http://www.crosscut.com/mossback/4159/Theodore+Roethke+lives+through+David+Wagoner/

Roethke is a fine German nature poet in American,
Report a violationPosted by: mikerolm on Jun 17, 2007 3:44 PM

and he certainly fits the No' West. However, he only spent the last years of a fairly short life in these parts. His appropriation by the locals is yet another instance - August Wilson is a more recent example - of their dressing themselves with laurels developed elsewhere, since they allow so few of their own to flourish.

Nowhere does Mr. Berger - while citing prizes, posts held, accolades showered, influences exerted - even attempt to define even a single quality of Roethke's, or manifest a kind of personal response to his work. I am afraid I find this to be typical not just of Mr. Berger's work in such matters in these parts.

Mr. Berger's Mossback columns in The Weekly were one of the few things I at least looked forward to, that one could at least disagree with, whereas as an editor he certainly did not develop or allow any interesting writers to flourish. With few exceptions, Roger Downey being the most significant, The Weekly must have had a collection of some of the most godawful writers going anywhere. Who do I miss, well Claire Dederer is now at the NY Times. Suspicion is in order when an editor chiefly features himself, as is the case once again in Crosscut [Neither cross nor cuts nor much of a section says this once lumberman who however took down his last tree with a double bit about 20 years ago.]

I recently re-read quite a bit of Roethke, on-line, on the occasion of The Stranger's Brendan Kiley's take on Roethke,

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=166026

where Kiley's quoting did not seem [to me, obviously] to do Roethke the best of service. Thus there are different kind of Roethke's to respond to.

http://gawow.com/roethke/poems/

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/

maps/poets/m_r/roethke/roethke.htm

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/13

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roethke

sincerely

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