Peter Balakian Reads Theodore Roethke


Photograph Courtesy The University of Chicago Press

Peter Balakian joins Kevin Young to read and discuss Theodore Roethke’s poem “In a Dark Time” and his own poem “Eggplant.” Balakian’s latest book is “Ozone Journal,” which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Below is an automated transcript of this podcast episode.


Kevin Young: Hello. You’re listening to The New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I’m Kevin Young, poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine. On this program we ask poets to select a poem for the New Yorker archive to read and discuss along with one of their own poems that’s been published in the magazine. My guest today is Peter Balakian, whose honors include the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the Presidential Medal and Movses Khorenatsi Medal from the Republic of Armenia, and the Spendlove Prize for Social Justice, Diplomacy and Tolerance. Welcome, Peter. Thanks for joining us.

Peter Balakian: Great to be here, Kevin.

Kevin Young: It’s really great to have you. The poem you picked is “In a Dark Time” by Theodore Roethke. Can you tell us why this particular poem stood out to you from the archive?

Peter Balakian: You know, it’s one of Roethke’s late poems. And I find Roethke a powerful figure from mid-twentieth century American poetry and poetry in English. And this poem strikes me as having a kind of urgency and what I might even call an existential richness to it that that gives it an enduring power. I first encountered this poem in the early nineteen-seventies and it’s a poem that has stayed with me over the decades, a poem I continue to teach and I have written—I’ve written about Roethke and this is a poem I’ve also written about.

Kevin Young: Let’s hear it. Here’s Peter Balakian in reading “In a Dark Time,” by Theodore Roethke.

Peter Balakian: [“In a Dark Time”]

Kevin Young: That was “In a Dark Time,” by Theodore Roethke, which appeared originally in the January 16, 1960, issue of the magazine, and again in the December 3, 2018, “New York Stories” archival issue. So tell me about this poem. One thing we should say is that in the book that this poem eventually appeared in there are no numbers but it appeared with numbers in the magazine. Obviously you read it so well that hearing the numbers it has a kind of majesty that if it was all one thing I think it would feel different. I’m not saying it’s better or worse but there’s something about those numbers and that, you know, starting over again you really hear that “wren” and “den” and “Is it a cave / Or winding path? The edge is what I have.” That’s one of the great lines.

Peter Balakian: Extraordinary. Yes. Well, you know, it’s interesting, Kevin, the idea that Roethke had numbers in there originally. The larger group of poems “In a Dark Time” commences—and these appeared in Roethke’s final book, 1963, called “The Far Field”—the sequence is called—the group of poems is called “Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical.” And I think that Roethke was thinking sequentially when he wrote this poem. And obviously he started with numbers as a kind of way to orchestrate four movements in a very powerful meditation. And I even find the notion of “sometimes metaphysical” very rich for this poem, which seems to move between the metaphysical and the organic and the psychological.

Kevin Young: Right. And, you know, as Berryman called him, “the garden master”—he always has that sort of natural world at hand there, Roethke, but there’s something, you know, as you said, metaphysical about it. It’s about human nature, the nature that he sees, I find.

Peter Balakian: It’s very much an interesting dialectic between I think this, I’m going to say, between the self, the psychological self, the natural world, and the possibility of transcendence. And you know Roethke once wrote, back in the mid-1940s when he was beginning his famous greenhouse poems, which I think are the great kind of breakthrough poems for him in his career, he wrote, “I wanted to write a poem the shape of the psyche under great stress.” He was a man who suffered severe bipolar disorder. He went through electroshock therapy. He really did know the depth of mental anguish and suffering.

Kevin Young: That’s right.

Peter Balakian: And he takes that—I think he uses that so powerfully in his poem. It’s not a poem in which he’s parading his psychiatric conditions on his sleeve but in which he’s so masterfully absorbed his mental suffering into a larger broader human struggle to find release and transcendence and wholeness.

Kevin Young: Yeah—no, and I think there’s a procession if not a progression through that, you know, and—“In a dark time, the eye begins to see”—that’s a really interesting starting point. And it’s very personal, as you say. “Death of the self in a long, tearless night, / All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.” That contrast between dark and light which he’s playing with can get, you know, frankly overused but he somehow renews it I think in this poem. And the other thing I felt rereading it in the light of day, as it were—it was also about dark times, if you know what you mean, and not like just his personal struggle but a kind of public political struggle.

