Reed Whittemore, Handyman to the Muse
Influential Poet Writes the Work of His Life

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 3, 2008; C01

The word man is reading. Who knows if this will be his last time?

It's a Sunday afternoon at Politics and Prose in Northwest Washington, and a goodly crowd has gathered to celebrate Reed Whittemore's "Against the Grain: The Literary Life of a Poet," which was published last fall. Whittemore is the author of 20 books and a former poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, a job since renamed, more grandly, Poet Laureate.

He is also 88 years old, with a memory that has betrayed him. Vascular dementia is the culprit, and it sometimes leaves him confused as well. Friends and family stand by to read in case he can't.

He can.

"Thank you. At least I got up," he says, drawing a welcoming laugh.

He reads a poem called "A Teacher," which is what he was for much of his life, first at Carleton College in Minnesota and then at the University of Maryland:

He hated them all one by one but wanted to show them

What was Important and Vital and by God if

They thought they'd never have use for it he was

Sorry as hell for them, that's all, with their genteel

Mercantile Main Street Babbitt

Bourgeois-barbaric faces, they were beyond

Saving, clearly, quite out of reach, and so he

G-rrr

Got up every morning and g-rrr ate his breakfast

And g-rrr lumbered off to his eight o'clock

Gladly to teach.

He really throws himself into those g-rrrs. Sitting behind him, his younger daughter swipes at a tear.

Daisy Whittemore has come prepared to read as long as necessary herself -- but from her father's memoir, not his poems. "It's really hard for me to imagine reading my dad's poetry out loud," she says later, "because I hear his voice when I read poetry.

"And I hear his 'g-rrr.' "

Garrison Keillor was a Whittemore student once, in Minneapolis more than four decades back. In a foreword the poetry-loving radio host contributed to "Against the Grain," he writes that his teacher talked of literature as "a noble undertaking but also a job of work that a man or woman does in the ordinary course of things, just as you would plant a field or weld a fence."

Keillor describes the Whittemore of 1964 as "movie-star handsome," and his craggy face does nothing to belie that judgment today. But a New England WASP of his generation would never suggest such a thing about himself, as can be seen when someone gets up to read a self-description from the memoir. It was selected by Whittemore's son Ned, who couldn't make the reading but was moved by the "brutal honesty" of this portrait of the artist at age 21:

"He was nearsighted but wore no glasses. He had a medium-grade mind and managed to mix intellectual modesty with sudden arrogance. . . . He preferred to think of himself as a genuine rebel yet couldn't help being polite."

The politeness was learned growing up in New Haven, Conn., in a not entirely happy household. At the end of meals, Daisy Whittemore says, her father was required to say "I've had a great sufficiency" before he could be excused. As a young child, he thought that meant "I have had a great fish," so it was puzzling to have to say it after roast beef dinners.

Later he was sent to boarding school, which led to the poem he's reading now:

Why was a radio sinful? Lord knows. But it was.

So I had one.

Which I kept locked in a strongbox under my bed

And brought forth, turned on, tuned and fondled at night . . .

"I think I was talking about An-dover," he interjects, dislike for the place still palpable after 70 years.

Yale suited him better. There he befriended another would-be word man, James Angleton, with whom he founded a literary magazine. The first issue of Furioso included work by E. E. Cummings, Richard Eberhart, William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound -- not bad for a publication run by undergraduates.

World War II shut Furioso down. Angleton abandoned literature for a legendary CIA career. Whittemore, who spent the war as an Army supply and transportation officer, recruited new collaborators and revived the magazine, which survived until 1953.

By that time he was teaching at Carleton. His wife-to-be, Helen, got his attention at a party by stealing his porkpie hat. Four children ensued, with the usual juggling among teaching, family, writing. Occasionally he'd head off to a literary retreat and get to focus on the writing part.

His elder daughter, Cate Whittemore, reads a poem about what happened when such a retreat had run its course:

The artist must leave these woods now.

He must put his books and files back in the car . . .

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."

His reticence makes the emotion he does display more powerful. Take, for example, his report on a trip he took with his younger son, then in his 20s, who was chronically ill and was to die at 37. Whittemore quotes from his son's journal, prints the first poem the young man wrote and restricts his own commentary to a two-word ending paragraph:

"Ah Jack."

As the afternoon wears on, Whittemore's publisher, Merrill Leffler of Dryad Press, reads a poem he particularly loves. It's called "Clamming" and features a father meditating on his life and that of his small son. As many of Leffler's appreciative listeners know, Jack Whittemore is the boy being advised to watch out for rising tides.

"Against the Grain" was a labor of love for its publisher. Leffler helped out by, among other things, unearthing troves of Whittemore's correspondence with other poets and urging its inclusion. He also argued that an autobiographical work by a poet should include lots of poetry, so the memoir functions as a Whittemore anthology as well.

The poet, meanwhile, is creating this day a modest anthology of his own.

"Sometimes it seems that all life is an ailment," Whittemore says, "so that dying is the business of getting well." This is by way of introduction to a poem taking the point of view of a hospital patient.

He reads another poem that begins, "The mind wears many hats" and ends like this:

I know a mind, soul, whose time now leads it

Shoreward to silence.

Not long ago it chattered like half a school,

And bade the desert dance.

He's forgotten which friend he was writing about, he says.

When Whittemore is ready to end his part in the proceedings, he reads the poem with which he chose to end his memoir:

the busy word man is tired

he is lying down

he is lying down with his pad

he is lying down with his pad and writing these words

but lowly

slowly

wanting to slow the flow . . .

He finishes reading and sits down to the applause a noble undertaking and a job of work has earned.