Sean Bentley delivered this reminiscence of his father at the UW Creative Writing Program's 50th Anniversary celebration, held at the Henry Art Gallery on May 27, 1997.

I had what I gather was an unusual childhood. All the while I was growing up, both my father Nelson and mother Beth read, wrote, and taught poetry. From birth I was steeped in poetry—I was read Milton in my crib, for example. My father insisted that my first words were, "Of Man's first disobedience..." I loved to identify the photos of the authors on the Oscar Williams anthologies, and knew Yeats and Auden by sight as some kids know sports stars. (I still can't tell one sports personality from another).

Approximately 48 weeks of the year my father taught days and nights, hosted TV and radio poetry shows (on which I often appeared thinking nothing of this media exposure), hosted student and professional readings at the library, bookstores and the university, handled correspondence courses, edited Poetry Seattle and Seattle Review, and juried poetry contests for everything from the Pacific Northwest Writers' Conference to Mother's Cookies. He couldn't say no. Well, he said no to Mother's Cookies the second time around. In what few off hours were left he wound down after class in coffee houses and pizza joints with adoring students.

Every quarter Nelson would show the film made about Theodore Roethke just prior to Roethke's death, In a Dark Time. Ten years down the road, students who hadn't known the man had only those few minutes to absorb his voice, his gestures—otherwise they were forced to rely on his highly stylized poetry, or on others' reminiscences, which admittedly were fairly colorful. This poem is about that film.

                After Screening "In a Dark Time"
                        for Nelson Bentley

        Your friend's been telescoped; how often have you
        studied the icons, his simple conducting arms,
        the stifled waltz abstract before his hearth?

        Soon we all will only know the same
        gestures, inflections, dogmatic as propaganda:
        this emblem, this inspected idol, Roethke.

    	This single token of ten years might remind you
        of the dig, Makah fragments sluiced from mud;
        their old day lost its shackle. With the joy

        of detectives, poets Linda and Greg scoured
        at Greg's own tribal past.  And now a workshop
        of poets puzzles together a shard of life

        celluloid's preserved, no less thoroughly.
        His character's the intrigue:  maddening as half
        a potlatch bowl.  We can only come to know

        the artifact, try to decipher what runes we see,
        make bright the essence of your obscured friend.

Most people might not apprehend from the film Roethke's fairly frequent journeys off the deep end. I recall at least one episode when during a party at our house, my mother brought our mantel clock down the hall to my bedroom, wrapped it thoroughly in one of my sweaters, and buried it at the bottom of my toybox. The ticking was getting to Ted.

Now, seven years after my father's death, the situation is much the same—although no film was made of Nelson (and he was happy with that, thinking that both Roethke and poet Vernon Watkins had been jinxed; Watkins survived only a short time after Under a Bright Heaven was filmed). Students can hear about him from the old fogies like me who were in his workshop, and they can read his work, which although intensely, encyclopedically autobiographical, is still only a partial picture of the man. Take for example, an early poem, "Zero Tide."

You see, for all his civic and academic activity, he still was compelled to take a brief vacation every year, between summer and fall quarters. The family usually demanded it, even if he wanted to keep on teaching. This is when he typically allowed himself to get sick. He never took a sabbatical but taught for about 140 consecutive quarters. We often went to the ocean. Even here—perhaps especially here—poetry remained foremost in his mind.

                  	Zero Tide

        I walked from our cabin into the wet dawn
        To see the white caps modulating in,
        The slow wash of the word in the beginning:
        Wind on the bowing sedge seemed from Japan.
        A cloud of sandpipers wavered above the dune,
        Where surf spoke the permanence of sun.
        Back inside, I sat on my son's bed
        Where he sweetly slept, guarded by saints and poets,
        Oceanic sunrise on his eyelids;
        I whispered "Shawn, get up!  Its a clamming tide,"
        And thought of chill sand fresh from lowering waters,
        Foam-bubbled frets across the hard-packed ridges.
        "Shawn, it's a zero tide!"  From a still second,
        He came out of the cobvers like a hummingbird.
        "Don't wake up Julian."  In the ale blue light
        He dressed in whirring silence, all intent.
        Along the empty coast the combers hummed:
        Sleepy gulls mewled in the clearing mist.
        My wife and baby slept folded in singing calm,
        Involuted by love as rose or shell.