Peter Balakian: That’s right. And you know, your noting that, Kevin, reminds me that my good friend Robert Jay Lifton, the psychiatrist and historian, who has written, you know, two dozen books on mass violence and dark times, always quotes the opening of this poem at the end of his lectures because he, as you’re noting, he also sees a universal emblem in that opening line. And it’s also a hopeful one, you know, because I think Roethke from the start of this poem is noting the dialectic between suffering, hope, and light, and in the end of this particular problem there is a kind of catharsis and freedom that happens which I think gives this poem an enormous psychological power.

Kevin Young: Yeah. And I think, you know, Roethke’s sometimes less remembered, let’s say, of the quote “confessional” poets, but he was really early to write about some of these questions and I think one of the best at enacting what used to be called madness. You know, there’s this kind of way in which he’s able to think about, as you put it, mental anguish, not as a descriptor, but as a process. Those sections, I remember, when I would have students who were trying to do something kind of big, kind of bold, but I would say go read Roethke—but don’t read the stuff that’s in the anthologies. You must go to the actual books, where those sequences are enacting and thinking about the poem as a mind, as you say, like, sort of at war with itself.

Peter Balakian: I think that’s right, Kevin, and one of the reasons I chose this poem is also because I agree with you. I think Roethke is way underread today, and I think that his best poems really are large and and enduring. This is one of them. And he is—and I’ve argued this in a piece I’ve written about Roethke—that I think he is the first Confessional. If that matters, in a sense of historicity, I think that the greenhouse poems of the mid- and late 1940s broke ground in merging what I like to call the ontogenetic and the phylogenetic—I mean, moving between, you know, the anguish of the self and a sense of an archetypal natural world out there. And other poets would move into that zone—Lowell, Berryman, Plath, Sexton—very shortly thereafter, but for the sake of history it’s worth noting what Roethke did in the 1940s for American poetics, and those “Lost Son” poems—I think you’re noting here when you say that those poems enact such extraordinary psychological processes of discovery and unfolding, and they’re never didactic; they’re always about the self in motion. So I always want to recommend to our listeners—just read “The Lost Son,” the first poem in that cycle. Wow, that’s just an amazing piece of work.

Kevin Young: And Plath—she credited him, right?

Peter Balakian: She did.

Kevin Young: And was very clear about—that her transformation in many ways was thinking about his poems.

Peter Balakian: Very much, yeah. I think she found a lot of energy in Roethke’s organic psychic energy. You know, I think of her poems like “Ariel” or “Tulips”—those poems I have that, you know, that—I keep using the word archetypal because Roethke was very interested in Jung. And he’s bringing Jung into poetics and his own poems, I think in an organic way, not in an academic way, and I think she really liked that.

Kevin Young: Yeah. I mean, do you think it’s that, you know, his disciples, as it were—I mean, the wrong word but—surpassed him as a poet? Or why do you think he is forgotten? I mean, he’s not forgotten, but, like, why isn’t he, you know, the person we’re like talking about—when we think of Confessional, he’s the last person we perhaps think of.

Peter Balakian: You know, I think you hit on something just a moment ago, Kevin, when you were mentioning your remarks to your students. I feel that Roethke is anthologized poorly. He’s anthologized by more of his mid-fifties, Yeatsian formal poems. Now, this is also a formal poem, and I want to say something about how powerful I think this poem is formally, but I do think that the most experimental and dynamic Roethke isn’t anthologized.

Kevin Young: Right. That’s the thing, is, I think you’ve nailed it—he’s very experimental. People don’t realize that. You read the Roethke in the anthologies, like “Well, he likes greenhouses; he’s on the top of the house.” But you dig a little deeper and say, wow, he is really trying to see how language can exist without verb or language can exist that’s only verb. You know, he’s really thinking about language as a medium.

Peter Balakian: Very much. The plasticity and the aural—the kind of aural rhymes and, you know, Roethke at one point said, “my true ancestors are the Bible and Mother Goose.” He wanted to really massage the infantile intensity of syntax.

Kevin Young: Yeah. And doesn’t he have great kids’ poems, isn’t that right?

Peter Balakian: He does. He has those poems, based on animals, for children called “I Am! Says the Lamb.”

Kevin Young: What a great title.

Peter Balakian: Yeah, yeah, great poems.

