December 2017
Tad Richards
tad@tadrichards.com
tad@tadrichards.com
These are very very young poems, and they're important to me because in a significant way they were my first poems.
I came to Iowa in the summer of 1960, twenty years old. I didn't know what the Iowa Workshop was. I went there because my uncle, a sweet man and your classic Babbitt, an insurance salesman, Iowa-born and booster of all things where the tall corn grows, told me, Oh, you want to be a writer, you have to go to Iowa. So I went because I had nothing else to do. I was admitted into the summer workshop program, which in those days was just a moneymaker for them -- they'd let anyone in. Engle and Justice saw something in me, I have no idea what, and invited me to stay on. So I matriculated at Iowa. I was a dropout from not quite two years at Bard, and stayed in the workshop.
For my first year there, I was a wallflower. None of my poems were ever accepted for discussion on the weekly worksheets. I was still just writing what I felt, or what I thought I was supposed to feel -- not shaping, not making, not doing what poets need to do. Then somewhere in the second year, overnight -- and I mean that literally -- I understood what poets were supposed to do, what made writing poetry different from just writing stuff. I wrote these three poems. They were about my experience at the New York Psychiatric Institute, where I had found myself after leaving Bard, but I was using the experience, not just flopping it onto a page.
They were included on a worksheet, and I was finally a part of the workshop experience. Of course, I had been all along. Sitting and reading and listening and taking part in the discussion, at first hesitantly, were an important part of the experience. They aren't what I would write today, but I can look back on them and still see that moment of epiphany happening. It may not have happened without Iowa, and for me, those three years were life-changing. I owe so much to Paul Engle and Donald Justice, to Marvin Bell and Mark Strand and Bob Berner and Chris Wiseman and Tod Perry and Annette Basalyga and Jim Crenner and Michael Harper and Mary Crow and Al Lee and so many others.
Looking back on these poems, they aren't what I would write today, but I can still see something that clicked in me, an insight into what a poem was supposed to do, whether or not I always succeeded in doing it. I can see that the young me already loved telling stories, and that story was at the heart of what I did. And though these poems are about my experience, they'e not about my internal experience. It's interesting that although I've always been so deeply influenced by the blues, I've never had the intense focus on self that the great blues writers had. I'm more in the tradition of Leadbelly, Chuck Berry, Lieber and Stoller -- the storytellers. And my great mentor was Donald Finkel, who also reached outside himself for the material of his art. I don't think that he steered me in that direction. I think that was me, and that was one of the reasons I was drawn to him, the others being his wisdom, his humanity, and his unerring sense of what was soft or half-realized in a poem.
Oh, and these poems, my first to be recognized on an Iowa worksheet, were also my first published poems. In Poetry.
I came to Iowa in the summer of 1960, twenty years old. I didn't know what the Iowa Workshop was. I went there because my uncle, a sweet man and your classic Babbitt, an insurance salesman, Iowa-born and booster of all things where the tall corn grows, told me, Oh, you want to be a writer, you have to go to Iowa. So I went because I had nothing else to do. I was admitted into the summer workshop program, which in those days was just a moneymaker for them -- they'd let anyone in. Engle and Justice saw something in me, I have no idea what, and invited me to stay on. So I matriculated at Iowa. I was a dropout from not quite two years at Bard, and stayed in the workshop.
For my first year there, I was a wallflower. None of my poems were ever accepted for discussion on the weekly worksheets. I was still just writing what I felt, or what I thought I was supposed to feel -- not shaping, not making, not doing what poets need to do. Then somewhere in the second year, overnight -- and I mean that literally -- I understood what poets were supposed to do, what made writing poetry different from just writing stuff. I wrote these three poems. They were about my experience at the New York Psychiatric Institute, where I had found myself after leaving Bard, but I was using the experience, not just flopping it onto a page.
They were included on a worksheet, and I was finally a part of the workshop experience. Of course, I had been all along. Sitting and reading and listening and taking part in the discussion, at first hesitantly, were an important part of the experience. They aren't what I would write today, but I can look back on them and still see that moment of epiphany happening. It may not have happened without Iowa, and for me, those three years were life-changing. I owe so much to Paul Engle and Donald Justice, to Marvin Bell and Mark Strand and Bob Berner and Chris Wiseman and Tod Perry and Annette Basalyga and Jim Crenner and Michael Harper and Mary Crow and Al Lee and so many others.
Looking back on these poems, they aren't what I would write today, but I can still see something that clicked in me, an insight into what a poem was supposed to do, whether or not I always succeeded in doing it. I can see that the young me already loved telling stories, and that story was at the heart of what I did. And though these poems are about my experience, they'e not about my internal experience. It's interesting that although I've always been so deeply influenced by the blues, I've never had the intense focus on self that the great blues writers had. I'm more in the tradition of Leadbelly, Chuck Berry, Lieber and Stoller -- the storytellers. And my great mentor was Donald Finkel, who also reached outside himself for the material of his art. I don't think that he steered me in that direction. I think that was me, and that was one of the reasons I was drawn to him, the others being his wisdom, his humanity, and his unerring sense of what was soft or half-realized in a poem.
Oh, and these poems, my first to be recognized on an Iowa worksheet, were also my first published poems. In Poetry.
Me with my daughter Wendy, Winona, MN. 1964
722 W. 168th St.
The tenth floor is what they call ground level--
Built up against a bluff,
Falling away beneath,
Down to the lower floors where we are channeled.
Down here is where they mine,
Tap from obscure veins
The higher grades of mental ore that settle
Like marrow in a bone.
The richest dirt they pan
Will make the psychoanalytic journals.
Upstairs they have offices to assay
The weight for all our guilt,
The flaw without a fault,
It may be in the next case history.
They sit, filing their claims,
Ignoring minor crimes,
And sometimes send canaries down to die.
Support Mental Health--or I'll Kill You
Chalked on a New York subway platform.
--For E.K., who probably wrote it--
I read somewhere one day you can't grow up
--It was on a diagnosis chart we found
In a drawer--you'll always be like this,
I don't know why they even keep you around.
They talk you--even have you half convinced
That you should act mature; and the nurses
You fall in love with plead with you to change
Your sloppy dress, your lateness, and curses.
Your attitude's not serious enough!
So for a while you try to settle down.
That mescaline you brought in last night--we got
So stoned the orderly just about caught on.
Your doctor says you're doing pretty well,
He sets his sights down lower every day.
Your hair and clothes are cut to Ivy League,
Your paintings are looking more and more like Klee.
In Reply
I see nothing but Psychiatric Institute nuts. They are the only people who mean anything to me. --A letter from G.T.
You must be about twenty now, your world
Bounded on the south by violence
Now a good three years back, and even then
A dark continent, not to be charted.
The east and west are undulating walls,
Now wide, now tight, but always firm--projections
Mercator never dreamed of. New names
Replace the old, new nations emerge,
You look for leadership among the strong,
Not always well--defined: what first seemed bold
May stem from anarchy--and what if
That makes it even more appealing?
North is not on your map; over-defined,
The world is segmented page by page
With no latitude for us who lose our place.
For us an island colony, hidden, remote,
Spoken of but not seen: Too small
For North, South, East, West. There,
There are missionaries of the old school,
Skilled in cartography and related arts,
Who can pinpoint us, show us how it's done,
Guide us to our appointed place, and then
Tell us that we can find our way alone.
It wasn't that we didn't know the way.
©2017 Tad Richards
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