By David Romtvedt
The author of the poetry collection Still on Earth describes the winding path that eventually brought him to LSU Press.
Photo by Aaron Burden
Still on Earth addresses experience from three points of view, that of the person, the angel, and the poet. These characters are partly me and partly invention. I am a poet only in the moment of writing a poem. Otherwise, I’m a person, a child of working-class parents in a house with few books. As has been the case for so many writers, books became for me a refuge and an escape. You can see what I was escaping from in the poem “Thunderstorm”:
Thunderstorm
The dark clouds hide the sun,
a flash of lightning and crack of thunder.
My father worries I’ll be a candy-ass—
I’m already ten, time to toughen up.
It’s the mother of all thunderstorms—
the windows rattling, doors banging.
He drags me to the tallest tree in the yard,
tells me not to move. I do, I’ll be sorry.
The rain is pounding down, water running a river,
the jumpy feeling from electricity in the air.
I tell him I’m scared. “You wanta see scared?
I’ll show you scared.” Throws me into the storm.
Another crack, lightning slicing
toward the house, blinding wall of light.
I stand there, not moving, clothes heavy,
hair soaked, toughening up.
That’s the person and the poet. As to the angel, well, I’m the angel only insofar as both of us were somehow posted to earth, where it turns out we share the same problems and ask the same questions about time and mortality.
I’d like to pivot away from Still on Earth now to speak about my trajectory as a poet. My first book was published in 1984 by the Bieler Press, an independent publisher of fine-book limited editions. This was nine years after I’d received an MFA degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I’d sent the manuscript of that first book out many times and received mostly form rejections. Then one day I got a call from the Bieler owner-editor-publisher-designer-printer, who said he loved the book and wanted to publish it. He would produce both a limited edition and a trade paperback. I was ecstatic and told him that I would be very pleased to have Bieler do my book.
But some time earlier I’d also sent the manuscript to Alfred A. Knopf. The day after I verbally agreed to have Bieler publish the book, I received a note from a Knopf editor telling me that she very much liked my manuscript and while they were not prepared to take the collection on, she’d like to hold it a bit longer as they were leaning toward doing it. No guarantees.
The Bieler editor was calling almost daily to talk about manuscript preparation, book design and illustrations, typesetting, pub date—all the steps in making a book. I was distant, vague, thinking, What if Knopf wants my book? I hadn’t signed a contract with Bieler. I was stalling.
One afternoon, the Bieler editor asked, “What’s going on?” I reluctantly admitted that I was waiting to hear from Knopf. The ensuing conversation was difficult and short. Not long after this, Bieler called again to tell me that I could take myself and my manuscript and both of us could jump in Puget Sound and drown. It was a practical suggestion as I lived in Port Townsend, Washington, only blocks from the beach.
In not speaking immediately and openly with Bieler, I was under the sway of my self-centered dream of success, my delusion of becoming an important poet. In the American literary scene, a first book with Knopf might have been noticed in ways a first book from Bieler would not. I called Bieler and apologized. “If you’re still willing to do my book,” I said, “I would be honored.”
“Yes, okay,” he said. “I’m still willing to do your book. I like it.”
I wrote a note to the Knopf editor, thanking her and removing the manuscript from consideration.
Since 1984, I’ve published nineteen books from thirteen publishers. These books have included poetry, fiction, essays, translations, and anthologies for which I’ve been the editor. I have for most of these books struggled to find publishers. Two appeared as the result of winning publication prizes, one of which was the National Poetry Series, to which I submitted a manuscript seven years in a row before being selected. In three cases, editors who enthusiastically published my work then moved on to other houses or left publishing. The editors who replaced them were not interested in seeing further work from me.
In one case, I worked with an editor for three years on a poetry manuscript. The editor’s comments on the many drafts I produced were extensive and insightful. By the middle of the second year of our work together, as I continued revising and rewriting, it was clear that the editor would take the book for publication. And then I got a call telling me the press was rejecting the manuscript.
No matter the struggle and the number of rejections, I had always found a home for my books in the end. But this felt different. No one had rejected a book after suggesting so strongly that it would be accepted. Was this payback for my self-centered behavior so many years earlier with Bieler? Whatever the cause, it served to increase my anxiety about my work, which led me to further second-guess what editors would like. Working from self-doubt, I spent too much time worrying about how my poems would be received. I revised poems thinking about what magazine editors or book publishers might like. And now I had no idea what to do with the suddenly rejected manuscript. To whom could I even submit it?
Poetry book publication is increasingly driven by prizes. But winning a prize does not guarantee a relationship with a publisher. Most of the time it’s the opposite—if you win a book publication prize, you can’t win it the following year. Every year there has to be a new winner. Last year’s winner must find a new contest to enter.
