☀ What Sparks Poetry: Martha Rhodes on Theodore Roethke

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March 2, 2020

What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our third series, The Poems of Others II, twenty-four poets pay homage to the poems that led them to write. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.

The Geranium

Theodore Roethke

When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,
She looked so limp and bedraggled,
So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle,
Or a wizened aster in late September,
I brought her back in again
For a new routine—
Vitamins, water, and whatever
Sustenance seemed sensible
At the time: she'd lived
So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer,
Her shriveled petals falling
On the faded carpet, the stale
Steak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves.
(Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.)
The things she endured!—
The dumb dames shrieking half the night Or the two of us, alone, both seedy, Me breathing booze at her,
She leaning out of her pot toward the window.
Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me—
And that was scary—
So when that snuffling cretin of a maid
Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can,
I said nothing.
But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week,
I was that lonely.

from the book THE COLLECTED POEMS OF THEODORE ROETHKE / Doubleday

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What Sparks Poetry:
Martha Rhodes on Theodore Roethke's "The Geranium"
"I really heard him. He was talking to me. He was sitting on my bed, drunk and slurring as he said it and he was saying (confessing) 'And that was scary' to himself, but also—I repeat—to me. I was stunned. I thought, 'He can do that? He can do that?'"

READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE

Second Acts in English
Lisa Russ Spaar reviews translations of Francesc Parcerisas’ Still Life with Children and Ye Lijun’s My Mountain Country. "In the poems of both Parcerisas and Ye, the fresh and visceral is always balanced by the humbleness of the quotidian, and by the awareness of life’s mutability."
viaLOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

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