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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Poets We Lost in 2022

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf, I’m Helena de Groot. Today, Poets We Lost in 2022.

I don’t mean to be grandiose, but when some people die, a whole era dies with them. Such was the case with Richard Howard. Howard’s writing was unapologetically highbrow. He peppered his poems with esoteric facts about artists, writers, musicians, and historical figures, and he was so intimately familiar with these long-dead people that he could even speak as them, taking on the diction of their time and place, or at least a Howardian version of it. What he also did was use words lesser mortals like myself have never even seen, not just in his poems, but in conversation. In one interview I read, he casually dropped a gem like “nugatory,” or “scoptophiliac,” a word that only the exceedingly erudite would know is dirty.

Of course, for everyone else, his poems could feel inaccessible, even off-putting. But Howard did not seem to mind. All that knowledge he had amassed to the point of overflowing, during the nine decades of his life, simply gave him too much joy. Then dementia eroded all that. And in March of this year, Richard Howard died.

To remember him, I talked to someone who knew Richard well during the final two decades of his life, the poet Craig Morgan Teicher, who wrote a very moving tribute to him on the website of TheParis Review. When I sat down to talk to Craig, I wanted to start with the end. So I asked him what it was like to see his most learned friend slowly lose his learning.

Craig Morgan Teicher: It was really shocking. I mean, Richard had this encyclopedic mind and it was very literally encyclopedic, right. Like he kind of had each fact memorized. And his whole body of poetry was—or one of its major obsessions was like, imagining what would happen if two literary figures who never met had met and talked about everything that they wrote about and talked about. So he knew all—you know, it’s like he could speak as Lewis Carroll, you know, in a poem with the facts of Lewis Carroll’s life at his disposal. So it was really shocking to see that mind, which had never had to reach for a certain kind of information, suddenly just have no idea where to find it. It was definitely sad. And at the same time, you know, I met him when he was 75 and he didn’t have any health problems until his mid-80s and didn’t really begin to lose his mental faculties until his early 90s. You know?

Helena de Groot: That’s incredible. And when he started to lose his faculties, like, how did you react?

Craig Morgan Teicher: I mean, I wasn’t that involved day to day once that was happening. My sense from his partner David was, of course, that he found it very frustrating. David did tell me that they reached a point where Richard couldn’t really read anymore, and then they sort of adopted a really dedicated practice of David reading to Richard. And actually, David read Richard all of Richard’s own work. And, you know, David said and, you know, this is David Alexander, the artist who is Richard’s longtime partner, I think partner of 40 years, David said to me when I saw him the other day. Anyway, David said that, you know, he had read Richard all of the poems and all the essays, and Richard didn’t quite remember that he wrote them, but he liked them, you know, and he thought “Oh, they’re very good,” you know.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) I love that.

Craig Morgan Teicher: Yeah. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Well, thank God. Well, then I’d like to start with the beginning. Or at least the beginning for you. How did you guys meet?

Craig Morgan Teicher: So I went to the Columbia Graduate Program, the MFA, and Richard was one of my first semester teachers. I had Richard and Lucy Brock-Broido. And as I’m sure any research you do on Richard will turn up, Richard liked to pick favorites.

Helena de Groot: Mm.

Craig Morgan Teicher: And he was flagrant about it, and almost relished the unfairness of it. And for whatever reason, he picked me. I mean, I think for him, it always had to do with, you know, he liked my poems, which were very nascent and very young. And I think he saw in me a sort of disheveled person who could probably benefit from his help. You know, so, but he conducted his classes in an unusual way. At Columbia, you would go and he would lecture about the poets of his generation, his friends, you know, Richard Hugo and Charles Simic and Madeleine DeFrees and A.R. Ammons. And he would tell stories about times you hung out with them, and then he would have a big packet of poems that we would discuss. And then the workshopping part happened at his house, and instead of doing a workshop at a table in the round, you would go alone to his house and he would take your poem and put it on a clipboard while you sat there and tried to stop his dog from humping your leg.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Craig Morgan Teicher: And we should talk more about his dog, Gide, because I was very involved with Gide’s life. And he would just line edit your poems while you sat there and watched. And then he would tell you a few things about them. So everyone who worked with him had this one-on-one time with him, just built in. And so we became friends, you know, over that one-on-one time and, you know, and then by second semester, Columbia sort of hired me as his assistant just to, I think, as much because they wanted a go-between to make sure that Richard did stuff on time. And Richard could be very petulant with people who he needed to do things. And so I was there to sort of buffer that and to help keep him organized with his classes. And so, you know, I just ended up over that year and a half that I did that, just spending a lot of time with him. And then the next big thing that happened was that when Richard you know, Richard had a dog named Gide, who was a French bulldog. Gide was, I think, Richard’s second or third French bulldog in a row. Gide really did not act like a dog. I mean, Richard said to me once, you know, “I don’t want to deny him anything.” So, so Richard hired me to take care of Gide. And when Richard would leave town, I would stay in his apartment and I would take care of Gide because Gide, you know, of course, couldn’t go to a kennel. And Richard’s apartment was—and I actually just went there for the last time to sort of say goodbye to it—it was a remarkable little New York railroad apartment. And Richard had literally lined each surface from the bathroom to the alcove around his bed with bookshelves. And so there were probably 10,000 books in that little apartment. Literally, I mean, he hung paintings on top of the bookshelves.

