STEADY EDDIE: Some Memories of Tucson and Steve Orlen

His hands had a slight, but insistent tremor to them. Big thick fingers. That may be the first thing I noticed about Steve Orlen. In those days you were allowed to smoke in your office if you were a professor, and at my first conference I saw him lift the orange flame of a match to his Menthol Cool. It trembled, and I wondered if it wasn’t a symptom of what they call The Drink (It wasn’t). Steve had a deep, slightly gravelly voice, a big nose, some acne scars. His eyes seemed slightly unfocused. He was fond of letting you know that he didn’t belong in the academy- he was a J.D., a juvenile delinquent, a hoodlum from Holyoke, Mass. He had a faded blue tattoo of a swallow on his brawny forearm, which, in fact, didn’t look like the arm of a professor.

But above all Steve Orlen gave off an impression of calm, and of steadiness. Everything he did seemed measured and considered, almost slowed down. There was something distinctively un-self-involved about him, like he wasn’t in a great rush to get back to something else more important than you. He wasn’t full of gratuitous manic show-offy intellectual energy, but he issued considered opinions, and he asked actual questions.

This would have been about 1981. The year before, when I had arrived at the University of Arizona, Steve was on sabbatical in Boston for a year. His best friend Jon Anderson was teaching classes, and Jon would relay stories of Steve in Cambridge—how Steve was practicing a regimen of early morning writing, getting up at five, and before he was really awake, covering pages with free associated sentences.

Sometimes in class, Jon read the workshop poems Steve had written during his sabbatical—he read them from thick, folded white pages of typescript he had received in the mail, —to us they looked exotic and charged, like real poems, compared to ours. They were poems that would appear in Steve’s second collection, (one of his best— A Place at the Table.) They were Jarrellian poems, which valued a kind of fabular imagination combined with the voice of a speaker whose identity was guessable but not explicitly revealed. Norman Dubie had been, in part, one of the influences on Steve’s first book, Permission to Speak, but now a more mature, perhaps less affected mentor, Jarrell, was in the house. Now Steve was coming into his own voice. One of those poems was “Big Friend of the Stones” It starts like this:

The donkey doctor came covered with rain

and a gift, a picture of Jesus that changed

when you looked—his head seemed to wag.

My father is a good man

with a pinecone for a head—

all summer he chops firewood

when the air is hot, not cold.

I’ve watched him from the rubbish pit

where I was playing with a snail…..

But I could not save the donkey.

he day the donkey died, a strange

white peace came over our land

like the doctor’s white hand

into his breast pocket. My father said

the donkey was a friendly old man

because he carried his burden over the land

with the flies in his ears

and the dog at his legs.

…I sneezed. I pushed the dirt back

over him and thought, go to heaven

Where you belong and get yourself cured,

Old favorite of Christ. …

Jon was the famous one of the two friends. He had published In Sepia, his third book, the year before, and it was one of the most read, most widely admired books of poetry of the time. In our little poetry cosmos, Jon was a minor cult figure. The friendship between Jon and Steve was famous, too, in that world. There weren’t many examples like that, of non-macho male friendship, around; to me it seemed like one of the benefits of being a poet, to be permitted to have close male friends. And it was a real friendship. Steve had worked to get Jon offered a place on the faculty at the University of Arizona the year before.

Aesthetically, Steve and Jon were part of a larger movement of that era in American poetry, a shift away from the poetry of image and flashy morbid surrealism, towards a meditative narrative voice. (You can read about that movement in an essay by Ira Sadoff, published around that time in American Poetry Review). Jon and Steve had invented a label for their style of poetry; they called themselves Sincerists, and they seemed to mean it. They wrote poems to each other, they met for drinks after workshop, they talked about their feelings without irony. They were the post-James Wright/Robert Bly generation. And Jon, that semester, taught Wright’s book Two Citizens. in his seminar, for its passion, and its artlessness.

As I say, the friendship between Steve and Jon was pretty famous; and the reputation of it, the legend of it, had an odd and positive influence on our Tucson community –it had the effect of fostering strong, intimate male friendships. David Rivard and David Schweidel, the two Davids, wore t-shirts with the words, Not Rivard on them to distinguish between them. Steve Schwartz, William Olsen, Robert Boswell, Rolly Kent, Gibb Windahl; Michael Collier and David Wojahn; Boyer Rickel, George Shelton, Bruce Cohen—we were all members of the tribe of Steve and Jon. There were frequent big dance parties, where all the guys tried to out dance each other into the sweaty early morning hours, while their wives and girlfriends watched tolerantly from the perimeter.

