The publication of Ira Sadoff’s ninth book of poems, COUNTRY, Living, has given me two opportunities: to review it for Ron Slate’s excellent On the Seawall, and—thanks to Joyce’s generosity—to reflect upon a formative poetry workshop Ira taught at Antioch College in the spring of 1974, which I remember as a rare confluence of good fortunes. I’ve used the Antioch Registrar’s course number as the title for this post. Memorable as the workshop was, however, I haven’t had its course number by heart for forty-six years: a routine accreditation procedure at Lesley University, where I teach, required me to order a pdf of my undergraduate transcript. Typewritten, the font unmistakably a Selectric’s, it has the visual feel of a sepia-toned photograph.
Twelve students took Advanced Poetry Workshop that spring. Of those participants, six have gone on to publish books and devote much of their lives to poetry: Jean Day, Stuart Dischell, James Galvin, Sarah Gorham, Laurie Sheck, and myself. Another class member and close friend of mine and Stuart’s at the time, David Ghitelman, has returned to short stories after decades, one of which can be read here. I don’t know the whereabouts of the other six students, much less their fortunes. Two of them, members of The Revolutionary Student Brigade, took part in a seconds-long colloquy that captures the late-60s zeitgeist still presiding on some American campuses. During a break, the subject of Stalin’s legacy came up. “He made some mistakes,” said one (or maybe both?), “but he furthered the Revolution.”
I arrived at Antioch in 1972, besotted with the poetry of T.S. Eliot, thanks to a teacher who’d read The Waste Land to his Honors English seniors in a voice best described as doomed. But I’d grown up in a household without poetry, and only genre prose. Ian Fleming, not Henry Fielding. Antioch’s transcript testifies to my earnest efforts at becoming less ill-read: Classical Literature; Three Approaches to Poetry: Yeats, cummings, and (who else?) Eliot; Four French Realists; Medieval World Literature; Shakespeare: Comedy and Romance; English Romantic Poets; Nine Modern World Novelists; Three Modern Poets (Auden, Stevens, and a third who escapes me); and Shakespeare: Four Tragedies. A pretty good literary curriculum for an undergraduate, although I skipped chances to learn the names of beasts and flowers, as Valery says a poet must: the snap courses I used to fulfill my science requirements guilt-trip me to this day. As for more contemporary poetry, the students mostly taught each other. Stuart, uncannily well-read, introduced me to Berryman, Roethke, and Jarrell, among the scores of others on his personal syllabus. I’d acquired Donald Hall’s Contemporary American Poetry, but not for a class. “Christmas Eve Under Hooker’s Statue” stumped me utterly, but “Skunk Hour” led me to Life Studies. Mowing lawns in the summer of 1973 in Madison, Connecticut, during lunch breaks in the shade of very wealthy people’s trees, I’d eat my sandwich quickly then puzzle back and forth through Lowell’s tortured sequence.
I’d never tried writing a poem, and through much of my freshman year, the notion of putting my own words to paper (aside from “papers”) terrified me. One day early in our second semester, Stuart said: “Steve, you’re a smart guy; I think you could probably write poems.” Why that flipped the switch I’ll never know, but I still feel gratitude for Stuart’s characteristically matter-of-fact generosity. My first attempts were ghastly Eliot imitations, but good came from that: the understanding that reading breeds, then schools, one’s writing. At some point I worked up the nerve to show a few poems to two of the Literature faculty (one a poet, one not), as well as to Stuart, David, and the sometimes flamboyantly caped Askold Melnyczuk—whose dorm room contained a tower of xeroxed, staple-bound copies of The Agni Review # 2, a sketch of Ezra Pound on the cover. It’s archived here. Askold had to leave Antioch after three semesters because of Nixon’s assault on federal financial aid; otherwise, I’m sure he’d have joined Ira’s workshop, still a year in the future. When I read Stuart’s, David’s, and Askold’s poems, I sensed all sorts of sophistications absent from mine.
Many sophisticated undergraduate poets gathered at Antioch in the early 1970s, and even formed “schools.” Stuart, David, Askold, and I made one circle. I’m pretty sure Jim, Laurie, and David Weiss—years later to edit The Seneca Review, which Ira had co-founded with James Crenner at Hobart and William Smith Colleges—formed the hub of another. I see myself listening from the margin, the wallflower at a dance, on evenings when the schools merged for group readings in a dorm common room. When L-301h: Advanced Poetry Writing; Instructor: Sadoff showed up in the spring 1974 course catalogue, any student who loved poetry either knew Ira or, like me, knew of him. An adjunct, he’d taught an advanced seminar on Blake and Whitman the second semester of my freshman year, but I didn’t qualify as advanced enough; and indeed, I wasn’t. I believe Ira conducted independent studies in poetry writing, but I know he taught no other courses between Blake and Whitman and L-301h, because I’d have taken them.
Admission to Advanced Poetry Workshop required submission of a writing sample. Given all those sophisticated undergraduate poets, I imagine Ira needed to turn away quite a few supplicants. Three details from the sample I submitted have stuck with me: a title (“Two Poems of Snow”), a subject (insects), and a line, addressed to my Irish Twin sister (“not even a year between us”). I still like that line; have I used it? Most in the class were twenty or just twenty-one. I’m pretty sure that Jim Galvin, at twenty-three, was the oldest. It never occurred to me that Ira, at 29, had less than a decade on even the youngest of us, but he has since told me that it occurred to him. I bring up our relative ages not to present us as a gathering of prodigies—I certainly was no such thing—but because I distinctly recall an atmosphere of freshness, a sense we shared of being on the cusp of realizing a great deal in a very short time. The poems I’d already read or heard read by the others I found somewhat intimidating, but I didn’t feel any of the workshop “jitters” my own students sometimes confide to me. Naïveté? Maybe, or maybe—in a way that I’m not sure I’ve experienced since—the class members, and certainly its teacher, cared about poetry in ways that downplayed ego-involvement.