Kevin Young: I have a personal soft spot for children’s books by poets, which I think are a genre unto themselves. And everyone from James Baldwin to Elizabeth Bishop have these children’s books, you know.

Peter Balakian: Eliot, too, with his cats poems.

Kevin Young: Of course, of course—and there’s a sort of charm but also, you know, a Mother Goose that they’re learning from also in their quote “adult poetry.”

Peter Balakian: Even one of my favorite nursery jingles in Roethke’s “Lost Son” poem goes “Even steven all is less: / I haven’t time for sugar, / Put your finger in your nose, / And there will be a booger.”

Kevin Young: There you have it.

Peter Balakian: He did this stuff and right in the middle of a poem—what he called jump rope. Jump rope language.

Kevin Young: That’s so interesting.

Peter Balakian: Powerful.

Kevin Young: So tell us about the more formal aspects of this poem. Because, you know, we’re talking about Mother Goose, but this is, you know, Mother Goose on something.

Peter Balakian: You know, Kevin, I feel that the rhyming in this poem is really brilliant. These are four six-line stanzas going ABBACC, and the rhymes, for example, like “shade” and “tree” or “despair”—

Kevin Young: And “fire.”

Peter Balakian: And “fire”—they’re really subtle rhymes. And there’s also “mind” and “wind” closing the poem. And they have that Dickinsonian slantness to them—they’re a little less slant—they’re somewhere between slant and perfect, but they’re beautiful and rich and they create a kind of acoustic for this poem that is so accomplished and memorable.

Kevin Young: And they have—another way to think of it for our readers might be, they visually look like they rhyme more than they do sometimes.

Peter Balakian: Yes, yes.

Kevin Young: And so there’s this kind of tension I think that also is part of the point of the poem which is things aren’t always what they seem. You know, they seem one way but, as we were talking about, “the eye begins to see”—there’s something else. I love that moment where he says “Which I is I?” And we return to the “e-y-e” and the “I” of the poem—and I’m really, you know, trying to work out what that is in a poem. Because I think a poem is always obsessed with that switch between the self and the thing that sees.

Peter Balakian: Absolutely. And the two things that I was going to note in in response to what you’re saying—one is that this is a poem in which the poet is not afraid of taking risks with big language and there are times when, you know, I like to talk to my students about rhetoric and poetry and those big-risk moments, and how hard they are to pull off and how they need to be set up. Roethke here, at the peak of his powers in this poem, is taking enormous risks with large rhetorical gestures: “I know the purity of pure despair,” “Which I is I,” “The mind enters itself, and God the mind”—Roethke never used the word God, rarely used the word God, in his poems. I think Roethke was a spiritual poet but he wasn’t orthodoxly religious. But here he takes that risk with that big word. So it has that—or “What’s madness but nobility of soul / At odds with circumstance?” You know, there are many days when I walk around saying those lines. They so—they’re Shakespearean, you know?

Kevin Young: Well, and in Shakespeare, in Roethke, and sort of in our time, saying the truth or saying these things can feel, you know—Shakespeare gives the madmen, the clowns, the truest lines, of course, in the plays. And here he is observing this thing that may be true of us. I mean, we’re in this crazy moment where—it seems like someone’s telling the truth, it’s crazy. It’s madness! You know? And so there is this really interesting comment on our times.

Peter Balakian: And I think that’s the kind of thing that poetry can do and does do. You know, it gives us language that is, to quote Kenneth Burke’s phrase, that’s language that’s equipment for living. And I think this poem is equipment for living in many ways, and in dark times, and we’re in some hard times here, and this poem may not be pointedly political, but what’s so rich about its dimensions is that it does provide us with rhetoric that’s meaningful and insightful and powerful in a time that may be difficult, both socially, politically, or personally.

Kevin Young: Sure. Now in the May 28, 2018, issue, The New Yorker published your poem “Eggplant,” which we’ll hear you read in a moment. Is there anything you’d like to say about this poem? How did it come to you? Let’s talk about it just briefly before we launch into it.

Peter Balakian: The poem is part of a cycle of poems I’ve been writing that are kind of, I don’t know, object meditations on fruits and vegetables, and I think this is one of the kind of important places for poetic imagination. So many poets are engaged in object meditations, whether they be on paintings, on architecture, on works of art, on fruits and vegetables.

Kevin Young: Still lives, in a way.