Helena de Groot: Wow. And it was little, right? It was like a, it was, was it even a one bedroom or not even?

Craig Morgan Teicher: No, no it was a studio.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Craig Morgan Teicher: It was just a long, narrow studio that Richard had lived there for decades. And the amazing thing is that he kept his correspondence in the books. So, you know, I mean, here I’m going to reveal something which, you know, it seems sort of okay to reveal now. But, of course—and I wasn’t the first person to be the Gide sitter and I wasn’t the last, but of course, when Richard went away, I would sit there and read the letters, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Craig Morgan Teicher: And, you know, just learn all this gossip about the great poets of the late 20th century.

Helena de Groot: Okay. You can spill one, right?

Craig Morgan Teicher: I don’t think so. I think I’d better not. I think I’d better not.

Helena de Groot: They’re all still alive?

Craig Morgan Teicher: Not all of them, but they’re all famous.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Craig Morgan Teicher: You know, they’re all, they all have legacies that I don’t want to, you know, but I mean, obviously, the things I remember are not like, ‘Oh, somebody wrote this nice letter,” you know, it’s all—

Helena de Groot: Sure, sure. Of course, it’s all like the real dirt.

Craig Morgan Teicher: Yeah, but I mean, again, that the things I remember, you know, you have to keep in mind, Richard, especially in the ’70s and ’80s and early ’90s was a major force in poetry publishing. Right. I mean, he was a person who could, you know, meet someone off the street and they’d have a book contract in three hours. I mean, he edited the Braziller poetry series, which was a groundbreaking series, and launched Frank Bidart and Charles Simic and J.D. McClatchy and all these people. And then by the time I knew him, he was sort of the advisory editor for Grove for their poetry. And so, a lot of the correspondence that I remember, because I was really interested in publishing myself at the time— not in publishing myself, but in my own future as someone who might publish things, you know, I remember all the correspondence about the publishing.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Craig Morgan Teicher: So, you know, it was a lot of stuff about that. And, you know, seeing these sort of sides of these writers where they were like, “I need, I need to publish things.”

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) For money?

Craig Morgan Teicher: Well, for, you know, for all the reasons writers need to publish, for tenure and for, you know, because they want to make sure that God hears them when they when they cry.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. (LAUGHS)

Craig Morgan Teicher: But, you know, but it was amazing to see, you know, these people who were mythic in my mind, you know, to just see them like, being utterly human, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Craig Morgan Teicher: I mean, that was a big thing for me with Richard, too, it was just like really getting to understand Richard was a really unusual person in a lot of ways. Like he was able to live his whole life just immersed in culture. You know, there was sort of not a moment of his day when he wasn’t sort of surrounded by opera and poetry and paintings, and so, like, on the one hand, he was just a sort of a fanciful, like, I just I had no notion that people could live this way, you know, where they don’t think about anything but what they love. And on the other hand, I got to know him, and through him, many other poets, just as people. You know, it was sort of a crash course in like, the actual size of larger than life people in this world that I wanted to be part of. And Richard granted me access to that. And it was, it was amazing.

Helena de Groot: Mm. There are a few things that you start talking about and then kind of drop, so I’d like to just pick up on those. One, maybe the silliest one, was his dog, Gide. Can you tell me a little bit more about him?

Craig Morgan Teicher: Yeah, so Gide was a little tan French bulldog. But he wasn’t a dog, he was a projection of aspects of Richard’s personality, you know?

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Craig Morgan Teicher: And Richard and him had sort of customized each other so that they, you know, they could have a happy life together. So Gide, you know, Gide just did whatever he wanted. He did a lot of humping. A lot of humping. And, you know, it’s sort of gross to say, except it’s so funny, you know, it’s so—but Gide also, so he just, he wouldn’t walk. To get him to walk, I had to carry a bag of kibble and literally every three or four feet, I had to bait Gide with kibble. And then when I got tired of doing that, which, which, and Richard did the same thing, when I get tired of doing that, Richard had sort of developed this way of holding the leash that I imitated, where you essentially hold it straight and long like an oar, and you row Gide forward and get him to walk about four steps, and then you do another row.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Craig Morgan Teicher: And, and so this is how I would get Gide from Richard’s house on Waverly Place to the dog run in Washington Square Park, which, you know, is like a four-minute walk that would take 20 minutes. And I remember the first time I took care of Gide, I didn’t understand that this is what Gide did. And I thought it was like, me not knowing how to walk him. So I carried him all around the park because I was like, “What am I supposed to do?” And I was like, you know, I remember being sort of stranded at some point and being like, “This dog won’t move. How am I going to get him home? How am I going to do this?” The only time he would move fast is sometimes, you know, Richard’s building had a trash chute at the end of a long hallway, and so I’d have to take the trash out. I would open the door. Gide would see it, look up, run out the door, and then turn back around, stare at me. And, you know, I swear he smiled. And then he would dash down the hall as fast as he could. It’s the only time I ever saw him kind of move quickly, and I would have to chase him.

