, when it feels appropriate to be referring to Sam Moon and Doug Wilson, I can't bring myself to call him Bill.  He's forever Mr. Spanos.

I recall this Types of Poetry course as a large one, with juniors and seniors among the second years.  Mr. Spanos defined his mission at the first class: Most people don't know how to read a poem.  They get a feeling, as he said with undisguised sarcasm.  But true poetry is not sentimental mush.  Poems make statements--they assert, narrate, ask questions, provide if/then arguments and internal debates. There are sentences in the lines of poems, with subjects and verbs and objects, however they are ordered.  The pronouns refer to something: the 'it' in the 7th line of the third stanza in Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium" refers to "heart" in the fifth line, for instance.

Poets use devices, sound patterns, rhyme schemes, themes, ambiguity, irony, paradox ("To that sweet yoke where lasting freedom be," Sir Philip Sidney in "Leave me, O Love.")  In the course, we were going to learn how to read what's really there in some of the best poems in the English language.

Our main text was 100 Poems: Chaucer to Dylan Thomas, edited by A. J. M. Smith (Scribner's 1965.)  Along with the poems, the Glossary of Technical Terms in the back proved useful.  These poems were supplemented by others in handouts.

Mr. Spanos impressed upon us that there was a lot in each poem to discover.  He did that partly by spending what seemed like weeks on the first poem in the collection, that in its entirety is four lines, by an anonymous poet: Western wind, when wilt thou blow./The small rain down can rain?/ Christ, if my love were in my arms,/And I in my bed again!

We spent another year on the first two lines of Chaucer's Prologue to the Canterbury Tales in Middle English.  Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote/The droghte of March hath perced to the roote...  But once you know "shoures soote" means "showers sweet," then let the metaphor begin.

I have my copy of 100 Poems from this class, with my circles and arrows to my marginal notes on Spanos' analysis.  He points out a troche (two syllables, first stressed) and the places where Shakespeare shifts his rhetoric from negative to positive and back to negative again in his Sonnet CVI, which pits Platonic ideals against the changeableness of human nature: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ Admit impediments."  The line continues "Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds," which means one thing when "alters" and "alteration" refer to the same sort of behavior, but something else with the Elizabethan meaning of "alteration" as the ravages of time.

(There's another note I made that probably went right by me at the time, but now that I've become more familiar with Shakespeare's plays, it's brilliant: "Mixed metaphors (to be effective) must be analogous images."  Shakespeare deploys cascades of mixed metaphors--see Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech alone--but because the images are analogous, they work together.)

We spent a lot of time on Thomas Wyatt's "They Flee From Me"--the rhyme scheme, the movement from present to past and back, the ironies, the reversal of the traditional metaphor of man the hunter and woman the hunted, but also the poem as a reflection of the historical moment: it was a lament on the rise of the "newfangledness" of courtly love.  Yet knowing this did not disturb, and does not disturb, the phrases and elements of language that attracted me, and that continue to work their magic on the level of (don't tell anybody!) feeling.

And so it went, with large cultural themes and hidden antinomies, disparaties, dichotomies, ambiguities...existential implications, sexual metaphors, symbols and allegory, persona and allusions, verse forms and rhyme schemes...By the time we got just to Dryden (1631-1700) the class was thoroughly intimidated, which led to my one moment of glory (sort of) that I remember.  We were looking at "A Song for St. Cecilia's Day," and Mr. Spanos began by asking the class, "What kind of poem is this?"  Silence, for an uncomfortably long time.  I timidly put up my hand.  "Occasional?" I offered.  "It's an occasional poem!" he thundered in exasperation.  It wasn't exactly a genius flash of insight on my part.  The title says it--it is a poem marking the occasion of St. Cecilia's Day.  It even includes the date.  But after all these areas of arcane mysteries had been revealed, the obvious looked like some sort of trick.

In old pages of my persistent college fictionalizing, I came across a scene that might come from this class.  If it didn't happen that way (as my Aunt Toni used to say) it could have.  It centers on a poem that's not actually in the 100 Poems collection, a very short lyric by Robert Frost called "Dust of Snow":
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

In my pages, "Mr. Spiros" insists the poem is scatological: "'This person--the persona of the poem, some young kid with a broken heart--' Spiros deeply sang the words in the measure of ridicule--'who goes out, burdened with sadness and suicide, like students like to go out in the rain, feeling abysmally sorry for themselves, and loving it.  This persona is standing under a tree, and up in the tree a bird shakes some snow on him.  For a moment he thinks its bird droppings that have fallen on him.  But then he realizes it's snow and he laughs in relief.  He laughs at himself.'"

