Announcing the 2024 Virtual Speaker Series: “A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke”
Featured Speakers (left to right):
Marc Malandra, Jeff Vande Zande, Trenton Hickman, and Don Bogen
A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke (edited by William Barillas and published by Ohio University Press in 2021) is a constellation of essays that reanimates the work of Theodore Roethke for a new century.
In this series, four of the contributors will discuss the poem they wrote about in the book while sharing their individual perspectives on Roethke’s life, work, and legacy.
All events are held virtually via Zoom at 7:00 p.m. EST. Keep reading for a closer look at each of the sessions in this series.
Tuesday, March 9 – “Moss Gathering” and Roethke’s Romantic Child of Nature with Marc Malandra
Marc Malandra shares his thoughts about “Moss Gathering,” one of the “greenhouse poems” in Roethke’s second book of poetry, The Lost Son and Other Poems, published in 1948. “Moss-Gathering,” describes a task that Theodore Roethke was given as a child as a contribution to the family's greenhouse business: collecting moss for cemetery arrangements. Of all the greenhouse poems, this one displays the greatest evidence of biocentrism: the view that all organisms, including humans, are part of a larger biotic web whose interests must govern the human interest.
Tuesday, March 26 – “Otto”: An Insight into Roethke’s Poetic Vision with Jeff Vande Zande
Jeff Vande Zande speaks about “Otto,” a late poem of Roethke’s that recalls with vivid specificity and deep feeling his father, who nurtured the flowers in the family’s greenhouses. Vande Zande considers the poem’s evocations of the Roethke greenhouses and the people who worked there in light of his own contemporary experience visiting the Roethke home in Saginaw and writing a novel about a young man who finds a sense of purpose helping preserve that same house for posterity.
Tuesday, April 30 – Roethke’s “The Abyss” Finding the Next Life in This One with Trenton Hickman
Trenton Hickman, Associate Professor of English at Brigham Young University, leads us through Roethke’s late poem “The Abyss,” in which spiritual crisis yields to an embrace of the sacred as embodied in “the small but not insignificant manifestations of life that have always been around us.” The presentation will conclude with time for audience questions and conversation.
Tuesday, May 7 – “First Meditation” and Roethke’s Career with Don Bogen
Poet Don Bogen speaks of “First Meditation,” the first of Roethke’s late “Meditations of an Old Woman,” a poetic sequence concerned with “the essential entropy of nature . . . the unstoppable process of aging,” and ways in which “memory might be a response to spiritual inertia.” The speaker of this poem was inspired in part by Roethke’s mother, Helen Huebner Roethke (1881-1955) of Saginaw. The presentation will conclude with time for audience questions and conversation.
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