I’ve noticed something strange happening to the way I relate to my work, or, rather, the way I think about the works of my studies and the figures behind them.
The first hint was when a graduate-school friend of mine, a medievalist, said, “Oh, yeah, I forgot that you study people still alive.”
The occasion for this statement arose when I mentioned a conference paper I would be giving shortly, in which I address the writings of a poet who was supposedly going to be a fellow conference-attendee. As a contemporary Americanist in poetry and poetics, I am not afforded the luxury (the wrong word, I know, but somehow still fitting. Maybe?) of studying long-dead writers far removed by oceans, countries, continents. Instead, at least at this stage of my academic career, I find myself with increasing chances of bumping into the living, bungling through small talk, exchanging emails and correspondences, doing my best to avoid making an ass of myself.
But at the same time, with the rise of university archives and their bids for the papers, correspondences, and ephemera of writers—some still living, others recently (well, within a decade or two) passed—I’ve been scaling down giants.
Let me back up.
When I first started my MA program, I remember emailing Lew Klatt with the news that I would be in seminar rooms that once housed the offices of people like Charles Olson and Robert Creeley. Don’t fret if these names don’t ring a bell: in the rather small world of poetry studies, I’m used to speaking a different language; my version of name-dropping is far less impressive than that of many others. These two poets, however, are big names in my field, so I was excited to share with Lew that I’d be breathing the now-stale air of an otherwise less-than-notable room with the same white walls and four corners as so many architectural practicalities. Lew’s response, however, stuck with me—less at the moment of its arrival but more so in the years since. To paraphrase, “That’s great, Jake. Just remember that they had deeply personal issues and struggles just like anyone else.”
Just like anyone else!? These were two of my idols! What drew me into poetry in the first place, their creative works still a force of legacy and their critical writings still being drawn on and cited today!
Flash forward a few years.
For the past four months, I’ve been acting as a research assistant in Notre Dame’s Special Collections library, getting firsthand experience of working with the writings (and by writings, I mean the daily, tedious, fascinating, mundane, insightful writings) of Ed Dorn and Robert Creeley. It’s been a whirlwind of a semester as I’ve worked through their exchanges with fellow poets, artists, protégés, students, admirers. And as much as I’ve loved it, I understand that for every glimmer of brilliance there are dozens of doldrums. I’m not painting out such writers, or any writers, for that matter, to be dull; rather, what’s been more fascinating, and all the more reassuring, is that such giants were people first and writers second.
Something I’ve struggled to reconcile with myself was the intense sense of feeling as if I were eavesdropping, an academic voyeur, critical plunderer, tabloid-addict. Because these people may never have intended to have their papers collected in a university archive—perhaps, at the end of their esteemed careers, they realized the inevitability of it—but mining fifty-plus years of correspondences for any hint of “useful,” “usable,” “valuable” content for future visitors to these archives gives me a gift of ambivalence. How to see it both ways? To realize that these lives are significant to so many? To categorizing, diagnosing, healing the ills of their time and culture, while simultaneously exposing a simple night out with dear friends, describing an intimate conversation with family, revealing their struggles in whatever shape they take?
I’m still working through all this. These feelings, at least: the archive work is complete, as of last week. But for everything unresolved, I like to think I’ve gained a better sense of viewing people—including writers/poets/movie stars/politicians/shut-ins/passersby—as people. To relish in the contributions they give and to acknowledge the realness of their lives even, especially, in the moment-by-moment. After all, who am I to stand on the shoulders of anyone, let alone giants?
And, of course, so often does all of this become opaque when the words of these giants emerge as the giants themselves: From Creeley’s “For Love,”
Let me stumble into
not the confession but
the obsession I begin with
now. For you
also (also)
some time beyond place, or
place beyond time, no
mind left to
say anything at all,
that face gone, now.
Into the company of love
it all returns.
Jacob Schepers (Calvin ’12) is the author of A Bundle of Careful Compromises (2014), a winner of the 2013 Outriders Poetry Project competition. His poetry has appeared in Verse, The Common, PANK, The Destroyer, and others. He lives in South Bend, IN, with his wife, Charis, and two sons, Liam and Oliver. He is both an MFA student and doctoral candidate in English at the University of Notre Dame.