In my fiction, the "persona" is a student who scribbles down his own version of what a Spiros version of Frost's poem might be:

The dust of snow from a hemlock tree
fell down and revolted me.
'If you don't have the courage 
or the good sense,
shit on somebody else
who isn't so tense.'

Nervous was I
when I spoke out these words
to take the snow from a tree
for spineless bird turds.

But I grew wise
as I grew old
and realized turds
are not that cold.

It does sound like something Spanos would say, and the kind of doggerel I wrote during classes.

We were assigned to read more poems than got marginal notes in my text, but I'm not entirely sure which ones.  There's nothing marked in Blake, though we must have done at least "The Tyger."  We must have blitzed through Wordsworth (pausing to note the rhyme scheme of his sonnets) and the rest of the English Romantics, the 19th century Americans.  (The editor's judgment was also part of it--one Byron, lots of Keats, one Emily Dickinson.)  The notes pick up when we reach Yeats, and explode with Eliot's "Gerontion" and "The Hollow Men."  And that's more or less where we would return in the Spanos spring course, Modern British and American Poets.

Before that however, a little about the supplementary text for this Types of Poetry course: A Prosody Handbook by poets Karl Shapiro and Robert Beum (Harper & Row 1965.)  Notice that both this and 100 Poems were new that year.  Of the two, only A Prosody Handbook remains in print, which is odd only in the sense that the authors' foreword made it sound like only the latest in a long line of books on prosody, and apt to be replaced at any time as ongoing debates are resolved.  But it's still around.

According to the two poets: "A poem yields up its meaning, and makes that meaning an experience, in two ways: (1) through the semantic content of words that are organized in sequences of images, ideas, and logical or conventional connections; and (2) through the "music," the purely physical qualities of the medium itself, such as sound color, pitch, stress, line length, tempo."

Prosody has to do with the music, the sound.  "In recent decades, the study of poetry has focused intensively on the semantic elements of the poem, and prosody has been somewhat neglected," the authors assert.  Spanos probably leaned that way, too, but he dutifully included prosody in his discussions of individual poems. Shapiro and Beum write that teachers should feel free to assign their book without going through it point by point, and to my recollection that's what Spanos did.  Fortunately, this book also has a useful glossary, which is probably how I used it.

That's not because I disdained prosody (though even now I find the early going in this book confusing.)  If anything, all the new knowledge about semantics seemed to devalue my natural attraction to the sound.  That's been true in my own writing, prose and verse: the music is its greatest strength, and therefor at times its greatest weakness. But I no longer am intimidated about this preference.  Robert Frost is known for his country wisdom, Wallace Stevens as the premier poet of ideas, and Edward Albee for the riveting characters in his plays.  But all three said that sound is primary in their work.  It's the rhythm, the sound of words, the music.

Reading poems in this analytical way inevitably involved interpretation, and the ongoing question was what made an interpretation valid?  Those attracted to poetry could become defensive if their experience of the poem was demeaned.  Were they "mis-reading" the poem, or simply getting something else out of it?  Such conflicts could get quite emotional.

Interpretation quickly gets into the realm of literary criticism, and methods or styles of criticism can change.  The dominant style at Knox in 1965 seemed still to be the New Criticism of the 1940s and 50s.  Even as early as this Types of Poetry course, there were at least a couple of works of criticism referenced.  In any case, I'm pretty sure I bought my copy of The Well Wrought Urn by Cleanth Brooks that spring (copyright 1947.)

Another I heard about but am not sure I owned at the time was Theory of Literature by Rene Wellek and Austin Warren.  ("Wellek and Warren" were often mentioned.)  These days I own a vintage paperback of the second edition of 1955--the first edition was in 1941.  It's one of those books I'm glad I remember hearing about, because it's more interesting to me now than it would have been then.

