2024 Virtual Speaker Series
A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke
About the series
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.
About this session
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. “Otto,” which appeared in Roethke’s last book, The Far Field, completes the picture of the Roethke family’s floral business developed in the famous “greenhouse sequence” in the poet’s second book, The Lost Son and Other Poems. 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. This personal approach, referred to as reader-response criticism, will be expanded upon in tonight’s talk. The presentation will conclude with time for audience questions and conversation.
Jeff Vande Zande
Jeff Vande Zande is a writer who is best known for his novel American Poet, which won him the Stuart and Vernice Gross Literature Award. He is also a poet and an editor of the Driftwood Review with two of his poems being nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize in 1999. His poems and stories have appeared in such magazines as College English, Passages North, and Whistling Shade. He teaches fiction writing and film at Delta College in Michigan.
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