or: My Iowa Isolated Freedom
(1965-67)
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I was 24 going in, having been delayed two years by an errant
yet necessary venture in a Jesuit facility in St. Bonifacius,
Minnesota. During my junior and senior undergraduate years
I was the lead editor of Pursuit, a dying literary and arts
journal. Thankfully, after my departure, Professor Richard
Lyons changed its focus, and renamed it Wisconsin Review.
In June of 1965 I married the woman I was most attracted to
when we were in grade school. Subsequently, by means of a
ruse, I initiated employment for her at the university, but
we were not able to find living quarters in Iowa City. In
Solon, about ten miles north, we found an upstairs apartment
in a large house. All in all, though it kept me away from
other students in the MFA program, it was/ a pleasant place.
Solitude appealed to me.
My first year my mentor was George Starbuck. For reasons
I do not recall/ I decided to write Onefor, an epic with a
torturous rhyme scheme. I did manage to complete a draft
of Book I. However, it was not acceptable, and the efforts
needed to make it acceptable would have been Herculean.
I was not faring all that well with the hill courses either.
Starbuck could have sent me packing, but an intuition he
had, plain and worn as it was, led him to tell me to: write
about something you are familiar with. Already nearing the
end of year one, and knowing I had not written enough good
short poems, on a return to my hometown, I walked through
important parts of it. Thus, Fond du Lac, a loose blank
verse long poem, a lyric narrative, speckled with others
its protagonist encounters/imagines. Compared to the epic,
it is like a happening. By the time the first lines of it appeared
on a worksheet/ Marvin Bell was my mentor; but Starbuck's
intuition, pressuring me as it did, had freed me. The change
was palpable. Alas, it perturbed one student so/ he walked
to the front, and--sitting in a chair behind a table--began
reciting from memory a composition of his he was certain
was superior--which indeed it was--but was made comical by
the juxtaposition of a deeply felt personal truth. Laughter
erupted. I, though I may have smiled, was sad. That student
rushed out; and to this day I wish I had had the strength to
convince him to stay; but childhood traumas prevented me
from helping him heal the trauma/ he was experiencing.
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[ Note: My memory is fallible, but I am relating all here
as my memory has retained that all. ]
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Afterwards, out in the hall, James Tate (god that he was)
asked me: "How do you write those long poems?" Stunned
is the word. First off, if he actually did use "those
long poems"/ it didn't register. Had it, I would have
questioned it/ as I didn't think anyone knew about the
epic. Perhaps it's neither here nor there since I was
stunned. Not having a clue how to respond, I asked him:
"How do you write your short ones?" At that point the
word became silence. Had I known then what I know now:
that he was into jazz, I would have mentioned that and
then told him I prefer symphonies.
I did have brief conversations with two or three other
students while I was at Iowa. Here are names of those
I remember, whether or not I ever spoke to them: Phil
Hey, Michael Dennis Browne, Peter Klappert, Harold Bond,
Peter Cooley, Steve Orlen, Jon Anderson, David Lunde,
Julia Vinograd, Richard Geller, Eric Nightingale.
Some side notes:
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During the summer of 1966 I worked in a pallet factory
in Coralville, Iowa.
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When I was a child, my parents learned I had allergies
the day I went with my father to help him pick corn on
the land where he was a child. It was less than four
blocks from our house, but by the time we got back to
there/ my eyes were pasted shut. One day in Iowa City
when I stopped to get my wife, she told me my face was
all white, scaly white, that I looked like a ghost.
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Julia Vinograd has written over 50/ books of poems.
kh00003