Peter Balakian: Yeah, they’re kind of still lives. And then as we engage in the meditation we find that the thing or the object takes us to places that surprise us.

Kevin Young: Wonderful. Well, let’s hear this poem. Here’s Peter Balakian reading his poem “Eggplant.”

Peter Balakian: [“Eggplant”]

Kevin Young: That was “Eggplant,” by Peter Balakian. That poem so subtly powerful, I think. I love that moment where it says “came with no memory. // But . . . ” So tell me about that “no memory” and the “but,” because it seems like that’s part of it. Is it that the moment is so vivid it’s not a memory, or that one’s alive in the moment? Or is it that everything boils down to this “table with white dishes”?

Peter Balakian: Well, that word “memory” is a kind of fulcrum word for the poem because although I start the poem, you know, remembering the eggplants being cut in my kitchen, in my mother’s kitchen, in suburban New Jersey, say, when I was ten years old, in the early nineteen-sixties or something, immediately the image of the eggplant evokes something dark and traumatic in our family and culture’s past and so the image of the Syrian desert takes my memory back to the Armenian genocide. And though my grandmother doesn’t appear in this poem in a trope or an image, her experience as an Armenian genocide death march survivor is evoked with that image of this vegetable, which is very much a staple in the Armenian cuisine, but it also becomes a historical emblem. And so the “elegy for the last friend seen” and “the fog on the riverbank / like a holy ghost” and so on. That’s evoking hard times.

Kevin Young: So food is never just food, is it?

Peter Balakian: That’s right.

Kevin Young: Well, it’s interesting because I write about food, food appears in poems of mine. Is this, you know, an ode or—do you think of it that way, or was it—you called it a meditation, which, I like that idea, and how are they different? For me, you’re not just praising this eggplant, which, I think praise is complex. You know, if you’re just praising you have to praise something that, you know, is worthy praise but also maybe unexpected. You know, when Yusef has “Ode to the Maggot,” you know, then you’re thinking about this lowly thing that is huge and I think what I love about you using the eggplant is as you said it’s a staple. It means something in this cuisine but it also means something else in this poem.

Peter Balakian: Yeah. So—I appreciate your noting the differences between the ode and the meditation, and I think that also maybe in this poem there’s a little overlapping, because there is a praise of the beauty, just the sensuous beauty of this natural world, the eggplant, a piece of the natural world, and its color, which still when I slice them once a week my own cutting board, because I cook a lot, you know, they still speak back to me. And I close the poem with praise of the eggplant. But as you’re also noting I guess what I’d say is that the meditation might move in places that are a little wilder or more unexpected, perhaps. And so that the poem, so that the eggplant, as a thing as a beautiful emanation of nature, also catapults me, my imagination, back into the historical— that’s the meditative part of it, perhaps. Both are going on.

Kevin Young: Yeah. Well, I love the simplicity both of the poem and of the dish. You know, “some egg wash and salt,” “some parsley appeared / from the garden”—that’s a lovely image. But then this last one, and I want to think about it just for a little bit longer: “shining aubergine, black-skinned / beauty, bitter apple.” What a great word—I want to start calling them bitter apples—but also, all those words, from “skin” to “beauty” to the “apple,” the sort of Eden quality, prelapsarian—that’s there, you know. And then: “We used our hands.” Tell us about that.

Peter Balakian: Well, yeah—again, I appreciate and love listening to you reflect on those two lines that precede the last line, in which I want to just linger. I think it’s one of the things that the poetic imagination does so much of the time—it’s lingering on the layers of the sensual world, and this is why poetry—and I’m not just referring to me here, you know, just poetry in a broad sense—brings us such profound and indispensable knowledge of reality. Because poems do this. You know, we as poets get obsessed with the complex layers of things—but, OK, I go on too far, too much here.

Kevin Young: No, that’s perfect.

Peter Balakian: But in the end, I guess “we used our hands” became a kind of image of passion and, you know, unmediated love of ingesting this beautiful food and this beautifully prepared vegetable. And so I didn’t want there to be any mediating reality, like a cold metal fork or knife.

Kevin Young: When you put it that way it sounds—why do we use these things?

Peter Balakian: I know! I always feel Asian culture has it better because they at least have wood, and wood is a more organic way, but sometimes you just need to use your hands.

Kevin Young: That’s right.

Peter Balakian: Right? For the things we love.