While Mr. Spanos may have shortchanged the evocative somewhat, this Types of Poetry course imparted skills in reading and analyzing that revealed and enriched the experience of the poems.  On that essential level, it was one of the more important courses I took.  Spanos balanced his own critical point of view and enthusiams with the nuts and bolts analysis--scanning the lines, noting the spondees, revealing the meaning--and double-meanings-- of words at the time they were written, and so on.  However, in the spring course he gave freer reign to his own insights and point of view.  He took us on journeys deeper into the poems.

For this British and American Poetry course The Imagist Poem, an anthology edited by William Pratt. was the first paperback we used, mainly to trace the historical path to modern 20th century poetry that proposed centering on the accurate and original image, using ordinary words, in a rhythm that corresponds to the emotion evoked by the poem.  The model was Ezra Pound's:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Most of the course as I remember it concentrated on William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Pound.  (I seem to recall that Spanos wanted to add a more contemporary poet, like Stanley Kunitz, but we didn't get that far.)

In Yeats' Selected Poems and Two Plays (edited by M.L. Rosenthal) we certainly read "The Second Coming" though I have more marginal notes on the lesser known poem that follows it--"A Prayer For My Daughter."  We read "Among School Children" and the Crazy Jane poems.  Classmate Leonard Borden reminds me of one short poem that got the full Spanos treatment--which he points out is particularly apropos for us these days:

Speech after long silence; it is right,
All other lovers being estranged or dead,
Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade,
The curtains drawn against unfriendly night,
That we descant and yet again descant
Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song:
Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young
We love each other and were ignorant.

So emphasized and drummed into our heads was this poem that I parodied a few lines of it in my short story published later this spring, "The Pressure of Reality."

We read a lot of Pound, no poem more intensively than the very long "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly."  My notes are extensive, and include analysis by John Jacob Espey, evidently from his book on this poem.  It's not surprising then that Spanos published a long article on Mauberly in Contemporary Literature, where he dealt with the issue of who is speaking--the persona.  I have an undated reprint so I don't know whether it was a class handout or came later.

"Mauberly" in particular was an apt transition to T.S. Eliot.  While we used the New Directions paperback of Pound's Selected Poems, we got the hardback edition of Eliot's The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950. I believe it came without a dust jacket--just that firm, deep green book that was like modernist scripture.

We did the major poems (though not the ones that would ultimately be the most famous--the Book of Practical Cats poems that were the basis of the international hit musical Cats): "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "The Wasteland," "Gerontin" and at least one of the Four Quartets, plus some of the lesser known poems, and perhaps a play, and certainly the essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (not included in this volume.)

  This book is less marked up--maybe because I was reluctant to deface a hardback I was likely to have for awhile.  Some--perhaps many--of my classmates had been acquainted with at least Prufrock in high school, as Spanos himself had been when Eliot was alive and fashionable.  But with the possible exception of "The Hollow Men," Eliot was all new to me.

Such was the power of these Eliot poems that they seemed to permeate that entire spring--but more about that in a future post. Eliot got into our heads--he seemed suddenly to have invaded the whole campus--but I was also intrigued by Pound.  I bought his ABCs of Reading that spring, and other books of his poems and prose for several years after.  According to a notebook I ineptly kept that school year, I also read at least some of Hugh Kenner's The Poetry of Ezra Pound.  I would later acquire and read his opus on this generation of writers, The Pound Era (1971.)

This British and American Poetry course (in which none of the poets were, strictly speaking, completely British or entirely American) was one of the last Spanos taught at Knox.  He left at the end of the spring semester, taking a position at what would become the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he taught for the rest of his academic career.

Spanos was part of the second wave of the faculty exodus in my Knox years.  Others who left then included Kim Chase, my sociology professor Michael LaSorte and respected history teacher Gordon Dodds.  I took 18 courses in my first two years.  Eight of them were taught by faculty members who weren't around for my third year.

Students continued to express concern if not outrage about this exodus, which this year numbered at least 17.  More than twenty Sociology students and fifty Economics students signed letters of protest in the Knox Student.  Bill Barnhardt wrote an editorial on it, commenting "It is one thing to experience 'mobility' among the faculty, a growing trend in higher education, and quite another thing to witness the one-way drain of academic talent from the campus."

In a draft of his autobiography that he circulated privately, Spanos attributed his leaving Knox to a desire to devote more time to scholarship, which student demands on his time precluded.  His essay in the Spring 1966 issue of Dialogue tells a different tale--of disillusionment with the college, and despair that it will change for the better, especially in view of this exodus of young faculty.  Also that spring, he signed for me a reprint of an article he'd published (which unfortunately I can't find.)  I recall it said something like "with pleasant memories of a interesting year, despite"--and here I am sure of his words--"the persistent bad faith."  In a Sartrean sense, bad faith may simply mean conformity, but perhaps in this context something more.