Helena de Groot: Wait, what was that about? He really liked the smell of the

Craig Morgan Teicher: He was messing with me. He was playing. He was just playing.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHING) Oh.

Craig Morgan Teicher: But it was just, he was a phenomenally lazy, you know, he was a kind of a sack of odors, you know,

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Craig Morgan Teicher: except for when I would open this door and he would run. And he just, I mean, look, dogs are weird, but he was extra weird. But then he just, you know, I spent a lot of time just sitting in Richard’s apartment, with Gide curled up on my hip, you know, he would just curl up next to me and I would read these letters, you know? (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) And there’s one other thing I want to pick up on, and that is you talked about these one-on-one sessions and that, you know, he would put one of your poems on a clipboard and then give line edits. What kind of edits did he, like, whatever you remember.

Craig Morgan Teicher: So it felt very much like he was working as an editor, you know, meaning he would—he didn’t want you to make major changes to the poems. He would make kind of alterations, you know. And every so often he would cross out a whole line. But it was a lot of, you know, using diacritical marks to X out words. And he would sometimes substitute another word. He also really liked the lines to be even. And so he would just start—

Helena de Groot: Like, as long?

Craig Morgan Teicher: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Craig Morgan Teicher: He liked the look of an even poem and felt that that was, you know, a kind of virtue in and of itself. And so he would sort of, you know, snip your long lines. And so, you know, you would kind of walk out of there with this poem dressed in little tercets. And I thought the bravest thing in the world was like, you know, I saw Frank Bidart’s poems, and I was like, “Oh, my God, the one line is like, so long and the next line is so short. That’s so courageous!” (LAUGHS) You know, it took me years to just allow myself an uneven line in a poem, which is so silly.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Craig Morgan Teicher: But, you know, it was, I mean, it felt to me at that time, it was like, wow, “Richard Howard, he’s this famous guy. He’s won a Pulitzer Prize.” He, you know, he sort of loomed over Columbia in this very profound way. And it was like, “Wow, this guy!” I was 22. I was very young and I was like, “This guy is reading my poems and taking them seriously. I must, I must really have arrived,” you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Craig Morgan Teicher: You know, and it would take me years to sort of understand at some level that like, the whole—this was, this was the way Richard made friends, it was the way he moved through the world. Poems were the way that he connected with people. And so, I mean, he’s certainly like to better if you were good at writing poetry, but it was, it was his way of talking, you know? And it was his way of just sort of bridging the space between people. So, you know, most of the poems that he edited were student poems, and they’re gone. You know, they’re not poems that will ever be part of my sort of body of work. But it was the way that I got to know him. And that feels really beautiful and precious. And also, you know, my wife, Brenda Shaughnessy, also was his student before I was. So we have, you know, in our relationship that’s always been a part of our conversation is like, what was it like to know Richard, and what did we each know of him? And it sort of reminds me many, many, many, many, many people have known him in this way. And, you know, it just makes me feel part of this kind of community. And when I wrote that piece for The Paris Review, a number of people just emailed me and said, “Oh, my God, I was Richard’s student in, you know, 1983.”

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Craig Morgan Teicher: And, you know, “you, like, I did the same thing with him and you really caught the sense of what it felt like to be in that room with him.” I mean, there’s this vast community of hundreds of people, you know, some of whom became poets, some of whom didn’t. Hundreds, probably thousands, you know, from Columbia, from Johns Hopkins, from Houston, who had this relationship with Richard. And you know, because he picked favorites, there are also as many people who are bitter about how he treated them. But, but—and that’s part of the legacy, too, I think. But there are also hundreds and hundreds of people who feel this intimacy with him and this closeness that he offered, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Because the generosity of that, I mean, you spend a lot less time if you just look at students’ poems in class and be done with it when the hour is over. To invite them one-on-one in your apartment, like, what a dedication.

Craig Morgan Teicher: Yeah, well, and I mean, it was also something that was possible at that time. You know, you could never do it now. You would, you’d get a Title IX complaint, or something.

Helena de Groot: Sure.

Craig Morgan Teicher: But it was something that was still possible. It was something he’d been doing probably since the ’60s, you know? And, you know, it felt very New York and very special and very like, wow, what a, what a crazy thing to get to do.

Helena de Groot: And, you know, since there was like a 50-plus year age gap between the two of you, like, what was he like in conversation? Did he dominate the—like, was it mostly him talking and you listening or how did that go?

