From the archive
The Bitter and Beautiful Voice of John Woods
John Woods spent four decades teaching and writing in Kalamazoo, Michigan, earning the admiration of major poets while remaining relatively obscure to a general audience. David James, a former student of Woods, argues for rediscovering the poet’s bitter, wry, and deeply original voice.
John Woods was a great poet and a peculiar man. His entire teaching career was spent at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan (WMU), but he never enjoyed the literary spotlight he deserved. Some might say he carried a grudge as he saw writers with less ability scale the heights of literary notoriety. In a blurb for Woods’ final book, Black Marigolds, which was released in 1994, Gerald Stern writes that Woods’ poems had “just the right amount of bitterness.” That bitterness is what sets Woods apart from others. I cannot speak for Woods’ particular reasons for staying in Michigan, but he hovered on the margins of the literary world for forty years while honing his craft.
John Warren Woods was born in Indiana in 1926. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Indiana University. He studied with Theodore Roethke, and the first poet Woods ever heard give a poetry reading was Dylan Thomas. After landing a teaching position at WMU in 1955, Woods remained there until his death in 1995. As a writer, he was well-known regionally but never made it to the national stage. His decision to stay at WMU for his entire career may have hurt his chances. It may also have been his refusal to “play nice” with the literary stars of the day, poets such as Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov, John Ashbery, and Gwendolyn Brooks. It may have been that chip on his shoulder, growing larger as his work was being overshadowed by writers more adept at navigating literary politics. One can only speculate how and why reputations are made and blossom.
However, John Woods’ reputation among his peers was clear: He was held in very high regard. On the book jacket for his 1982 work The Valley of Minor Animals, a quotation from the venerable James Wright says that Woods was “one of the best writers we have…” In fact, Howard Norman recalls that at a dinner with Hunter College students, Wright told them he had “brought John’s poems to Italy” with him to read. David Wagoner, long-time editor of Poetry Northwest, wrote on the book jacket for Black Marigolds that Woods “gives us again his shrewd, savage, tender, unpredictable and invariably original poems, a valuable asset to American poetry.” On the back cover of The Valley of Minor Animals, Wagoner also confessed, “If we hadn’t had his eyes and ears and sensibility at work in this country for the past thirty years, it would have been necessary, though impossible, to invent him.” This is glowing praise from some poetic icons. So why have avid readers of poetry and most younger poets never heard of John Woods?
This may be the nature of poetry in the United States. There are thousands of writers without fame living and publishing and dying in relative obscurity. Keith Taylor, a retired professor from the University of Michigan, someone intimately familiar with the students at one of the premier writing programs in the country, admitted to me that his M.F.A. students have never heard of James Wright, let alone read his poems. This is probably true about students in most M.F.A. programs: They have not heard of James Tate or Sharon Olds or Joy Harjo. With so many wonderfully talented writers in the world, this may be a common fate for most poets. This is a big country with thousands of small literary magazines and presses. It is easy to be anonymous, even if one does not want to be.
Like most poets of his generation—Philip Levine, Donald Hall, William Stafford, Richard Hugo, and Galway Kinnell—Woods started writing formal verse and then transitioned into writing free verse. His first book, The Deaths at Paragon, was published in 1955 and his fourteenth book, Black Marigolds, in 1994. In between, his books included Keeping Out of Trouble, Striking the Earth, The Valley of Minor Animals, and The Salt Stone: Selected Poems. That averages to approximately one book every three years, quite a healthy pace over a forty-year career.
By his fourth book, Keeping Out of Trouble, in 1968, Woods had developed the unusual wry tone and dry humor in free verse that would mature in his later poetic work. His keen attention to sound, practiced in his earlier formal writing, would stay and benefit him in later years.
The Educator
As a teacher, Woods commanded respect in the classroom. I was fortunate to have him as my professor for several creative writing classes. It was a rare honor for undergraduates to have a published and accomplished poet read their poems, mark them up, and comment on them in the writing workshop. Unfortunately, most of us did not realize the extent of Woods’ talent at the time.
