Rosmarie Waldrop: 'Other Influences'
Influences? Every book I’ve read. Other influences? Yes. For instance, music, printing, and less tangible silences.
In fall 1954 I started commuting (a half-hour train ride) to the University of Würzburg. I voraciously gobbled as many lectures in literature, art history, and musicology as I could fit into the week — and promptly got indigestion. What clinched it: over Christmas vacation I checked out both “The Faerie Queene” and “Paradise Lost.” It would have been a steep project even if my English had been perfect.
Of course it was a fiasco. I despaired of being cut out for study. I stopped going to classes, which went unnoticed (the German system of the time left students on their own until the fourth-year exams, except for a number of seminar certificates), and I practiced the piano all day, which did not.
Herr Jaeger, on the floor beneath us, complained. He had already offered to buy felt slippers for the whole family if we promised to wear them the moment we entered the apartment. Mother, no matter how dissatisfied with her children, rose like the proverbial lioness the moment she perceived an “attack” from the outside. She on the spot invented a future musical career for me. My practicing was professional necessity. Herr Jaeger sued. A team of experts arrived with a “noise meter” and measured the decibels I produced. I got an injunction not to play during siesta, 12:00-2:00 p.m., or after 10:00 p.m. — which I had never done anyway.
My mother’s fiction of a musical career made my parents tolerate my drop-out. I did not share their illusions about my musical talent, but Bach, especially the preludes and fugues of “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” were the only thing I could hold on to.
I am sure that my sense of form was essentially shaped by the months of working at Bach’s strict forms. Not that I turned to “strict” literary forms when writing poems, but the structure of the fugue where each element follows with necessity from the one before — and at the same time gives pleasure by its beautiful sound — is still “the measure” for me. A necessity that for me includes not-so-obvious elements: jumps, disjointed fragments, seeming non sequiturs.
When Keith Waldrop and I started Burning Deck Magazine in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1962, we could not afford having the journal printed by professionals. We could afford buying a small Chandler & Price Printing Press because it was the moment when most printshops switched to offset and dumped their letterpress equipment.
We learned to set lead type by hand, letter by letter. A process so slow it seemed the invention of close reading. It also made me extremely aware of the physical aspects of words. And of any excess “fat” in a poem.
This lesson in leanness was taken into another dimension when I heard Robert Creeley read his poems. It was a revelation: he so clearly “read” the silence at the end of each line without, however, letting the tension of the grammatical arc drop. This brought home to me that a poem is embedded in a matrix of silence. So that even if the words celebrate what is, each line acknowledges what is not.
For me, this silence connects to a different silence. Of the voices I should have heard as I grew up in Germany and could not: the voices of the murdered Jews and other dead of the Nazi regime and World War II. And of the gap between what I had experienced (I was 10 in 1945) and what had happened around me. And haunts me to this day.
Rosmarie Waldrop is a poet, novelist, translator, essayist, and publisher. This essay is excerpted from the volume “Other Influences,” edited by Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone.