Craig Morgan Teicher: I mean, Richard was fundamentally a lecturer, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Craig Morgan Teicher: I mean, fundamentally, like, his personality was designed for output, in a way.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Craig Morgan Teicher: So it was a lot of, yeah, just trying to ask him about things and getting him to talk about them. You know, he would stop talking abruptly when he was bored or done.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) With his own argument, basically?

Craig Morgan Teicher: Yeah, I mean, when he said the thing he was going to say, and he was ready for you to go, he would just stop talking. He also, when he was done with you on the phone, he would just hang up.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Craig Morgan Teicher: You just didn’t—you wouldn’t have realized the conversation ended. Because it hadn’t, and he had just hung up on you.

Helena de Groot: Like in the movies, where nobody ever says bye.

Craig Morgan Teicher: Yeah. No.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Craig Morgan Teicher: But he was also, I mean, as we got to know each other better, you know, he was also somebody who, I confided in him about my dad. You know, he was somebody who was a little older than my dad. And so he could, he had watched my dad’s generation from this little distance. And, you know, this generation of people born right after World War II and kind of how shut down and screwed up they were. And, you know, I mean, he also did things other than lecture. You know, he, he was very open and available to me once I got to know him, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I mean, it’s funny, you know, the way that you talk about him also being available when you wanted to talk about your dad, because as I was reading his poems, you know, the way people talk about his poems made me sort of intimidated before I had read any. Right, because I thought, “Oh, I need to have like an education that I didn’t have to understand them.” But then I started reading them and I thought they were surprisingly emotionally vulnerable.

Craig Morgan Teicher: Yeah. Well, you know, I think probably his favorite, his favorite aspect of being alive was conversation. You know, I mean, the poems are utterly jam packed with knowledge and facts and information at some level because they needed something to talk about. What he liked to do was to talk and iterate language. And he liked sentences. He liked clauses. He liked to just see if you could get language to double back on itself. And so, yeah, I think fundamentally if you come to the poems, what you’re really getting into is something very familiar, which is what it’s like to converse, or which is what it’s like to be on one side of a very erudite conversation. You don’t have to know what kind of handkerchief Lewis Carroll would have monogrammed or whatever thing he, you know, he was writing about. You just had to be kind of available to the idea of conversation.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah. Do you want to get to a poem?

Craig Morgan Teicher: Sure.

Helena de Groot: Is there any poem that you particularly love or, you know, that you think about when you think about him?

Craig Morgan Teicher: I mean, I think about this book, Progressive Education, which he was writing—God, it’s so full of weird stuff that I can’t, that I shouldn’t read, and the poems are so long, you know?

Helena de Groot: Well, you can read excerpts also. I mean, you can read whatever you like.

Craig Morgan Teicher: So this book was the book that he was working on. I mean, this was really the last book that he wrote entirely when he had, you know, his wits about him. And he enjoyed, I mean, and I probably knew him over the course of three, four books. This is definitely the one he enjoyed writing most. The other thing that would happen when you would come to his house is, if he had a new poem, he would say, “Well, now let me read you my new poem.”

Helena de Groot: Wow!

Craig Morgan Teicher: So this book is he, you know, he went to a progressive elementary school, you know.

Helena de Groot: In Ohio, right?

Craig Morgan Teicher: Yep. In Cleveland. And this would have been like the ’30s. I think he was born in ’26 or ’28,

Helena de Groot: I thought ’29?

Craig Morgan Teicher: ’29, okay. So yeah, it would have been the, toward the end of the ’30s. I mean, it was sort of one of the first times that he really reanimated figures from his own life, because the kids who speak in this book are based on kids that he grew up with. And he had this amazing couple of years of like, just re-immersing in these memories of the kind of progressive, articulate environment that formed him. So you’d come in and he’d read you the new poem. And it was like this, this installment of his, of this part of his autobiography that he’d never really shared before. And he was so obviously enjoying it. He was a happy person, you know? And he enjoyed what he was doing as long as I knew him, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Craig Morgan Teicher: So. All right. So this is the first poem in A Progressive Education. It’s called “Our Spring Trip.”

(READS POEM)

Dear Mrs. Masters, Hi! from the Sixth Grade Class

of Park School! We’re still here in New York City

at the Taft Hotel,

as you must have guessed from the picture printed

on this stationery—we inked in X’s

to show you our rooms

which are actually on the same floor as

the Terminal Tower Observation Deck

in Cleveland, Ohio

which we visited on our Fifth Grade Spring Trip,

but nowhere near so high as some skyscrapers

in New York City:

we’ve been to the top of the Empire State

and the Chrysler Buildings, which are really high!

But there’s another

reason to write besides wanting to say Hi!