Now, what's missing from this poem, what the reader seeking to know the real Nelson Bentley can't know from this piece, is that it was I who was doing all the actual the dirty work. While I lay in the clammy sand, up to my armpit in pursuit of a razor clam, its slippery foot-tip in my fingers, shouting for assistance with increasing irritation, my father stood fifty feet away lost in the fog of his coalescing pentameter. He sort of came to, and sauntered over looking perplexed and distracted while the wily bivalve struggled from my grasp. I did manage to catch enough clams for chowder however, and he got his poem.

Poetry was his life, at times eclipsing reality. This was of enormous benefit to his students—his virtual and ever extending family. His living championing of the art—inspirational, passionate, evangelical, even obsessional—this is what cannot be recaptured by mere anecdote or the reading of his work.

Above all he maintained a rather elfish humor, rooted in the comics of the Depression, W. C. Fields being the prime example. Nelson once said that "'The Dong with a Luminous Nose' is probably the single masterpiece of the Victorian era." He disliked, the strident, the didactic, the Republican. "One of the great unwritten laws of Northwest poetry," he said, "is not to take yourself too pompously." He also typified the Northwest school as "seething with slugs" and possessing a sense of "humorous gloom." "Avoid self-pity like the plague," he would say. "Punctuation is an emotional thing." "Someday nothing will be left but poems."

There was always a visiting poet at the English Department, and with the death of Roethke, my father inherited the role of host to them. On one memorable occasion, my father had to pick up Allan Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and another Beat poet at the bus station to go to a reading. My sister Julian and I came along for some reason, plus we picked up our babysitter en route. We were all crammed into Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy, a 1955 Chevy. The babysitter got to sit on Ferlinghetti's lap.

When I was fifteen, in 1969, I asked one day, out of sheer curiosity, if I could visit one of his night poetry workshops. I didn't leave it for ten years. I, like he, virtually never missed a night in all that time, including attending the Castalia readings that eventually ran three times a week. I took the poetry class for the maximum possible eight quarters. Once you had taken it for credit—even for a single quarter—you were granted a lifetime pass, and hordes of poets, myself among them, used their pass freely.

By the time I was 18, my self-consciousness, my sense of nepotism, not to say paranoia, had fully kicked in and I assumed a series of anagrammatic pen-names, such as Betsy Nealen and Nasty Neeble, finally settling on Lenny E. Beast. At least half of the students in any given class had little or no idea who I was. The ironic thing was, that the criticism or lack thereof that I got from my father was, as far as I could tell, exactly the same as his other students got. He was not a harsh critic. Exacting, yes, but always positive and encouraging.

He emphasized "The Joy of Revising." Even in the most flabby, trite, dull poem he would point out the best line, the most striking image, a fine detail, a felicitous word. The worst writer in the class was treated as nurturingly as the best. And his philosophy was that nearly anyone could be—ought to be, even—a poet, as long as they were devoted to it, that they read poetry, carried it with them at all times, and practiced reading as well as writing it. He would take on students sometimes not because of their portfolio, if they even had one, but because their names sounded promisingly poetic. Argentina Daley. Jennyjoy LaBelle. Dymphna Flavin. Melville Flournoy. Or for the size of their nose, whose names I won't mention.

In any class of large size, there is a panoply of eccentric and colorful characters, but in an ongoing class, that contains literally thousands of students, the spectacle is staggering. Nelson's poetry workshop—not to mention the myriad correspondence and survey courses he taught—had, over a third of a century, an epic--nay, apocalyptic—cast of characters on the order of a particularly fevered Cecil B. DeMille production. Most players had walk-ons of a single quarter, but others held major supporting roles. Some lingered on the periphery, reappearing a bit more grizzled every few years like the characters in "Gasoline Alley," and eventually bringing with them their babies, their teenagers. And many have gone on to teach their own classes in colleges and high schools around the country. Thousands of his students publish widely in magazines, bringing out book upon book of poetry—or even in at least one case, hard-boiled detective fiction.

They remember Nelson, dedicate their books to him. He stays with them, almost supernaturally. His influence continues to be felt in the school of Northwest poetry and reaches into other regions of the States as his students peregrinate far and wide spreading his spirit, his not entirely whimsical, apocalyptic words:

Home