Kevin Young: Yeah. I want to ask just sort of lastly, what else appears in this, in your garden of verses that you’re sort of working toward, the sequence?

Peter Balakian: I have a range of vegetables in this sequence that include some things that are really I find located in an Armenian-Middle Eastern terrain, like quince and apricot—I mean, apricot’s universal but it’s Armenia’s national fruit. But tomatoes, zucchinis, cracked wheat, bulgur, which is something we grew up eating a lot of, cracked wheat. And some things that are very American, too. But a variety—walnuts, grape leaves—it’s been fun. This is one small segment of a longer book I’m completing now.

Kevin Young: Are these poems at the heart of it, or the whole thing one meditation on this?

Peter Balakian: No, no. I’d say these are a group of poems that have their own kind of space in a book that has a few layers to it—including one more, because my two previous books have two fity-section multi-sequence poems, and I have one more sort of forty-five-, fifty-section long poem to finish what I’ve been working on for about fifteen or twenty years now, this trilogy that I call my “ziggurat trilogy.”

Kevin Young: That’s amazing. Tell me just a little bit more about that, the ziggurat trilogy for you.

Peter Balakian: Well, the ziggurat trilogy began with a poem, forty-five sections or so, in my book of 2010 called “Ziggurat,” and that poem was called “A-Train / Ziggurat / Elegy.” And the next installment of that was “Ozone Journal.”

Kevin Young: And that was 2016?

Peter Balakian: That was 2015—

Kevin Young: And then you won in 2016 for that book.

Peter Balakian: And the new one—I’ll leave the title off until it’s absolutely sealed—but I would say in these poems—and they’re all set in Manhattan. And in fact the first poem, “A-Train / Ziggurat / Elegy,” a lot of it is set in Manhattan, and in lower Manhattan, during an era of the nineteen-seventies when I was commuting down here and the city was in another phase of its evolution, and I started writing the “A-Train / Ziggurat / Elegy” poem after the World Trade towers came down. And my shock and my engagement with the towers had to do with my feeling of intimacy with them, having been a mail runner, mail deliverer, mail guy for a shipping company, and I was in the towers a lot as a young guy, as a teenager and college student, and now their absence really haunted me, as it haunted all of us. So that was some animating impetus for that poem. That poem has many layers to it. And both “Ozone” and “Ziggurat” move between the Middle East and New York City. In “Ozone Journal” a piece of that poem is situated with the persona—I always like to use the word “persona” because—

Kevin Young: Exactly—especially when it’s very personal, one has to say “persona.”

Peter Balakian: It’s not a memoir, even though it’s personal, yeah—we all know that but readers sometimes think, oh, this is your life story. Well yeah, a piece of it maybe, but—

Kevin Young: Sure.

Peter Balakian: Right. But the autobiographical piece was that I was on a forensic dig with a “60 Minutes” crew, doing a segment for “60 Minutes” in 2009, and we were digging up the remains of Armenian bones in the Syrian desert, in a place called Der Zor, which was the epicenter of death during the Armenian genocide in 1915. And so I have a little dialectical place that moves between Syria and New York City in that poem.

Kevin Young: Yeah.

Peter Balakian: And now in this third poem I’m picking up various threads, but the cultural, political tensions in this poem, in the new poem, the new sequential fifty-section poem, are centered around the geological history of the planet and and some climate change engagement. So I’ll just say that very generally.

Kevin Young: Sure. Well, I look forward to reading it.

Peter Balakian: Thank you.

Kevin Young: Peter, thanks so much for talking with us today.

Peter Balakian: Kevin, thank you. It’s been great being here. “Eggplant” by Peter Balakian, as well as Theodore Roethke’s poem “In a Dark Time” can be found on newyorker.com. “In a Dark Time” is from “The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke,” published by Anchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Peter Balakian’s latest book is “Ozone Journal.” Thanks so much.

Tag: You may subscribe to this podcast, the fiction podcast, the Writer’s Voice podcast, and the Politics and More podcast by searching for “The New Yorker” in your podcast app. You can hear more poetry read by the authors on newyorker.com and on the New Yorker app, available from the App Store or from Google Play. The theme music is “The Corner” by Christian Scott Atunde Adjuah, courtesy of Stretch Music and Ropeadope. The New Yorker Poetry Podcast is produced by Jill Du Boff of newyorker.com, with help from Hannah Aizenman.