We’re having a dilemma Miss Husband thought

you might help us solve

once we get back to school … Yesterday we went

to that Dinosaur Hall of the Natural

History Museum

for our Class Project—as you know, the Sixth Grade

is constructing a life-size Diplodocus

out of chicken-wire

and stuff that Miss Husband calls papier-maché,

but no instructions seem to show how the tail

balances the head

to keep our big guy upright. We need to see

how the backbone of a real Diplodocus

(it doesn’t even

need to be a live one, we could probably

figure all this out from a good skeleton)

manages to bear

so much weight—

So I’ll pause there for a second. Just to, I mean, you feel instantly like just the giddiness of writing in this voice, right? And all of his poems, no matter whose voice they were purporting to be in, it was his voice. This is who he was. He was a precarious, hyper articulate, hyper educated, childlike person who moved through the world that way with that kind of like boundless curiosity, even though, you know, by the time I knew him, he had literally, he knew everything. He had learned each thing. But he was still curious. And then I just love, I mean, you can’t tell, but of course, there’s clauses enclosed in, you know, em dashes. I mean, there’s two parenthetical clauses on this one page. He also, he was one of the only and last great practitioners of syllabics. So all of his poetry was, you know, rather than use stressed and unstressed syllables, he would count the syllables. So all the poetry is written and syllabics. And so he also had some mechanism in his head of keeping track of that as he was going along.

Helena de Groot: Huh.

Craig Morgan Teicher: You know, Marianne Moore was really the last person to really do it, like, I’m going to do it the whole time.

Helena de Groot:  That’s interesting. Do you feel like he ever did that when he was talking? That like, that mechanism was so ingrained.

Craig Morgan Teicher: I mean, he didn’t talk, you know, most people talk, like, differently, like they talk normally. They say “like,” they interject, they—he talked like this. I mean, this is a transcription of how he talked. He only had the one way. And so he must have been, you know. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY) Actually, this goes really fast, like, I’m not in the least bored. So if you just want to continue reading this poem, you know, it doesn’t feel long. It’s very entertaining.

Craig Morgan Teicher: No, it’s not boring, it’s fun.

(CONTINUES READING)

—did you know that some Dinosaurs

(like the Brontosaurus) are so huge they have

a whole other brain

at the base of their spine just to move their tail?

Another thing: each time Arthur Engelhurst

comes anywhere near

our Diplodocus, it collapses because of not balancing right.

This went on until

David Stackover

got so mad at Arthur he assaulted him

in the boys’ cloak-room and gave his left shoulder

a really good bite—

So the other thing I love about these poems is that he insistently uses these names. There’s also, we’ll meet Duncan Chu, who I love very much. And again, I remember him telling me once that they were the real names. And then I remember him telling me another time that they weren’t the real names.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Craig Morgan Teicher: So I don’t know which is true.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Craig Morgan Teicher: You know, little kids use each other’s names all the time, and their last names. These are the, you know, this is your Beyoncé, I mean, David Stackover. You know, it’s like these are the icons of your world, you know?

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHING) Yeah.

Craig Morgan Teicher:

(CONTINUES READING)

David claimed it seemed like the one thing which could

keep Arthur away … and that was the moment

you claimed the best thing

to do was to call an All-School Assembly

to explain about biting. Biting’s no good …?

(Which was why Arthur

decided not to come on this year’s Spring Trip.)

And there, you know, it’s like there’s this funny subtext, like, Arthur probably wasn’t allowed to come. You know, it’s like he’s always—the poems also always revel in what their speakers do and don’t know about what they’re saying.

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh, uh-huh.

Craig Morgan Teicher: Richard loved naivete, you know? He loved the ways that language could conceal and reveal a speaker’s knowledge and their naivete.

Helena de Groot: That’s lovely, because, yeah, of course, nothing will, like, reveal point of view than what that point of view doesn’t know, right?

Craig Morgan Teicher: Right. And so that’s why they’re always, I mean, these poems are all addressed to the principal of this school.

Helena de Groot: Right. Mrs. Masters.

Craig Morgan Teicher: Right. She’s not with the students, so they’re always explaining all this stuff to her so that they can reveal themselves and reveal what they do and don’t know.

Helena de Groot: It’s such a great conceit.

Craig Morgan Teicher: Mm-hmm. And he, he used it, I mean, all of the dramatic monologues, all of the poems about literary figures and historical figures, the way they all operate is that you’re hearing from one of them and you know who the other one is. Right? And so you then, as a reader, use your knowledge to imagine, well, what would the, what would the overhearer of this conversation have known that the person who’s speaking in the poem didn’t know.

Helena de Groot: That’s amazing.

Craig Morgan Teicher: I mean, it was this very interactive thing.

(CONTINUES READING)

But we took a Subway train from the Hotel

to the Museum

(actually our first New York excursion),

where the uproar, once we were on the platform,

was so loud one girl

—Nancy Angrush—cried (she was always chicken)

when someone told her that terrible roaring

the Express Trains made

was Tyrannosaurus Rex himself—and she

believed it!

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Craig Morgan Teicher:

(CONTINUES READING)

Well, then we got to the Great Hall

and we’re surrounded

by Dinosaurs, each species we had studied:

some were not much bigger than chickens, but some

were humongous!

One was just a skeleton wired together,

so it was easy to see how we could make

our Diplodocus

balance by putting a swivel in its neck.