Woods could also be bizarre and bluntly truthful as a teacher. Robert Bixby, a former student, recalls that Woods once “told a class he hadn’t shown up for the previous meeting because he had been stung on the penis by a bee.” Howard Norman met Woods first at a Kalamazoo bookstore and ended up taking a poetry writing course with him. Later, in a conversation, Woods told Norman, “You’d be better off writing prose.” Norman admits, “He was right, and I knew he was right and I was relieved to hear it. It set me in a different direction.” Marc Sheehan, a WMU undergraduate, remembers when Woods gave him “one of the best pieces of advice I never followed—learn to do something with your hands, something which will make money. His suggestion was auto repair—foreign, preferably.”
Woods was ironic and wry, not an overly enthusiastic or boisterous teacher. He approached writing as a solemn craft. He was not verbally demeaning to students, but he made his expectations known. For example, in one writing workshop, I remember one fellow student who submitted lengthy, obscure diatribes as poems. They were incomprehensible by all standards. Woods would have the author read his poems aloud and then wait for a response from the group. After several minutes of silence, Woods would look up and say, “Okay, next.” It may have been a bit unconventional and perhaps inappropriate by today’s standards, but the message was clear. Sheehan captures Woods’ unstated teaching philosophy best: “The single most important thing I learned [from John Woods] … is that writing a poem is damn hard work, and why would anyone want to put in that kind of work if he or she wasn’t going to try to say something important.”
The Poetry
Woods’ poems range from lyrical to romantic to social commentary. His early work is grounded in Midwestern scenery, images from his native Indiana and adopted Michigan, and stories from his youth. Poems such as “The Deaths at Paragon,” “Everything Slumps at Kriner’s Pier,” and “Three Mornings in September” capture small-town life with remarkable imagination:
The visits of my aunt in Martinsville were invasions. I see the webby arbor and the tottered shed full of kindling and games, the willow lacing the pause of afternoon, and townsmen rocking under wasp shells and locust husks.
from “The Visits of My Aunt” in Turning to Look Back
In this excerpt, Woods’ use of consonance in the final four lines is masterful: full/kindling/willow/shells as well as afternoon/townsmen/games and rocking/husks. He even uses alliteration with lacing and locusts. The crisp music of his language is present in nearly all of his poems.
Woods did not shy away from social commentary in his work. At times he could be political, addressing racial and cultural topics. In his poem, “To Leroi Jones,” known later as Amiri Baraka, Woods homes in on that eternal truth about all humanity, regardless of class or ethnicity:
Aren’t we impaled on the same continuous wick of protein? Doesn’t the same master of doubt marshall our night sweats when the landlord of the last ghetto shows his true colors?
(in Striking the Earth)
In “Woods Gets Religion,” his phrase “O Helen of the Organ” not only refers to the woman who plays the organ as an instrument but also alludes to the sexual connotation of organ, which is clear after reading the final two lines. This is characteristic of Woods’ poetry.
O Helen of the Organ, I chose the Baptist Church for your deep eyes, and your sweet tongue was the only wafer I could not wash down.
(in Striking the Earth)
He addresses the meaning and purpose of poetry in “You Can’t Eat Poetry,” which I always imagined was a subtle response to Mark Strand’s famous poem “Eating Poetry.” At one extreme, people believe poetry can heal and transform lives; at the other end, as expressed by Woods, poetry can do very little—it will “not register Black voters in Georgia”; it will not “wash oil from ducks.” Poems will not create or change America’s policies. The final seven lines of Woods’ poem focus on an uncomfortable truth:
This poem will not feel around under your dress down by the lake. It will not be generous with its time, nor forgive. It can’t be warmed up at midnight after the skating nor charm the miser out of his hole nor proclaim amnesty. It’s words, God damn it, it’s words.