1965-66 was also the year that Dennis Parks brought ceramics-making to Knox, which attracted a lot of people I knew to "throwing" pots in the new studio--something that changed the lives of students Tom Collins and Harvey Sadow, who became famous ceramicists.  Doug Wilson got into the process as well, and probably as a going away gift he made Mr. Spanos a huge serving plate, upon which the words "Man, God, Art" ran vertically, intersecting like a crossword with the appropriate letters in the word that ran horizontally: Spanos.

My notebook records a party that winter that student James Campbell gave for Spanos on the publication of his first book, which at that time no one had yet seen, including him.  But eventually his Casebook on Existentialism made it into the Knox Bookstore, which in those days actually sold books.  This book became arguably his most influential, in this and a later, expanded edition.

Over the next decades Spanos published some 15 books, not including those he edited. In 2015 Northwestern University Press published a selection of essays titled A William V. Spanos Reader:Humanist Criticism and the Secular Imperative.  He is referred to as a "pioneer of theory," meaning the postmodern theory that dominated universities especially in the 1980s and 90s. He also founded one of the most influential journals of postmodern analysis, Boundary 2.

Unfortunately for me, the little I sampled of his work in this era I found unreadable, as I did most of this kind of criticism.  The specialized language (or jargon, depending on your point of view) was so dense as to render the old idea of a sentence--or a verb--inconsequential.  But his intentions are fairly clear.  Spanos expanded the New Criticism kind of reading to include political and cultural implications. He championed 'the full obligation to think the question of the human in an absolute sense: every single minute of one’s waking life.'  And in a 2010 book, his most personal, we learn why.

In 1945, waves of British and American warplanes firebombed the undefended city of Dresden, Germany, and reduced one of the most beautiful cities of Europe to ashes and agony.  In sheer destruction it rivals Hiroshima, but it was not widely known, during or after the war, until 1968, when Kurt Vonnegut's celebrated novel Slaughterhouse-Five dramatized it.  (I knew of it years before however, because I read about it in a combat comic book, which celebrated it.  The drawing of incendiary bombs lying on rooftops to be ignited by the sun stayed with me.)

As a young US soldier and prisoner of war, Bill Spanos was present during the bombing of Dresden and its aftermath.  He wrote about it in that 2010 book, In the Neighborhood of Zero.

I did not know this about Mr. Spanos, and I doubt if many at Knox did.  It seems he did not talk about it--at least in public-- until after Slaughterhouse Five brought the Dresden bombing into public discussion, including the charge that it qualified as a war crime.  That would have been at least two years after he left Knox.  It may have been longer.

That was not uncommon among World War II veterans.  But I marvel now at the mental picture of Spanos, witness to Dresden, sitting at that Gizmo faculty picnic table next to history professor Miki Hane, who had once attended school in Hiroshima.

I had no trouble reading In the Neighborhood of Zero--it is a remarkable, powerful book.  It is a memoir of his experiences as a young Greek American in the Army, the chaos of combat in the Battle of the Bulge, his capture by the Germans, the days of transport in a sealed boxcar with so many other men that they had barely enough room to stand, and his months of labor and privation as a prisoner in Dresden.  All of this before the sustained terror of the bombing, and the shock of the aftermath, when he and other POWs moved broken masonry to find rotting bodies, though some were even more horrifyingly well preserved.

His narrative continues through a forced march with other POWs ahead of the Allies invasion, his escape, and after a strange interlude with two German civilian women, his re-connection with the US Army, and his dehumanizing voyage home.

If this were a book and the story of a perfect stranger, I would find it gripping and illuminating.   Some awkward writing only adds to the sense of an earnest struggle to tell his story as truly as he can.

But it also sets off odd flashes of recollection concerning the Spanos I knew.  In his captivity he struggles to recollect a war poem he read in high school--it is Wilfred Owens' "Dulce et decorum est," which he would teach us in one of these classes, not from a book but a mimeographed sheet.  It concerns a young soldier whose ideals are shattered by the realities in the trenches of World War I. Spanos was especially passionate about it, and the expansion of the Vietnam War then underway was an undeniable backdrop.

