By Rod Jellema
 |
| Garrison Keillor, photo: kwbu.org |
Garrison
Keillor said goodbye to the bigger part of his radio audience this summer. The
warm and
genial humorist, host, writer, brave amateur
singer and chief character- actor has left NPRs “The Prairie Home Companion.” No
one has done more to rescue the medium of radio programming from the deep drifts
of TV slush-blood-sheets-guts-and-gun programming than he.
We
poets and teachers appreciate him even more—he has done so much to promote
contemporary poetry. There were many evocative readings by poets themselves
and/or by Keillor that were given valuable time on the PHC broadcasts.
Additionally, his own inimical readings of various poems were and still are the
feature of his five-minute broadcasts, seven days a week for many years, of
NPR’s A Writer’s Almanac.
But
somehow poetry’s best friend has slid downhill. He has forgotten where he
began. Back in his student days at the University of Minnesota he lucked into
friendships with poets James Wright and Roland Flint, then (respectively) a
young instructor and a fellow student. Wright introduced Keillor to another
Minnesotan, Robert Bly; Donald Hall, a Wright friend then at Michigan, became
another young poet who excited and helped to shape Keillor’s deep appreciation
for what poets were doing with words.
So
how is it possible that Garrison Keillor, in a widely distributed e-mail warned:
A young writer is easily tempted by
the allusive and ethereal and ironic
and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.
The
simplicity of the declarative mode underlies all good prose writing, yes. But
surely Keillor knows, or used to know, the paradox that tells us good writing
is a real hindrance to the process of making poems. The poet who stops at
saying things well is too quickly satisfied, ignoring the demand that a poem should
make a fuller experience than he or she knows how to declare. And poets, he
reminds us daily, are writers. Their reach beyond what prose writers can “say” is
exactly what Garrison Keillor’s voicings so often catch. With pauses and
cadences, with tonal shifts and an ear for musical sound and enjambment, Keillor
eases poems from print into life.
I
remember most the readings he did of some of the poems of James Wright and of
Wright’s teacher,
Theodore Roethke. On these, he read the poems into improvised duets with
single-string guitar
picker Leo Kottke. I cannot imagine poems being freer to employ irony, to
meditate reflections, to cross boundaries into the ethereal, or to echo
experience by way of allusion.
I
cannot presume to scold, as Robert Browning in “The Lost Leader” scolded his
old model, Wordsworth. Nothing like that. In late years, Garrison Keillor, now
an anthologist and light-versifier, now a “poet,” may have forgotten just where
he entered the deep dark lovely forest. I only want to remind some of the
thousands of his grateful friends. Myself included.
Rod
Jellema is professor emeritus of English and former director of creative writing
at the University of Maryland and a longtime convener of workshops at The
Writer’s Center. Incarnality: the Collected Poems (2010), which includes
a CD, is his fifth collection. Among his awards: Two NEA Writing
Fellowships, the Towson University Literary Award, 11 fellowships at Yaddo and
the Columbia University Translation Prize. www.rodjellema.com
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