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Remembering W. D. Snodgrass  

January 5, 1926 – January 13, 2009  

By Mike Foldes

   My personal introduction to W. D. Snodgrass came in October 2007 at Binghamton University where he appeared as the Milt Kessler Distinguished Poetry Reader. Snodgrass made an anecdotal reference to Fugitive Poet John Crowe Ransom, whom I’d met in Ohio many years prior, and who had given me a manuscript page of “Wrestling,” an annotated poem in progress. When it came my turn to meet and greet in a reception area after the reading, I mentioned this to the honored poet and promised to send along a copy. He replied he was leaving in the next few days for San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where he spends winters, and it might not get to him for some time. I sent it out with a note a few days later, and pretty much put the event behind me.

 Then in the spring, when I was planning an update for ragazine.cc, I sent a note reminding him who I was and where we’d met, and asked if he would be so kind as to allow us to run a few of his poems in the upcoming issue. He replied within days, including with his note a copy of “Mementos, 1”, and permission to publish it. While he did not remember where or when it first appeared, he did note it had accidentally been left out of his most recently published collection, Not For Specialists  (American Poets Continuum Series No. 97, 2006). If we wanted others, he said we should contact his publisher, BOA Editions, and offered his “moral – or more significantly immoral – support.”

 Mementos, 1

Sorting out letters and piles of my old

            Canceled checks, old clippings, and yellow note cards

That meant something once, I happened to find

            Your picture. That picture. I stopped there cold,

like a man raking piles of dead leaves in his yard

            Who has turned up a severed hand.

Still, that first second, I was glad: you stand

            Just as you stood – shy, delicate, slender,

In that long gown of green lace netting and daisies

            That you wore to our first dance. The sight of you stunned

Us all. Well, our needs were different, then,

            And our ideals came easy.

Then through the war and those two long years

            Overseas, the Japanese dead in their shacks

Among dishes, dolls and lost shoes; I carried

            This glimpse of you, there, to choke down my fear,

Prove it had been, that I might come back.

            That was before we got married.

-- Before we drained out one another’s force

            With lies, self-denial, unspoken regret

And the sick eyes that blame; before the divorce

            And the treachery. Say it: before we met. Still,

I put back your picture. Someday, in due course,

            I will find that it’s still there.

 My note of thanks for “Mementos, 1” included a reference to a phrase in the last stanza, “before we met…”, a ragged dart thrown easily to remind one’s self and one’s other of ill effect when familiarity has, indeed, bred contempt. While the bells those words rang for me also chimed back to a failed first marriage and the spiteful retorts that spilled like venom from our lips, Mr. Snodgrass, as I knew him until we met again in late 2008, replied, “At least for me, the reminder in “before we met” lies in Blake’s

                        When a man marries a wife he finds out whether  
                        her knees and her elbows are only glued together.”

As our correspondence continued over the next few months, I grew to appreciate the scholarship and humor woven into Snodgrass’ poetry in knots so tight they are difficult to see without a proper lens. His letters, less oblique, shed light on his perceptions of his work, as when he suggested a group from Not for Specialists for publication: “As mentioned, these are all earlier poems – so, like grown children – I can make easier choices there…. If you’d like anything from my more recent children, you might look into the New Poems section…”

 In a writing workshop in July, I read Snodgrass’s short poem “Critic” to the group:

                                    Anticipate no consequence,  
                                    No help, no harm, from Bile’s review:
                                    He’s never claimed you two are friends
                                    So he’ll not quite disembowel you;
                                    Since you’re unfashionable these days, you
                                    Can quite worrying he might praise you.

In discussion, the moderator observed Snodgrass had reinvented himself numerous times, and this was evidence of yet another iteration; not coincidentally, I thought, it was one of his younger children.

I often have wondered to what lasting effect winning the Pulitzer Prize has on writers, and asked him in a letter, “Did it ‘take you off the hook’ for finding work? Did it make your later writing efforts more difficult?” His reply came just a week or so later, and included references to the subjects of three other poems he recommended we use in ragazine.cc, , which BOA graciously allowed.

“As to further questions, I don’t know about ‘reinventing’ myself though I hope I have grown somewhat (not too often for the worse?) – by 82 you surely should have. As to ‘Critic’, of course I had (name withheld) in mind; as to ‘Warning’ I’ll add a footnote that the tennis (poet Richard) Wilbur wanted to play was against his own granddaughter, but I think he’s now quit playing – I think I heard his last reading several months ago. We still have those chairs (from the poem, ‘Sitting Outside’) which were bought for my father to die in; they’re still in our yard though in a section we seldom use.”  

 “The effect of the Pulitzer,” he went on, is more complicated – it changes every aspect of life. Not only does it make the job market easier, it also causes universities that wouldn’t take you as a student the week before, offer you substantial fees for coming there to give readings, lectures or have lunch with the faculty. It did make my second book harder – but (poet Robert) Lowell and others wrote to warn that the envy the Prize provoked would get my next book panned regardless of its real worth. It helped destroy my second marriage (to an aspiring actress who wanted the only spotlight) but made substitutes rise up. It also dropped me into eight years or so of deep psychoanalysis (where the “substantial fees” went) which was incredibly valuable, but that’s not to say that neuroses haven’t raised their ugly heads often enough since.”  