And, you know, it’s like he’s just, again, like, reveling in, like, yeah, how do you make a Diplodocus balance? You know?

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Like the engineering side of it.

Craig Morgan Teicher: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s like, you can imagine him sitting there trying to think, “What’s the word? Swivel,” you know, like, it’s like, it’s so silly and wonderful.

(CONTINUES READING)

All the other dinosaurs were stuffed with lights

and motors inside,

so that when they moved, their heads balanced their tails!

There was even a Pterodactyl flying

back and forth above

our heads, probably on some kind of track …

But even though Miss Husband tried explaining

(for the hundredth time)

how the Dinosaurs had all been extinct for

millions of years, not one person in the class

believed what she said:

the idea of a million years is so stupid,

anyway—typical grown-up reasoning …

You know the Klein twins—

the biggest brains

in the whole Sixth Grade Class, a lot

bigger probably, than both brains combined in

that Brontosaurus)—

well, they had a question for Miss Husband: What

if the Dinosaurs being extinct for so long

is just a smoke-screen

for being Somewhere Else, a long ways away?

I mean, again, like, this is a, you know, this is almost a trope, right? Like, we’re, you know, we’re the dinosaurs. I mean, Brenda often or once recounted a story with our niece, who when she was little, Brenda said, “You know, the dinosaurs are extinct. They’re all dead.” And she just kept going, “They’re all dead? All of them?”

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Craig Morgan Teicher: You know, Richard just wanted to include that.

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Craig Morgan Teicher: You know, in a poem.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, it’s like, what is it? “The idea of a million years is so stupid, anyway.” (LAUGHS)

Craig Morgan Teicher: I mean, and it, you know, obviously it’s wisdom from the mouths of babes, but, but I mean, what I love about this book is that the speaking voice of the poems is fundamentally not different from the speaking voices of the adult speakers that he—

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh.

Craig Morgan Teicher: It’s him. It’s like he got to this pure essence of his imagination, which is, which is curiosity, you know? And he found this expression for it that I think was kind of finer tipped, had a finer point than he had ever found before.

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh. It’s interesting that he came to it so late, right? Like 2014, this book was published, I don’t know when he wrote it, but that’s like,

Craig Morgan Teicher: Yeah, yeah. Just before that. I mean, between 2010 or so and 2014.

Helena de Groot: Right. So it was like 70 years after this all supposedly happened, you know?

Craig Morgan Teicher: Yeah. I have to think that there was some burden of, you know, he no longer had to prove anything. He could just write. He could just— and not that I think he felt like he had to prove much, but I don’t know, maybe he just dispensed his knowledge and he could then go back to his memory, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Craig Morgan Teicher: He, he, I don’t know. I mean, the first of these poems is in the previous book. And he reprints it in here. I mean, it snuck up on him. You know, he didn’t really know this book was coming. And then suddenly these kids just erupted out of him. And he was so excited to meet them and to remember them. You know?

Helena de Groot: I’d love to hear more. It just, it keeps going amazing.

Craig Morgan Teicher: Yeah.

(CONTINUES READING)

And Lucy Wenzel made an awful pun on

stinky and extinct …

Actually, Mrs. Masters, we’ve already

figured it out, about death: the Dinosaurs

may be extinct, but

they’re not dead! It’s a different thing, you dig?

(LAUGHS) Which is an archeology pun.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Right.

Craig Morgan Teicher: It’s like you just know that he was, you know, I can just imagine him giggling when he wrote it down because he would never have, you know, used it in the kind of countercultural,

Helena de Groot: And it’s also a little anachronistic, actually.

Craig Morgan Teicher: Yeah. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Craig Morgan Teicher: But it’s like you just see that he couldn’t resist. He just couldn’t resist.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Craig Morgan Teicher: And then here comes Duncan Chu.

(CONTINUES READING)

When Duncan Chu’s lhasa jumped out the window,

or when Miss Husband’s

parents were killed together in a car-crash,

we understood that—that was being dead; gone:

no body around.

Isn’t that what dying has to mean: not being

here? The Dinosaurs are with us all the time,

anything but dead—

we keep having them. Later at the Dinersaurus,

the museum restaurant, there was

chicken-breast for lunch

stamped out in the shape of a Triceratops!

Strange, how everything has to taste like chicken:

whether it’s rabbit

or rattlesnake, it’s always “just like chicken” . . . .

Anyway, dinosaurs are alive as long

as we think they are,

not like Duncan’s dog. And that’s just the problem.

By next week, though, we’ll be back in Sandusky,

and while we’re putting

the swivel into our Diplodocus’s neck

you could explain to us about Time—

those millions of years,

and Dinosaur-chicken in the Diner, and

chicken-size Dinosaurs in the Great Hall, and

where they really are.

Helena de Groot: That’s incredible. I mean, one of the things that also struck me about so many of his poems, again, I came into them expecting that they would be mostly about art. Right? Because that’s how so many reviewers describe them. And then they are so much about death.