Thanks to the recommendation of a writer whose books were published by LSU Press, I was able to submit a group of poems to the Press for consideration. After reading these poems, LSU invited me to submit a manuscript. I sent the poetry collection I’d spent three years working on with the editor at another press, and LSU Press published it in 2017 as Dilemmas of the Angels.
When Dilemmas appeared, a novelist friend whose work I admire wrote to say how much she liked the book. Indeed, in her view the poems marked a culmination in my work. It was unclear to her what more I might do as a poet. Was I finished? I wondered. And to keep writing, I gave myself, as poets often do, an assignment. I’d always loved the Tao Te Ching, the ancient Chinese text on the just governance of both the state and the self.
In high school, I’d read the book in translation—The Book of the Way. Now I began writing a Tao for our time and place. This Tao would be part homage, part parody, part reinvention of the original. I started from the beginning and worked poem by poem, making not a translation but a version or inversion of the original poem. When I finished each reworked poem, I’d put it aside. Later—two weeks, a month maybe—I’d take it out and write a poem inspired by that first effort. I never looked back to the original Chinese poem. I did this between five and ten times for each poem in the Tao. I was playing the old party game Telephone as Solitaire.
I didn’t think I was writing a book. I was just writing, keeping on when I didn’t know what I might do next. In the end, I started to read my exercises as poems and the collection as one with a meaningful arc. I have striven to write books of poetry that are like novels in that they have a clear motion from beginning to end. The poems might be seen as chapters. So my struggle has often been how to make a poem that can stand alone while also being one in a series that makes for a coherent progression.
In the end, I decided that my takeoff, which I called No Way: An American Tao Te Ching, was a book and so offered it to LSU. It was published in 2021. Ironically, No Way was one of three finalists for the High Plains Book Award, a competition to which many of my previous books had been submitted and gone unnoticed. Now, when I wasn’t trying so hard, the book somehow was better—at least in the eyes of the High Plains readers.
This is the key to my story for this blogpost. Because of the support LSU Press has shown me, I began to feel a level of freedom I’d not experienced before. Perhaps I could write what I liked with less worry about what others would think. Do I believe in the work? Am I doing what I can and should be doing? Am I telling the truth of experience both real and imagined?
The support of LSU Press has lifted a huge weight from me. I write with more ease while continuing to examine that writing with the most critical eye I’m capable of bringing to bear. I’m happy knowing someone is willing to look at what I do, that someone is there helping me to become a more fully formed poet.
I’ll end with a poem from Still on Earth that deals with the issue of how we judge the worth of a work of art. But whatever the speaker in the poem says, do not be fooled into thinking that it is to discount the editor. The poem’s speaker is, as I am now, very aware of our many debts. Still, in the end, it’s the writer who must decide what to put on the page, the writer who must decide for whom a given poem is intended.
Loving Poetry
My wife loves this poem,
loves it so much she’s hugging me.
I told this to the editor who rejected it.
“That’s just it,” he said. “Your wife
loves this poem because she loves you,
not because the poem’s any good.”
I felt bad but thought,
it’s true, my wife loves me
and better her than the editor.
Still, I worked over the poem,
trying to fix it. Finished,
I showed it to my wife.
“What about the ending?” I asked.
“Is the ending okay?” “Okay?”
she said. “It’s great. I love it.”
David Romtvedt’s recent books of poetry include No Way: An American “Tao Te Ching,” a finalist for the High Plains Book Award, and Dilemmas of the Angels. A winner of the National Poetry Series, Romtvedt has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wyoming Arts Council. For seven years, he served as Wyoming’s poet laureate.
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With Still on Earth, David Romtvedt addresses the sometimes disconcerting, sometimes thrilling, and, if we accept the writer’s premise, always wacky crossings experienced by figures identified as the person, the poet, and the angel. All three intersect and collide with the society and culture within which they exist, prompting speculation that uncertainty could be preferable to knowing. Romtvedt’s delightfully plainspoken and immediate poems probe the mysterious purpose of our stay on earth with humor, candor, and grace.
A poem, the father in the book argues, is worth next to nothing. And while the son disagrees, having experienced transformation through language, he also recognizes that the poem cannot buy the groceries and pay the rent. Or perhaps it can and it’s just tricky. After having devoted years to writing, the poet remains uncertain and speculates that uncertainty is not so bad and is preferable to knowing.
Between the person and the poet, Still on Earth presents the angel who seems to have the same father that the person and the poet had. The two fathers are too close for comfort. For the angel, we must imagine a being with no experience of the physical suddenly confronted with the demands of the body, a being both naïve and worldly—otherworldly. The angel has been here before. In Romtvedt’s reckoning, we all have. It’s just hard to remember.