Over the Rooftops of Time: Jewish Stories, Essays, Poems

A Journal for John Holmes

A Journal for John Holmes John Holmes, beloved teacher-poet at Tufts University, always had his poetry writing students keep journals. In the spirit of that tradition, and as a way to honor this generous teacher, to acknowledge writing as a process always in the state of becoming, I continue his teaching this way, as a journal. AUGUST 12, 1996: The word was that if your poem was good it was a one-grunt poem. And if it was very good, it was a twogrunt poem. And if superb, it rated three grunts from John Holmes. The truth was, as articulate as he was through his writing, as alive in his words, so he was reticent in person. In those days, I was almost pathologically shy. The biweekly meetings under the eaves in Packard Hall to review the two-weeks’ worth of journals and not quite born poems were often studies in silence. Yet they meant more to me than all the anatomy labs I was taking: more than histology, which I loved: infinitely more than organic chemistry, which I was taking with Paul Doleman who had taught my father before me (my father being far more successful than I, good enough in fact to go into biochemistry 6 9 for a lifetime). I was not alone in this. I knew of others who grew and strengthened under John Holmes’s inarticulate tutelage. John Ciardi was one such person—student of Holmes, translator of Dante, poet and essayist, for years columnist for the Saturday Review, “Manner of Speaking.” Once, Holmes told me, he had gone to visit John Ciardi’s mother. John Ciardi stepped out of the room for a moment and Mrs. Ciardi— who had been a fierce mother, slinging burning cooking pots across the room in anger, John having been an early breadwinner, stealing apples and other sundries for the family’s repasts—used the opportunity to inquire of John Holmes a question that had surely been on her mind for years. “My son,” she asked, “is he good?” John Holmes wasn’t sure what she meant. Was she asking if her son had become a good man, a true man? Or was it that she wondered if he was held in high repute because of his poetry, his writing? Was that it? John Holmes never did quite figure out what was behind the carefully sent question. But after a long moment, the kind of silence he was capable of, the silence that one could settle down to and take comfort from, John Holmes looked at Ciardi’s mother, looked carefully into her eyes and said reassuringly: “Your son, your son John Ciardi is good.” That was all she needed. SEPTEMBER 4, 1996: Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin, George Starbuck and John Holmes met in a workshop in the late 1950s. Anne Sexton had taken a class with John Holmes in 1958. In describing a poem she had written for Holmes, Anne Sexton talks about what she has left out: “I didn’t say that you have taught me everything I do know about poetry, and taught me with a firm patience and a kind smile. And I didn ’t say that poetry has saved my life; has given me a life and if I had not wandered in off the street and found you and your class, that I would indeed be lost.” This acknowledgment comes in the face of Anne Sexton ’s awareness of John Holmes’s disapproval of her public exposure of herself and family. Later, she implores him: “Please, John, stop making me feel like a toad . . . Oh my, this toad suit is very uncomfortable.”4 SEPTEMBER 9, 1996: In a wonderful anthology of love poems, A Little Treasury of Love Poems: From Chaucer to Dylan Thomas, which John Holmes edited and introduced, Holmes begins: “The shortest and most important love-letter ever written said: ‘Tonight, same place, same time.’ Was the language of that miniature classic Latin, or Babylonian, or 7 0 OVER THE ROOFTOPS OF TIME was it pencilled and pushed into a Brooklyn mailbox? A girl in Nebraska knew where to find it, and a lady in Elizabeth’s court; both, in some secret place.” A poem Holmes had written, “Take Home This Heart,” included in this collection begins this way: “Take home this travelled heart. It has been lost./ It has been wandering in the world alone . . .” The...