A Roethke recommendation

Here is a fascinating and thought-provoking piece by Edward Byrne on alternative readings of Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz" and, by extension, on reading poems from the past from one's own perspective and from the perspectives of the age when they were written.

Here's the poem, copied from Byrne's post:

MY PAPA’S WALTZ

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

John Daniel

Keith Woodruff drew my attention to John Daniel's website. John was my first poetry teacher. Here's what I wrote as a comment on Keith's blog:

Thanks for the link to John's web site. It inspired me to drop him a note. I have fond memories of my two workshops with him: reading Bishop and Roethke (among others), looking at Dylan's "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" as an example of a good song lyric, having my apprentice poems ripped to pieces — in anticipation of their further shredding in Denise Levertov's workshops, until one day she said that a poem of mine needed no workshopping, because it was done. That poem, "The Burning," is the only poem from that period that I still submit anywhere or consider part of a possible manuscript.