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Theodore Roethke

I like Roethke. Light and dark. Perhaps for dark, like in The Far Field :

The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,
Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,
Where the car stalls,
Churning in a snowdrift
Until the headlights darken.

This film was produced by the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University in 1964. I was a Creative Writing major at San Francisco State in 1975, and that is where I was introduced to Roethke’s work. I attended a class called “Roethke, Plath and Lowell.” Later I heard recordings and I was impressed and inspired by Roethke’s delivery. Ultimately, what makes a good poem is the hearing of it, although the seeing of it can help clarify the detail, like a musical score, where the message is the music not the the notations on paper.