The Ego itself, in its Freudian sense, was in deep disfavor in 1974. The schools of contemporary American poetry in session since the late 50s—The Beats, Black Mountain, the Confessionals, Deep Imagists, The New York Poets—scorned the Ego, abhorred the Superego, and cultivated the Id. Paul Breslin’s 1987 book, The Psycho-Political Muse, casts an illuminating, often cold, eye on the period sensibility that most poets Ira’s age took for granted. The irrational ruled, but that didn’t preclude rigor. Ira had us read like crazy: handouts, selections from A. Poulin’s Contemporary American Poetry (seventeen of the first edition’s twenty-two poets white and male), and whole books—two a week, I believe. Of the five poems discussed in our first class meeting—all handed out anonymously—I remember four: O’Hara’s “On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday” (“Quick, a last poem…”), Simic’s “Explorers,” Stevens’s “Loneliness in Jersey City,” and James Tate’s “Consumed.” Why anonymous? Perhaps Ira wanted us to begin the semester thinking about poems, not poets; or maybe he wanted us to read “professional poets” (horrible term we never used) as models of what we might become. I doubt he meant to catch us out in our parochial tastes, but according to my memory of the discussion, he succeeded. Everybody loved Simic’s surrealism, O’Hara’s campy ebullience, and Tate’s enjambed double-takes, but few understood, and so most disliked, Stevens’s purposely garish spoof of Panglossian complacency (“Kiss, cats; for the deer and the dachshund/are one”), which was a little over our heads.
From Poulin, we read Bly, Dugan, Ginsberg, Koch, Levertov, Merwin, O’Hara, and Snyder. Adrienne Rich isn’t in the first edition—nor is Bishop!—but I’m sure I first read Necessities of Life in the class: I recall Ira singling out for praise Rich’s uncharacteristically, perhaps uniquely, funny poem about sex, “Two Songs,” still a favorite of mine. Ira’s curriculum largely reflected the period’s taste for image-driven free verse and its sources in translation: we read Lorca, Neruda, Trakl, Tranströmer, and Vallejo. Near the semester’s end, we sampled the work of some “promising” younger poets: Ai, Louise Glück, and Gregory Orr. On campus for a reading, Orr visited our class discussion of Trakl. Late-60s handsome with his walrus moustache and shoulder-length locks, he hunched intently over the last three lines of Trakl’s great WWI lament “Grodek”—
O prouder grief! You brazen altars,
Today a great pain feeds the hot flame of the spirit,
The grandsons yet unborn.
—and debated (mainly with himself, the class over and most having left) whether those lines were or weren’t sentimental. I lingered for what amounted to a three-minute crash course in caring.
Of course, our own poems constituted the class’s primary texts. We wrote three or four a week. In an early class meeting, Stuart quipped, not in complaint: “everything we do will feel like a subject for a poem!” Ira smiled sagely, I want to write, but that wasn’t his style; “yup,” he quipped back. I don’t recall many specifics about our workshop discourse—a term we wouldn’t have used—but I know that the typical awkward silences rarely followed a poem’s reading. We jumped in, our critical vocabulary owing some of its premises, but not all, to Ira’s. All those common room readings and poet-swapping made us a relatively independent-minded group. What most stays in memory is an infectious atmosphere of discovery. I believe Ira was learning as much as we were, if at a somewhat more advanced level. Just about every territory was new to me, not just in the revelations of craft—an exact and surprising image grounds and transcends, a strategic enjambment can make a poem poignantly or comically surprise itself—but more important, our group, Ira as much facilitator as guide, valued inventive intensity in a more concentrated and communal way than I’d known previously.
Ira himself usually waited until we’d exhausted our readerly ingenuities before joining the discussion. Attentive to every poem line-by-line, Ira’s own comments promoted the idea that, while not every poem on the page succeeds, there’s an implicit emotional and imaginative impulse that deserves nurture, even if the language falls short of realizing that impulse in an eccentric way. “Eccentric” was Ira’s synonym for “fresh,” one of a number of coinages I’ve stolen from him. I don’t recall a single writing prompt; we didn’t need them. We revised our poems, of course, but Ira emphasized a poem’s evolution more than its completion: a “finished” poem worked best if it provoked another.
Many have had similarly formative workshops, and this piece owes an obvious debt to another reminiscence about a class, a group of poets, and a teacher: Philip Levine’s “Mine Own John Berryman.” Although Berryman’s drill-instruction shares nothing with Ira’s demanding receptivity, Levine’s characterization rings true for both classes and both teachers: “he sensed that the students had themselves developed a wonderful fellowship and took joy whenever one of us produced something fine.” I doubt what was “fine” half a century ago would hold up now for those undergraduate poets who stuck with it. Still, I find it easy to invent stylistic “just so” stories for what I love in their poetry. Stuart’s wit and attraction to the bizarre ripened into the sweet peculiarities of his poems today. David’s poems were erudite and often poignantly fabulist, as is the story linked above. Laurie’s and Jim’s poetry surely evinced the most developed aptitude for metaphor—Laurie’s folkloric and totemic; Jim’s craggy and snow-swept. Sarah (the only student I knew who rose at 5:00 am for an ornithology class) wrote with deep attention to the natural world. Jean, also a visual artist, was already experimenting with the angular intellectuality that would make its powerfully lyric contribution to the advent of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. I wish I’d saved those mimeo-blue worksheets. Thinking about them brings to mind one further detail, seemingly marginal, but on reflection, pretty astonishing: Ira typed up all our poems onto those worksheets himself, probably on a Selectric.