When sifting through the rubble after the Dresden bombing he thinks of "a heap of broken images" from Eliot.  But another Eliot line he quotes brings back a memory from outside of class. Between the British and American bombing runs he remembers "...it was Ash Wednesday, around 10:30 in the morning--we returned to the sawmill where we were told to await further orders.  I was physically and emotionally exhausted.  My mind was like the sky in T.S. Eliot's poem, a 'patient etherized upon a table.'"

It is one of Eliot's most famous lines, but it evokes for me an image of Spanos at  a kind of spontaneous after-party late at night at his house in Galesburg, in which he, his wife and some other faculty and spouses were playing charades.  When it was his turn he suddenly swept everything off a coffee table and lay down on it in the corpse position.  It didn't take long for someone to guess the answer.

Spanos relates some personal reasons for not talking about or writing about these experiences for so long.  He briefly mentions Vonnegut's novel, but his description of it is curiously reductive.  He refers to the experience of Billy Pilgrim becoming "unstuck in time" as a mental breakdown, and his encounter with the alien Tralfamadorians as hallucination.  This tends to devalue what the aliens (or Vonnegut) say about time--that events exist simultaneously like peaks on a mountain range.  The past, present and future always are.

This is interesting because in this book Spanos also makes a powerful point about time.  He begins the book by quoting an exchange with a student after a lecture on Vonnegut's Slaugherhouse-Five: "Did you ever return to Dresden, Professor Spanos?"  "I never left there."  He ends the book after his return home, as he and his sister Kitty watch a parade on the day the war with Japan--and all of World War II--finally ended.  His sister notices that he's quiet while everyone else is cheering.  Why isn't he celebrating?

I don't know what to say to her in response... I'm physically here in Newport, which has become the center of the world, but in my mind and heart I'm far away, in the midst of another center.  I'm in a sepulchral city of ashes, Dresden/Hiroshima/Nagasaki.  The world of zero.  And yet in a perverse way that I can't explain even to myself, I feel in the very abyss of my anguished heart, inextricably, the tentative stirring of a beginning not of a new story but a now time that bears within it, always, like a chalice, that infernal time.
I say in response, "I am celebrating, Kitty. I am!" 

Spanos is in a sense making a point about time similar to Vonnegut: that the past inhabits the present.  But his emphasis is opposite to the Tralfamadorians, who say that they find the pleasant places in time and concentrate on those.  Spanos commits to recalling the worst places, to inform the tasks and the meaning of the present.

And so emerges another dimension of a man I thought I knew.  It shifts the focus of the memories, including the moments in class when he passionately insisted on finding the power and meaning in the books and the poems we read.

In Memoriam

Very early this morning--at 2:20 a.m.--marks the 45th anniversary of my mother's death.   Flora Severini Kowinski bore three children, my sisters and me, and lived to know one grandchild.  Eventually there were three grandchildren, all girls.  Now there are five great-grandchildren, all boys but one.

Despite the technical difficulties in rescuing this old print, this is the best photo I ever took (you need to click on it to get the entire photo.)  That's my mother, my sister Kathy and grandfather facing the camera, with my sister Debbie facing them.  I took this squeezing between the sink and the table in my grandparents' tiny kitchen, out of which came so many wonderful meals.  I caught a moment in their card game--such spontaneous moments weren't often considered appropriate for photos back then.

At this time of year I often wish we'd had more time, especially in the middle and later years of my life when I had enough perspective to hear about her life.  But the opening lines of the second Merwin poem I posted had special and specific meaning for me as this anniversary arrives:

  All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know

R.I.P. W. S. Merwin (1927-2019)

Once Later

It is not until later
that you have to be young

it is one of those things
you meant to do later

but by then there is
someone else living there

with the shades rolled down
how could you have been young there

at that time
with all that was expected

then what happened to
the expectations

there is no sign of them there
a shadow passes across the window shade

what do they know in there
whoever they are

W.S. Merwin
published in New York Review of Books
May 7,2015



Rain Light

All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning

W.S. Merwin
published in the New Yorker
March 2008

Merwin, a hero among poets since the 1960s, not only defended the forests but planted one.  The world he spoke for has lost its voice.  And yet..tomorrow we wake without question, even though the whole world is burning.