W. D. Snodgrass, Binghamton University, '07

I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to visit De and his wife Kathy (Kathleen Brown Snodgrass) at their home in Erieville in mid-September before news of De’s illness. They were as warm and gracious as any guest would like, but not all have the good fortune to know. I was introduced to their dog, Sasha, and after a short tour of their remodeled farmhouse, we sat in the kitchen, drank and talked for an hour or two.

Much of the time we exchanged stories about who, or what, and where we’d been, essentially sharing experiences of place and time. We didn’t delve into questions I’d been meaning to ask about poetry, career, teaching. I asked when they were leaving for their annual winter in Mexico, and they said they weren’t sure. De had been not been feeling well and was scheduled to visit his doctor the following day to get results of some tests administered the week before. With a clean bill of health, they would be off “soon”.

I decided after a couple of glasses of wine I’d had more than enough to keep me warm on the drive back to Binghamton. It would have been great to stay and kibitz more, but I don’t drive well enough sober. I sent De & Kathy a thank-you note for their hospitality. Kathy replied the test results were not good, De had been diagnosed with cancer and would be going into hospice care.  

I saw De and Kathy together again at the Downtown Writer’s Workshop at the YMCA in Syracuse, where De had been invited to read at the opening of an exhibition of 200 pictures by long-time friend and collaborator Deloss McGraw drawn from the 200 poems in “Not For Specialists”. There was some question about whether or not the poet, in a wheelchair and breathing oxygen, would be up to the task. As usual, he rose to the occasion with a strong voice and the wry, if not sardonic, sense of humor that accompanied him when I heard him read at Binghamton University the year before.

Scores of friends, family, former students, colleagues and poetry lovers had turned out on this cold night in November to hear De perform what would be his last public reading. Kathy looked tired, but inspired by the large, exuberant turnout. I was pleased by her greeting, a warm hug and comment that mine was the last “normal visit” they’d been able to enjoy. As I see, hear and read accounts of De’s affect on others’ lives, my appreciation grows for what bound him and Kathy, and what good influence they brought one another upon the writer’s lives they lived. We have many opportunities in life that go begging, some clear, some not. If timing is everything, as far as De and Kathy are concerned, I am most fortunate to have shared the time.

Links:

Atencion: www.atencionsanmiguel.org

BOA Editions: www.boaeditions.com

Contemporary Poetry Review: www.cprw.com

Downtown Writers Center : www.ymcaarts.org

Poetry Foundation: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=6402

Poets.org: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/15

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_De_Witt_Snodgrass

JOE WEIL

I Am the Only One Left

I am the only one left
who can tell my family's stories,
which makes them all beside the point,
unless I doctor them up,
throw in the cumin, the cilantro
of universals, lard them over with
"ontology," marinate them until
they are cooked in their own
essential juices.

This skews the experiment.
I could toss myself into the pot,
yet, then, there's no one
left to stir. Things burn,
dissolve, become the sludge
of  three day soup,
rise up as vapor, fall as stains.

The smell won't go away.
That isn't them, that isn't me.
But a blue croquet ball rolls,
and grows my father's hand.
The weather of his face
reads storm. I've smashed
something and must be smashed.

This is my recipe. I have the power
to rip the ball from his clenched fist,
but I return, always to this dance,
circle the same damage
as if, somehow, by some miracle,
with just the right spice,
my hunger will drive it in.

ALICE SHAPIRO

Today is the blow when

lingering months of conflict

climax. I am glued to guessing

what role to play. You, spewing,

“Pay attention now!”

Neither an answer nor

a question. Just the terminus

of loneliness, and in my lap

the challenge. Tomorrow,

perhaps, the fall. I will be

absorbed in some puffy task,

head down, hand cupped

round my pen. You will

pass by, unseen, moving

into corners, a phantom on

the periphery of a blank white

page. You assume a lesser role,

inferior to my latent verse.

It is a bloodless command.

KAREN SCHUBERT

Open Big

Where fishes swim along the ceiling

on a wallpaper stripe, my mom

bends low over children

and tells them to open big.

She has given center stage

to thousands of tiny choppers,

swabbing purple goop that tastes

like bubble gum, their nemesis.

She asks about school while she tucks

little chests under the lead apron,

sees skeletons in the dark

room, teeth stacked on teeth.

When she issues warnings

about candy, she knows how it is,

those syrupy stubs

in their painful swelling, the small

hand a cloak over the quick

grin. The kids

in the deformed bodies

are lifted into the chair.

What the tooth

fairy admires in the gifts

under pillows is her work,

the tickly rubber cup

spinning around, the cold

water squirting before

the hiss of wind, the lulling voice.

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