(in Striking the Earth)
In one of my favorite poems by Woods, “Guns,” he describes that futuristic day after all of the guns in the world are collected and buried. Published in 1976, the poem pre-dates the Columbine high school massacre by twenty-three years:
Remember, then, in your canines, in your trigger fingers, in the blood of your temples, the belts of blue cartridges, Bofors pocking the Stuka sky, John Wayne searching for something in his chaps, sorry, it’s gone. His grandchildren will have to look it up in Webster’s. It starts with G, like God.
(in Striking the Earth)
Striking the Earth is John Woods’ seminal book. The title poem, for me, is a sacred text. Each year, if not more than once, I find myself drawn to reading this poem out loud. It is nothing short of a spiritual experience. As with many of Woods’ poems, I am not always able to say exactly what the poem means, but my body knows. I experience a physical reaction. There is a calm wisdom and certainty that rises from the tone of his writing. Here is the first stanza:
As we strike the earth with our bodies, for we are always falling, and standing up, and falling again, though you call it dancing, or walking, or flying, there is the sound of stone coming to rest in quarries, the last spray of sand, as we knock on earth’s sullen, historical face.
When I come to the end of “Striking the Earth,” I am lifted up in the same way other classic works affect me, namely, W.S. Merwin’s “For the Anniversary of My Death,” James Wright’s “This Journey,” Richard Hugo’s “The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir,” and Anne Sexton’s “The Fury of Cocks.”
Though we eat decay with both hands, the bruise is the sweetest part of the apple. Names that burned, that kissed deeply to the brain stem, that owned the Tartar plain from the high fur saddles, weather on stones, coming to rest in quarries.
He begins and ends the poem with stones “coming to rest in quarries,” an image meant to remind us of our final resting place—ashes to ashes, dust to dust. In the face of such truth, I am exhausted and redeemed.
More than thirty years after his death, John Woods’ poetry remains as crisp and relevant as ever. Of course, not every one of Woods’ poems is stellar, but he is the author of an inordinate number of exceptional poems. Whether he is writing about rural life, social or familial topics, gun control, love or mortality, Woods’ distinct voice, often with a bite or tinge of bitterness, flows beneath the words and images and within the music of the poetic line.
His approach to poetry may partly be a consequence of his decision to remain at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, far from the hallowed academic halls of the Ivy League and other prestigious universities. He kept his head down and worked at his craft in spite of a lack of national accolades. Because of his geographical isolation, his poetry is likely less influenced by trends or “schools,” which helps his work stand out and apart—a Midwesterner’s unique imaginative take on life, inspired by the roots he set down in his local community.
The Legacy or Lack of One
As to how or why one poet reaches critical stature or not, Howard Norman, in an email to me, provides a unique context that may bring some minor solace to those very good writers currently working in obscurity:
It would be entirely presumptuous and in fact stupid to speculate on the critical fate, let alone ‘popularity’ of anyone’s poetry in American literary culture. ‘Relative obscurity’ does not apply to those who love and continue to be sustained by John Woods’ poetry… All canonizing is reductionist and hardly dignifies literature. John wrote tremendously unusual and inimitable and on occasion haunting poems. With someone as original as John, superlatives can only be understatements.
Whether John Woods becomes famous or remains a literary unknown, I was fortunate to know him, to have him as a teacher and mentor, to read his work in my formative years, as were many other writers—Don Stap, Howard Norman, John Rybicki, Judith Minty, Robert Haight, Robert Bixby, Elizabeth Kerlikowske, Dennis Hinrichsen, and Marc Sheehan, to name just a few. It saddens me to realize that Woods’ poems sit dormant in his books and are unknown to so many. (In some respects, it is depressing because it forces me to imagine the likely fate of my own poetry.) However, Woods’ poetic work is compelling and as marvelous as any of the major American poets routinely found in poetry anthologies.
I hope that one future day, John Woods will be discovered or re-discovered, that his books will be read, and that his uniquely bitter and beautiful voice will again resonate in the clear air.
