"people have been trying to understand dogs ever since the beginning of time. One never knows what they'll do. You can read every day where a dog saved the life of a drowning child, or lay down his life for his master. Some people call this loyalty. I don't. I may be wrong, but I call it love--the deepest kind of love."

Theodore Roethke

The descent into the organic life of things themselves dramatized the theme of regression that is explored in psychoanalytic terms in the book's title piece. "Sometimes, of course, there is regression," Roethke said in "An American Poet Introduces Himself and His Poems." "I believe that the spiritual man must go back in order to go forward." "The Lost Son" presented this regressive aesthetic in terms of both a descent into the subhuman life of nature and a return to repressed, childhood scenes. Karl Malkoff was one of the first critics to interpret these so-called "developmental poems" in terms of Roethke's divided attitude toward his father Otto, depicted, for example, in his widely anthologized work "My Papa's Waltz." Apparently, Roethke's filial anxieties stemmed from the trauma of Otto's death, which interrupted the adolescent's successful passage through oedipal rivalry. The five sections of "The Lost Son" work through the poet's conflicted attitude toward the dead patriarch and, by extension, what Roethke described as his "spiritual ancestors" of the literary tradition. Indeed, in a telling Yale Review essay, "How to Write Like Somebody Else" (1959), Roethke described his relation to W B. Yeats in terms of "daring to compete with papa." Roethke's drive to master his precursors, however, led him to forge significant literary innovations.

My Papa's Waltz

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

~Theodore Roethke

For Roethke, boundaries between outer and inner dissolve; the natural world seems a vast landscape of the psyche, just as the voyage inward leads to natural things—roots, leaves, and flowers—as emblems of the recesses of the self. To travel either outward or inward is to encounter the self, and the voyage in either direction is fraught with the possibilities of transcendence, dissolution, or both:

In a dark wood I saw—
I saw my several selves
Come running from the leaves,
Lewd, tiny careless lives
That scuttled under stones,
Or broke, but would not go.

Dorothy Day - founder of the Catholic Worker movement - Upton Sinclair, Author of 'Jungle'

"Together with the Works of Mercy, feeding, clothing and sheltering our brothers, we must indoctrinate." ~ Dorothy Day

Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle, inspired Day to take long walks in poor neighborhoods in Chicago's South Side. It was the start of a life-long attraction to areas many people avoid.

Day had a gift for finding beauty in the midst of urban desolation. Drab streets were transformed by pungent odors: geranium and tomato plants, garlic, olive oil, roasting coffee, bread and rolls in bakery ovens. "Here," she said, "was enough beauty to satisfy me."
"Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them."

A quote from 'The Jungle' By Upton Sinclair ~"They are trying to save their souls-and who but a fool could fail to see that all that is the matter with their souls is that they has not been able to get a decent existence for their bodies?" Chapter 23, pg. 273

Pantoum Of The Great Depression

Our lives avoided tragedy
Simply by going on and on,
Without end and with little apparent meaning.
Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.

Simply by going on and on
We managed. No need for the heroic.
Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.
I don't remember all the particulars.

We managed. No need for the heroic.
There were the usual celebrations, the usual sorrows.
I don't remember all the particulars.
Across the fence, the neighbors were our chorus.

There were the usual celebrations, the usual sorrows
Thank god no one said anything in verse.
The neighbors were our only chorus,
And if we suffered we kept quiet about it.

At no time did anyone say anything in verse.
It was the ordinary pities and fears consumed us,
And if we suffered we kept quiet about it.
No audience would ever know our story.

It was the ordinary pities and fears consumed us.
We gathered on porches; the moon rose; we were poor.
What audience would ever know our story?
Beyond our windows shone the actual world.

We gathered on porches; the moon rose; we were poor.
And time went by, drawn by slow horses.
Somewhere beyond our windows shone the actual world.
The Great Depression had entered our souls like fog.

And time went by, drawn by slow horses.
We did not ourselves know what the end was.
The Great Depression had entered our souls like fog.
We had our flaws, perhaps a few private virtues.

But we did not ourselves know what the end was.
People like us simply go on.
We had our flaws, perhaps a few private virtues,
But it is by blind chance only that we escape tragedy.

And there is no plot in that; it is devoid of poetry.

