Interesting editorial in the WSJ today about the life of a poet and teacher.
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When I studied poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the early 1990s, my father, a business major back in the day, bought me a T-shirt that read "The Iowa Waiters' Workshop." Sadly, it wasn't too far from the truth. Only a poet would go into journalism for the money, I later joked.
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My undergraduate poetry teacher, Kevin Joe Eldridge ... introduced his students to the poetry of living, breathing American poets: Denis Johnson, James Galvin, Ai, James Tate, Jorie Graham, Galway Kinnell, Ira Sadoff and Louise Glück, to name a few.
He also taught the verse of Dickinson and Whitman and those who first gave voice to American poetry. But it was the fact that poets were alive and writing all over America that he most wanted to convey—that poetry wasn't just something you read in a book, it was something you breathed in and out and read aloud to friends to celebrate, to grieve, to love.
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But as talented as he was, Kevin never published a book of poems. He did what most poets do. He wrote. He taught. He scratched out a living and traveled from school to school looking for work.
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It was the moments of clarity and pure music that Kevin was addicted to—not a longing for acknowledgment or fame. To paraphrase one of his favorite poets, James Wright, he knew something of the pure, clear word.
To a former student, Phillip Pace, who was struggling with his own writing and the humbling process of submitting work, he wrote:
"[L]ooking for some long term exoneration of our efforts, some purpose to give them a working world reason to exist, is unavoidable but exponentially carcinogenic . . . worrying about the small details of the product while we're making it is more than enough and then some . . .
"Let's try, though it's hard, to just deal with how the little piece feels to us when we're done with it . . . that's the root purpose, anyway . . . we can drive ourselves crazy with hollywood dreams but in the end what the writing really seems meant for is to keep us, in this way and that, strong enough to survive the new harsh dawn of another grim mundane february day . . ."
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