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Reed Whittemore, Handyman to the Muse
Reed Whittemore, at 88 sometimes slowed by vascular dementia, ably reads from his poetry at Politics and Prose.
(By Nikki Kahn -- The Washington Post)
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And cash a check and fill up with gas and set out
For the world again, the world, to talk up art.
The world likes that.
It likes to get news of the spirit fresh from the woods,
What birds are saying and frogs. It sits in its cities,
Thirsty. The artist will fix that.
He will bring in a carload of essences quick on the thruway,
Mists for eveyone's parlor, sunsets done up nice.
Cities want their essences done up nice.
"Wit and humor," Keillor argues, is what makes Whittemore "permanently readable and relevant." His work "walks that no-man's land between lyrical and comic poetry where so few poets dare to go." It's a point echoed by other admirers, though some note that poetry with a comic edge tends not to get the respect it deserves.
The Whittemores moved to Washington for a year in 1964, when the Library of Congress named Reed poetry consultant, and they returned here for good a couple of years later. Whittemore got his teaching job in College Park, spent four years as literary editor of the New Republic, did a stint as Maryland's poet laureate. And he kept writing, adding "biographer" to his job description with "William Carlos Williams: Poet From Jersey."
Readers of "Against the Grain" will learn a good deal about the word man's views on biography and other aspects of his profession. They'll get less about his personal life. Unlike the tell-all memoirists in vogue of late, Whittemore is so reluctant to overuse the word "I" that he refers to himself throughout in the third person, as "R."