Craig Morgan Teicher: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: They’re so much about, like, the encroaching darkness and this question of, it’s not even like death as an—like in this poem—an end-all be-all, but death as being all around us all the time. Not in a morbid way, necessarily, but just like a fact of life.

Craig Morgan Teicher: Yeah! And he was just always curious about it. And he was also somebody who, he loved the idea of a figure. You know, like, he would say, “Oh, he was a great figure.” You know, he loved the idea of sort of abstracting a personality and lifting it out and saying he was a marker on this sort of timeline of human, of human progress or regression or whatever. And he was always translating. I mean, literally, he always had a book on a bookstand on his desk, and he would sit down and translate. He was always channeling the voices of the dead. And he was always writing in the voices of people from the 19th century. So he was always trying to animate dead people, and he didn’t—I think he was just curious, like, “They don’t seem dead to me,” you know? And he had a unique relationship with books. I mean, I think he lived in books while reading them more than most people do. And so I think he felt profoundly connected to anybody whose words he could reach, whether they were alive or dead. And if he could read them, they weren’t dead, you know? And so I think he was just constantly thinking, “What the hell, they’re not dead.” You know? And he was very vital.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Craig Morgan Teicher: You know, again, he gallivanted all over the city until his 80s. And he was, and he always had younger friends, because he was, you know, that was the other thing. He was gay, he didn’t have kids. He kept himself connected through the, you know, whatever, 50 years of his, of the non-youth part of his life, you know, by constantly being close to younger poets and younger writers. So, you know, I mean, his friends were also constantly dying, of course. And over the time that I knew him, his generation died. You know, James Merrill was one of his closest friends. He was still very actively grieving James Merrill, who died in the ’90s when I met him. You know, Mark Strand, who had been, you know, he would say his best friend for a large portion of his life. They had lost touch. Then Mark Strand came and worked at Columbia and they began to reconnect. And then Mark died. You know, Susan Sontag, they were close, and she died. And Dorothea Tanning, you know, I mean, these were all deaths that happened while I knew him.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Craig Morgan Teicher: It was a, it was a parade, you know, because they were all old.

Helena de Groot: Right. And did that make him ever talk at all about his own? No. Mm-hmm.

Craig Morgan Teicher: I think he sort of accepted it as a, yeah, I think it was sort of just part of his writer’s story in a way, you know?

Helena de Groot: I mean, I’m asking because—I don’t know where I picked this up, it must be like some kind of pop psychology insight—but this notion that when we read to the degree that he did, that it’s a way of out, trying to outrun death. It’s like we’re, I don’t know, this kind of desire for completism in a way. You know, like, “I will read everything.” And of course, we won’t. But I’m interested in that. Like, was there a certain anxiety, you think, underpinning his amassing?

Craig Morgan Teicher: When I knew him, I did not have the sense that he was explicitly, that he was aware of an explicit anxiety about dying. I mean, look, I think Richard was also somebody, you know, who if an analyst were to sit down with his body of work, would probably find, you know, that there were lots of parts of his personality that he sort of stored behind his literary life. You know, he mostly moved through the world as far as I saw him, sort of joyfully. I think there were lots of facets of his personality I didn’t see, and I think there were lots of facets of his personality that no, you know, that he didn’t, he didn’t look at. You know, so he didn’t sort of profess to me evidence of being particularly anxious about death. And he seemed to accept it, rather, you know, I mean, when each of those friends died, he was sad, you know? Not like, not anxious, you know? Not, he sort of accepted it. But, yeah, he was a, he was an amasser, you know, he was a collector. He, he collected obviously books, but he collected people. And he collected movies, and he collected, you know, cultural experiences. So, yeah, there must’ve been some desire to, you know, to keep it all. But he also just, he just, I don’t know, he just moved through the world in the same way. He just, you know, new books came, old books went out, new students came, old students went out. And he just kept moving that way. There was always the next book to translate, the next poem to write. And it always felt like it moved at a sort of relaxed pace. But it was, it was, it was unstopping. You know, he didn’t, he didn’t take a break ever. And there must have been something behind that.

Helena de Groot: And how do you think about him now? Like after he died. Like how do you carry him in your day-to-day, or as you’re working or writing?

Craig Morgan Teicher: You know, I mean, it’s like as we’re talking like this, I mean, he’s so alive to me. He’s so just right there, you know? And he’s one of the few writers I know who—or I knew—who like, reading the books really does, like, take me back to a room with him. You know, he was, he was he like that, you know? That was how he talked, like the poems. And so he put himself in his books, you know, more than I think many of us do, more completely than many of us do. But I just feel so grateful for having gotten to know him for as long as I did. And, you know, having gotten to spend that last 20 years of his life in his orbit, you know.

Helena de Groot: And you said all the way at the beginning that, you know, to be chosen by him, even for your nascent, as you describe them, poems, that yeah, it felt like a great boon, you know, it felt like, “Wow, I made it.” I know confidence is a very tricky beast to keep alive, but is there something of his belief in you that has sustained you over the years?