As is supposed to happen in graduate school, close friendships were formed. Many of us remain friends- I remember sitting at a table with four other writers—Steve Schwartz, Boswell, Dave Schweidel—, all of us taking a pledge never to have an author photo taken with an ironically raised eyebrow. I remember getting into a shouting match with Rivard over Robert Hass’s book Praise. I remember Rivard confiding to me one night, with a tone of tragic conviction, “If we don’t publish a book by the time we’re thirty, it’s all over.”

But Steve himself was about thirty-five before publishing his first book. He had had to wait. Jon had been precociously gifted and published right out of grad school. Even then, it seemed that their friendship, from a professional perspective, could have been complicated in ways, though you could not find two less competitive guys. But they had very different styles. Steve worked hard, almost every day on his poetry. For Jon, writing a poem seemed to be more sort of a spiritual event, an alchemical process which he engaged in intermittently. At that point he had published three books—and after In Sepia, it seemed that poetry writing—the act of actually sitting down and doing it—had become an ordeal for Jon, a painful act, one that required so much introspection and effort that it was quite formidable. He didn’t attempt it that often. They were both kind, and gentle teachers. But their styles as writers, their modes of working, could not have been much more different.

In fall 1980, Steve and his painter wife Gail—a babe, whom we all fantasized about—returned to Tucson. Steve started teaching again; in class, he was serious and intent, very responsible to his duty. After workshops he always invited students to meet him for a drink at the Shanty, on 4^th Avenue (where they should have a plaque with his name on it). Cool desert evenings, the big back patio of the Shanty, the Arizona starry sky overhead, the beer and endless talk of poetry. Steve, who always seemed relaxed, interior, calm, ready for conversation.

Though Steve was kind to me, and liked my critical writing, it was clear that he didn’t see much promise in my poems. He told me once that I needed more music in them. “Music?” I thought. I didn’t know what he meant, really. The bright lights of the program, the big talents were Bill (William) Olsen—he was Jon Anderson’s unofficial protégé, and David Rivard. My close friend Rivard really was one of Steve’s pet students. And Rivard was indeed very good. He and I were best friends. I remember there was a period when he took the same poem back to conference with Steve once a week for two months—each time they had a conference, Rivard would come back gnashing his teeth and cursing because Steve still didn’t think the poem was right. The poem was called “Venice of the North” – it turned out really beautiful, in Rivard’s first book. I think, from being stubborn, he learned a lot from Steve.

After I graduated in ‘82 or ‘83, I stuck around Tucson—teaching adjunct classes, impersonating a PhD student, working in the Arizona Artists in Education program. My friendship with Steve deepened. He loved to talk poetry as much as a grad student. I would move away for awhile, then return to the high Sonoran desert. I loved it there even though I was a mess in ways.

I especially remember one year when Steve gave up writing poetry. He decided it wasn’t working for him- had had a period of deep disillusionment in his own gift and his career. So, one day he just decided to quit it. He has the capacity to make decisions about behavior like that. That next year, Steve turned towards fiction; he wrote drafts of two novels—modeled after Kundera, I think. He worked like a mule, cranking out pages. But in some way, the novels didn’t quite work.

The miracle occurred when Steve came back to writing poetry. All of a sudden, it seemed that he was a substantially bigger poet—he had a command with the long, rhythmic unfolding sentence he hadn’t owned before. And he began to write the best poems of his life. Those were the poems of This Particular Eternity, which might be his very best book.

The influence of a teacher is hard to measure; one soaks up aesthetic preferences without even realizing it. But what I learned from Steve that I especially value is things about how a grown man acts. I learned a lot from watching him t reat people decently, even when he didn’t like them. To this day, he comports himself like a low gas flame, that burns low and steady.

The other thing I learned from Steve Orlen is how to stay with your work. From Steve, I’ve learned again and again about a writer’s allegiance to work: that you just do it, that you give yourself to it as an end in itself. And that when it isn’t working, you try to figure out how to renew your relation to it. You work through the periods of deadness and aridity. You face your own deficiencies of craft and try to alter them. To sit back and start over again and again.

Over the years I’ve watched Steve perform this alchemy of reinvention again and again. “I’m going to write short poems for a few months” he will announce, straightening his glasses and taking a drink. “I’m going to write poems in which the characters are talking household objects” Or “In my new epic poem, written in iambic hexameters, a cloud named after Abraham Lincoln discusses his life in heaven.”

The life of the poet is different from poetry, isn’t it? But the steadiness itself is a kind of compensation, a kind of rail track that you keep going down, not thoughtlessly, but relentlessly, and it becomes its own end. And the friendships, they are also a big compensation. What you get to, I learned from Big Dog, is the life we might not have otherwise not found.