A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers' Workshop

He Made It Possible

able to find such a book other than those that contained merely the standard sorts of things: the sonnet, the villanelle, the haiku and tanka, the sestina - mainly the medieval Italian and Provenc;;al forms plus a few others. What else was there? Perhaps there weren't enough forms to fill a short book. Then, one day while I was browsing through the bargain bin of Iowa Book and Supply on Clinton Street, I ran across a book of poems by Rolfe Humphries titled Green Armor on Green Ground. Humphries had laid out "the twenty-four official meters" of the Welsh bards, and he had written a poem in each of these complicated syllabic forms. I bought the volume, of course - I think I paid a quarter for it, or maybe a dollar - and I took it home. After I'd looked it over a while I got to wondering whether, with such forms as these, I might not be able to gather enough material for a book, particularly if I filled it out with examples of poems written in the forms and with schematic diagrams of the forms, which I had never seen in any other book. I discovered, incredibly , that no one in the history of English literature had ever put together a compendium of all the traditional forms, and I asked Don Justice whether he thought such a volume would be useful. He encouraged me, and I began working on the project. That period of time when I began putting together what would eventually become, first, The Book cfForms:A Handbook cfPoetics, and much later The New Book cfForms, was not auspicious for such projects. The so-called Beat Generation was in the process of consolidating its antiintellectual stranglehold on a generation, and the self-righteous, self-indulgent decade of the 1960s loomed ahead. Christopher Wiseman, a workshop poet from England, one day submitted to the worksheets a parody of the work of the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Mezey, however, did not see the humor in it, only the threat, and he reacted by writing, and the next week submitting to the workshop, his response, "A Coffee-House Lecture." Interesting things were happening off campus as well as on. The Paper Place, one of the first paperback bookstores in the country and certainly the first in Iowa, was being tacked together by graduate students. Upstairs the Renaissance II Coffee House was LEWIS TURCO 67 also taking form, and it was over coffee that Steve Tudor and his friends were starting the antiestablishment student newspaper, the Iowa Difender, which was to stand against the philistinism of the Daily Iowan. Across the street Kenney's Fine Beers was another hangout for the writers; in all three places we got together for talk and socializing, but at Kenney's, things were generally more boisterous. One evening, after a group of us had left Kenney's, we walked across the street to see in the window of the bookshop a display of the manuscript drafts of Walter Tevis's novel The Hustler and the contract that Tevis had signed, for which he had received a $10,000 advance. One of us asked him, "What the hell are you doing at Iowa?" "Learning how to write," he replied. It was at the Renaissance II that the first student readings ever organized at Iowa took place. John Gilgun was the entrepreneur. Vern Rutsala and I and one or two others had the honor of inaugurating the series. Others who read that year were, as I recall, Kim Merker, Peter Everwine, Jim Crenner, Morton Marcus, and Bob Mezey, who read his reply to Wiseman. He later included the piece in his first book, The Lovemaker, which won the Lamont Award of the Academy of American Poets in 1960 - Paul was one of the three judges. That same year two other books would come out of the workshop, Don Justice's The Summer Anniversaries, which had won the Lamont Award for the previous year, and my own First Poems, which was published as a selection of the Book Club for Poetry during the summer. I met Jerry Bumpus at Kenney's early in the autumn. Whether it was on that occasion or another soon after, for some reason we got into a discussion about words that described places where particular kinds of creatures were kept. I said that a herpetarium held snakes, an aquarium held fish, and an aviary was for the birds. Jerry nodded...