Craig Morgan Teicher: Oh, absolutely. Well, I mean, to be 22 and writing your first, you know, what feel like your first real poems, and then to have somebody of real consequence not only read them, but want to read them, you know, he wanted to see them. I, it made me feel like, “Oh, okay. I guess, I guess I must have something worth saying,” which indeed I may not, but I have enough of those little echoes in my head that I feel, yeah, absolutely buoyed by it. He wanted me to go out and be a poet. He felt I should. And he felt many people should. You know, it wasn’t particularly special to me. But the fact that he believed I should go out and be a poet has certainly helped me convince myself that I ought to, you know, and that it’s a worthy practice and a worthy life to live.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm. Is there something I didn’t ask you’d like me to have or that you want to say regardless?

Craig Morgan Teicher: Hm. I don’t know. You know, I just, I wonder, I think that his work is obscure. I think the posture it takes is not terribly contemporary. But I hope that people continue to discover what you did, which is that it’s really alive and available, and that there’s something really, just something really wonderful about it, and it’s worth reading. And it’s, it’s real, it’s poetry, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Craig Morgan Teicher: And he was just, he was a figure. Like, I don’t think my students or students who never kind of shared the world with him will ever understand the presence he had when I entered the literary world, you know, in 2002. He was at the apex of this, you know, kind of half century of influence. And he had really shaped, had done so much to shape the poetry world around the turn of the millennium. You know, so many of the major poets had actually had their start through him. It’s amazing, and I just hope that that is remembered. He really loved poetry more than anything in the world, and he loved the people and the kinds of people who wrote it. And he wanted to get more poetry into the world. And he wanted to keep poets, he wanted to sustain poets so they could write more poems. So he could get more books of poems and read more poems. That was his MO his whole life. I mean, he was, he was, you know, I don’t want to mischaracterize. He was a selfish person. He was very petulant. He was very cranky. He was very difficult. And he was very generous. And he was very attentive. And he was very, like, zoomed in. And I just, you know, sitting here now, I just think it was so unlikely that I should have come to know him as well as I came to know him. I’m not a scholar. I’m not like, I’m not brilliant in the ways that I think he valued. And I just feel so—but I, but I, but he valued me. It was, you know, one of the great friendships of my life. And I’m just very grateful that he chose me and that I managed to stay open hearted enough to be chosen.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: I love the way you describe that. I mean, it makes me think of kind of the essence of a gift, right? That it feels unearned in a way, but it does make you want to participate in that kind of cycle of generosity. You know, you want to keep passing it on.

Craig Morgan Teicher: Yeah. Yeah. You want to deserve it. You know?

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: Richard Howard was the author of more than 20 books of poetry and critical prose, including his 1969 collection Untitled Subjects, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, Two-Part Inventions, published in 1974, and Fellow Feelings, 1976. In his 1994 collection Like Most Revelations, he included elegies for friends who died from AIDS and cancer. His 2008 collection, Without Saying, was a finalist for the National Book Award, after which he published one more collection, in 2014, A Progressive Education. That was the one Craig read a poem from. He was also a prolific translator from the French, including Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire, for which he won a National Book Award, as well as many other writers—Camus, Sartre, Foucault, Barthes, Cioran, Breton, de Beauvoir, Deleuze, and, of course, André Gide, after whom his French bulldog was named.

Beside the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, Richard Howard received the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, the PEN Translation Medal, the Levinson Prize, and the National Order of Merit from the French government.

Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of four poetry collections, Brenda is in the Room and Other Poems, winner of the Colorado Poetry Prize, To Keep Love Blurry, The Trembling Answers, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and his latest collection, Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey. He also received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, and he is Director of Special Projects for the Bennington Writing Seminars, where he also teaches poetry and nonfiction.

Some of the other poets who died this year were Kelly Cherry, in March, Gloria Gervitz, in April, Jay Hopler, Kenward Elmslie, Rosemary Catacalos and Patrizia Cavalli, in June, James Longenbach, Noah Eli Gordon and Don Mattera in July, Dean Young, in August, Peter Schjeldahl and Gerald Stern in October, and then in November, Bernadette Mayer.

Mayer published more than 30 books of poetry and prose, won a Guggenheim, taught poetry and was taught, at writing programs all over the country. She was deeply influential avant-garde writer. But also, as my colleague Rachel James found out, broke. When Rachel traveled up to New York State to visit Bernadette Mayer at her home to talk about money, the conversation started pretty deadpan. Rachel is the first one to speak:

Rachel James: So, do you guys have plans for the future?

Bernadette Mayer: (LAUGHS) That’s a funny question. What if we said no?

Helena de Groot: You can find the whole interview through the now sadly defunct Believer podcast, The Organist. The episode is titled “Give Everybody Everything: The Financial Life of Bernadette Mayer.”

To find out more about any or all of these poets, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose. I’m Helena de Groot and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening, and see you in the New Year!

(MUSIC FADES OUT)