“Many critics consider William Trout (1927–1977) the best poet of his crowded generation. His work followed a template common to his peers, beginning with commitment to formal ironies, departing into an asym metric ‘Blue Rider’ period, and before his death reaching a new synthesis of narrative reminiscence with elements of fantasy. His books begin with Memory’s Jargon (1956), and include The Woodchuck and St. Ignatius (1959), Apples of Nightmare (1963), Mammal Dignity (1970), Another Elegy (1972), and Catching Bullheads in Rajasthan 1977). The posthumous Collected Poems (1981) contains new and previously unprinted work.
“Born in Pocatello, Idaho, Trout grew up in the Depression, one of four brothers. His mother cooked for an Italian restaurant. (She was of Calabrian ancestry; see Trout’s early ‘Sabato’s Taverna Tercets.’) His father was a brakeman for the Union Pacific, active in the Railway Engi neers’ Brotherhood. (Trout’s grandfather, a lumberman in Oregon, had belonged to the Industrial Workers of the World; see ‘Joe Hill to Utah.’) On a scholarship, Trout attended the University of Oregon in Eugene, where he edited the literary magazine and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. On graduation he entered a seminary to train for the priesthood, but after eighteen months quit to undertake an MFA at the University of Iowa. Other students included Philip Levine, W. D. Snodgrass, Jane Cooper, Robert Bly, and Donald Justice; among his teachers were Paul Engle, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman. For an account of these early years, see Trout’s lecture ‘Capes and Cages,’ reprinted in Last Lost Words, University of Michigan Press, 1981.
“Trout led a troubled life, more like the generation of his teachers than his own generation. After initial success—his Yale Younger Poets book, Memory’s Jargon, was the Lamont Poetry Selection—he continued to publish, first with Macmillan and later with Knopf, but with interstices caused by alcoholism, drugs, and instability. In a healthy and vigorous period he worked for civil rights; later he spent months in two hospitals for the mentally ill. He received two Guggenheims. In 1969 he settled in Bolinas, teaching at the University of San Francisco. During his third marriage, to the Bengali dancer Reba Hejmadi, he wrote the poems critics find his best, especially during the final year of his life when the couple traveled extensively in Europe and India. Catching Bullheads in Rajasthan won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. In the years since his death, editors have collected three volumes of essays about Trout’s work; a biography is in preparation.”
Geoffrey Hill quotes Coleridge, from The Notebooks, in a note to “Poetry as ‘Menace’ and ‘Atonement’” in The Lords of Limit (London, 1984), 161.
Baseball
Gerald Burns suggested a poem called “Baseball”; David Shapiro, read ing “Baseball,” asked for “Extra Innings.”
Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), the great Dada collagist, founded his own artistic movement called Merz, the name taken from a fragment of an advertisement for Commerz. In addition to his collages, he built his own living places into sculptural assemblages, each called Merzbau. He escaped Germany for Norway in 1937 and emigrated to England in 1940.
The Museum of Clear Ideas
Horace Horsecollar, a minor character in Walt Disney comics, in these verses counts both Fidelia and Julia as three-syllable words. Lacking Latin, he follows his master visually—the number and shape of stanzas in Horace’s first book of odes—except that Horace’s fifth ode uses four stanzas; Horsecollar’s “Who’s this fellow” adds another.
Occasionally, after a printer’s device, there is a rejoinder beginning “Or say.” These verses lack an Horatian provenance.