The green catalpa tree has turned
All white; the cherry blooms once more.
In one whole year I haven’t learned
A blessed thing they pay you for.
The blossoms snow down in my hair;
The trees and I will soon be bare…
“April is the cruellest month,” begins T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”; and we have survived it. Eliot seems to be referring to the month’s mixed messages of “memory and desire,” but we just suffered from poor scheduling on my part (back-to-back readings in different directions), and the ridiculous transportation system in Florida. Who knew there were no nonstop flights from Tampa to Jacksonville?
But April has its bonuses, too. One is that it always makes me think of some of my favorite poems, especially “April Inventory” by W. D. Snodgrass, quoted above and below. The poem promises “There is a loveliness exists,/Preserves us, not for specialists,” lines that move me even more in these Trumpish years, where mean-spirited ugliness grabs so much of our attention and time.
Snodgrass’s mainly conventional style is somewhat out of favor now, as well as late in his life (1926-2009), but was important in the ‘50s and ‘60s, often given credit with launching the surge of “confessional” verse, opening up poetry’s subject matter to personal problems, mental illness, family difficulties, trauma, and sexuality. He studied at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop while Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Randall Jarrell were there, and is a rare example of a student influencing his teacher. (Lowell’s Life Studies, coming after Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle, is confessional poetry’s flagship collection.)
Snodgrass had a practical, if a bit eccentric, side. One evening he was invited to read at Eckerd College, and we invited him to our house before the reading to enjoy one of Jeanne’s home-cooked meals with a few of our friends and colleagues. After drinks and some talk, Jeanne rang the dinner bell, and we all sat down around the table, shortly realizing the guest of honor wasn’t there. After a minute or two we began hearing sonorous chanting from above: ommm.mm.umm.mmm. Had Snodgrass joined some obscure Buddhist group at Esalen (popular in those days)? Was he upstairs working on some mind/body enhancement?
Well, no. He explained that he learned Americans didn’t buy slim volumes of poetry in any measurable quantity. The way a poet could make money, he told us, wasn’t by selling books but by giving readings. So he set out to become a first-rate reader, taking voice lessons and learning to strengthen his vocal cords and project his words. (Is this what Dylan Thomas did? I didn’t think so. He relied on whiskey and died at 39. But he sure could read.)
And so could Snodgrass. That evening he read from a new work, a cycle of poems called The Führer Bunker, using the many voices of Hitler and his crew, including his mistress, Eva Braun, who apparently liked to sing “Tea for Two” as she puttered around waiting for the Russians to roll in before marrying Hitler and committing suicide together with him. Snodgrass nailed it as he sang her song.
Although friends have spoken about emotional problems he had (well, he married four wives), he also had a sly, self-deprecating sense of humor, including repeating his not-very-poetic name three times in a poem: “Snodgrass is walking through the universe.” (His friends called him “De,” pronounced “Dee.”) And in a hilarious jab at professors (which he was for most of his life) in a poem called “The Poet Ridiculed by Hysterical Academics” he concludes: “Ah, what avails the tenure race,/Ah, what the Ph. D.,/When all departments have a place/For nincompoops like thee?”
Well, thanks, De. Every April you’re still walking here.
While scholars speak authority
And wear their ulcers on their sleeves,
My eyes in spectacles shall see
These trees procure and spend their leaves.
There is a value underneath
The gold and silver in my teeth…
—both quotes from “April Inventory” in Heart’s Needle by W.D. Snodgrass (Alfred A. Knopf, 1961)
This article appears in May 2-9, 2019.