Poem By Donald Justice

Pounding The Pavement - by cynthia m. geer

The rain came in a rapid collective. Large, gusty drops pelted against his window. He reached over to his lamp next to his bed. He fumbled with the chain. Finally his fingers grasped it and he pulled it on, then off, then on again. The electricity had been shut off. He had no hot water for a shower so he splashed his face with cold water from the kitchen sink. He put on his wrinkled shirt from yesterday and his stiff wrangler jeans. He combed his hair back and stepped into his cowboy boots. By the time he had arrived to the hotel he was soaked to the bone. He stood at the front desk for a few minutes when a young man in a navy blue blazer asked him if he needed anything. John explained that he needed a job. The young desk clerk told him that they were not hiring. John explained that he had seen an ad in the paper for a maintenance person. John told him that he would take any position that they had. The front desk clerk told him to wait and he would check to see if the positions had been filled. While John stood there waiting he looked at his large calloused hands. His nails had dirt under them. He held his hand out and his hand was trembling. He couldn’t remember the last time he had a solid meal. The desk clerk returned and repeated that they were not hiring. John started to feel impatient. John asked the desk clerk if he could speak to the manager. The desk clerk muttered something under his breath and snappishly turned and walked into the back office and shut the door. Within a few minutes the desk clerk returned and told John that the manger was busy and to check back in a few months. John spoke with a break in his words. He was half Blackfeet Indian. He spent most of his life on the reservation in Cutbank, Montana. He never had a difficult time finding work on the reservation. He could always find work herding cattle, cleaning stalls, bailing hay. The previous morning John had read in The Daily Interlake that eighty five hundred people were unemployed in the valley and one hundred twenty five jobs available. The probability of finding a job was slim to none.
John told the front desk clerk that he could not wait three months for a job. He explained that he needed a job right now. The clerk told John that he could not help him out. John started to walk away when something hit him. It was impatience. He turned around and approached the desk clerk again. He asked the desk clerk his name. The desk clerk gave John his name. It was Daniel. Daniel didn’t look old enough to drink legally. He had the complexion of a halibut. Pale with a tinge of blue in the creases. His face was full, round and clean. Every movement Daniel made was with irritation and utter exhaustion. John looked at Daniel with a cold stare. This stare that John smacked Daniel with was not without fire. Daniel became increasingly uncomfortable. Daniel refused to get locked into John’s stare. He avoided his stare by staring at the palm of his hand picking at a piece of dead skin. John explained to him that he was not going to leave until he was given a job. John’s hands were clenched. His forehead had beads of perspiration dotting the creases. Daniel was obviously nervous. He picked up the phone and called the manager. He explained to the manger that there was a gentleman at the front desk interested in the maintenance position that was available. John unclenched his hands and straightened out his collar. Daniel asked John to have a seat and the manger will be out to see him.

William Carlos Williams -

Robert Frost, of course, rivals Williams in his use of the native idiom--his poems are true to the speech and the trapped psyches of the New England country-people he knew; the dark elegiac and tragic strains running through so much of what he wrote carry it far beyond mere pastoral charm. Williams, however, expresses the whole nation's character, and especially its urban volatility: its multiracial and immigrant streams of speech and behaviour, its violence and exuberance, its ignorance of its own general and regional history.........

... a shared cultural and historical awareness to counteract the fragmentation of American society. Williams saw this fragmentation as a pressure for 'divorce' (i.e., inability to connect or communicate), not only between the sexes but among the people at large.

....At the same time, his poems project a sensuous and associative immediacy of extraordinary vivacity. Their aura of spontaneous improvisation has misled many younger poets into overlooking his artistry. ('Rigor of beauty is the quest,' he wrote at the start of the 'Preface' to Paterson.) Perhaps it was his apparently relaxed colloquialism--often coupled, however, with startling shifts of focus and with eloquent passages of beautifully controlled rhythm and phrasing--that delayed recognition of his achievement even in the United States.

Williams' Life and Career
By M. L. Rosenthal


The Desolate Field

Vast and grey, the sky
is a simulacrum
to all but him whose days
are vast and grey and --
In the tall, dried grasses
a goat stirs
with nozzle searching the ground.
My head is in the air
but who am I . . . ?
-- and my heart stops amazed
at the thought of love
vast and grey
yearning silently over me.
By William Carlos Williams


Arrival

And yet one arrives somehow,
finds himself loosening the hooks of
her dress
in a strange bedroom--
feels the autumn
dropping its silk and linen leaves
about her ankles.
The tawdry veined body emerges
twisted upon itself
like a winter wind . . . !
By William Carlos Williams

HeliumShort stories: Outcasts