McCUE: Bill, who were you most excited about having? Who were the ones that really stick out for you?
MATCHETT: Oh! Well, if you mean as readers? McCUE: Yes. MATCHETT: Or as problems? Or as..
(LAUGHING) McCUE: Ah! Let's get to the "problems" after the "readers."
REED: First, yeah first, what's the... MATCHETT: Well, we asked John Crowe Ransom
to give the first one because we knew he was elderly and it had better be soon.
Uh, If.. And he came and he gave a lovely reading, but, you may remember that 1963 was a very bad year for American poets.
Not only Ted died--Ted was the youngest of those who died--that same year Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, all died in '63.
Alright. John Crowe Ransom gave a lovely reading,
but, in the middle of it, he apparently forgot who it was for,
and he paid a SUPERB tribute to Wallace Stevens.
(LAUGHING) McCUE: Ohhhh,.,,
Uh, I think all these are on tape! I think all those were read.
But, anyway, that was, so, I mean..
We did not say "Hey, this is the Roethke Reading!" you know. He gave this high tribute to Wallace Stevens.
Um..
No, Jean, I said, Jean was a great help the year that we had Berryman here.
I picked Berryman up at the airport, and
he said, "We've gotta go get some whiskey!"
And, I said... I think I did a quick job of thinking because I knew that three of our graduate students,
Paul Hunter (you may well know Paul) McCUE: Yeah! Sure. MATCHETT: and Tom Parson and John Sherman were putting out a magazine then called Consumption.
And I knew that that Wednesday
they were at Paul's house, collating the magazine, and you know, getting it ready to distribute. (It was a new issue.)
So, I said to Berryman, "Wouldn't you like to meet some of the student poets?"
I knew that they'd be having beer, and I hoped that that would keep him away from the whiskey.
And, indeed, it did.
So, I took -- he said "Yes" -- so I took him (we didn't pick up whiskey) and I took him to Paul's house
where they were doing this and he and Paul sat in the kitchen and talked.
Well, if you know Paul, Paul can talk anybody under the table.
Uh, he's absolutely charming. And he goes on.
Well, it was a great success. It was a great success.
And I got Berryman to his hotel that night after that without the whiskey.
The next day, I was going to have to teach all day, so Jean Cox volunteered to
take Berryman around and show him Seattle.
The Roethke Reader at that time--I don't know if this is still true--always met with the advanced writing group, too,
whoever was teaching it,
and usually on the Thursday, or sometimes on the Friday after the reading. But, that was a great success.
Anyway, Jean said she would take Berryman around. Well...
she called me, mid-afternoon, just as I got out of my last class and said,
"You've GOT to come! You've... I've...He's DETERMINED to get some whiskey, and I'm trying to keep him from it!"
She says, "I can't handle it anymore!" So, so I had to go pick him up.
And that night Dave [Wagoner] introduced him, and Dave knew none of this background.
Dave introduced him, and Dave has reported that just as
he was about to get up to introduce Berryman, Berryman said, "I think I'll dedicate this reading to Paul Hunter."
And Dave, who knew nothing about this [said] "But It's the ROETHKE Reading!"
And Berryman said, "Oh, yes."
So (LAUGHS) So it didn't happen, but he had been so charmed with Paul the night before that he was going to dedicate the reading to him.
The other, uh...
I mean, we had difficulty with the drinking of several of our readers, but that was the worst. That was the worst.
McCUE: How was Robert Lowell? REED: Huh! That's what I was thinking.
MATCHETT: What? BOTH: How was Robert Lowell?
MATCHETT: Uhh..
I found him very remote.
But, but I think Caroline [Lady Caroline Blackwood] handled him very well then.
She, she, she was always on the edge of these, too.
I didn't like his reading, but that may be me, and you can listen to the tape and decide yourself.
Curiously, I think the best reader "as reader" --I'm not saying the best poet, at all--
but the best reader "as reader" of all of these was MacLeish.
That was a stunning occasion.
We were not at the.. The Roethke Auditorium didn't exist yet. We were in the HUB [Husky Union Building].
And he was in the HUB Ballroom, and we had
TV monitors in four other rooms, and they were all full.
I mean it was just mobbed. Just mobbed.
And he gave a.. Do you remember Sol Katz? Did you know Sol at all? He was Provost by the time he left. McCUE: I didn't, I didn't.
No, he'd have been a History professor. Absolutely beautifully civilized man. He introduced Archie. And uh..
It was really a stunning occasion.
I had known Archie at Harvard. I had been his assistant at Harvard, so
when he was coming--he'd never been West before--
so, when he was coming, I uh, arranged that
Archie and--Judy and I--would take Archie and Ada on a tour of the Northwest in the week before the reading.
But, he also had just been very ill, and he said the doctor said "No," so we took him out to our house in Nellita [Nellita Rd., Seabeck, WA], and
had a very quiet time. But, uh..
But he certainly rose to that reading. (SOUNDS OF AGREEMENT)
And we've had some other fine ones.
You know, Elizabeth Bishop-- McCUE: I was just going to say-- MATCHETT: Not her Roethke Reading,
but she gave her first reading ever
when she had the Roethke Position here.
And then she came back and did the Roethke [Reading], but she had never been willing to read in public
until Bob [Heilman] talked her into it.
And she was scared to death, but.. She was a very quiet reader.
She was not, let's say a great.. Her poetry is better than her reading of it.
REED: Her estate tries to prevent recordings of her from being available online. MATCHETT: Uh huh, yeah--
REED: They're trying to respect her wishes to stay private.
MATCHETT: Stanley Kunitz gave a very good reading here, and, actually,
he was down the list, somewhat, but when, in '63, when Ted died,
Stanley flew out right away to be with Bea,
and he gave a reading at the department as a volunteer in Ted's memory.
But that was before the official Roethke Readings.
So Stanley read, read twice. Um,
When Gary Snyder came, I think that we were, by that time, in the Roethke Auditorium
And...they finally...the...
university authorities came in and said, "Look, you cannot fill the aisles like this,
as well as all the seats." So they had a terrible time.
And I must say, the haze of marijuana smoke over that audience (LAUGHING) was
unlike anything we've had any other time.
But I had a lovely time. I like Gary very much. I loc(ated).. You know he was born in Lake City.
And he stayed with us at Lake Forest Park while he was here.
He wanted to go see the house he was born in,
so I drove him around, and we found it. And it was very much still there.
He said, "My father built that shed in back."
He said, "I wanna go to see that." So we started back, and a woman came out of the house
"What's going on!?"
(LAUGHING)
He said, "Oh excuse me. My father built that shed and I wanted to look at it."
So he got along very well with her.
I was, of course, not here for a few of them, when I was on leave.
But, um,
Those are the ones I think of most particularly.
McCUE: Who was the first? Who were some of the women who read?
MATCHETT: The first woman to read? Well, it was to be Marianne Moore.
McCUE: Right. MATCHETT: But then she didn't get here, so
it was Elizabeth [Bishop] was then the first one to read.
And then we had Muriel Rukeyser.
I had a great time, although she... (ENERGETIC GESTURE)
she was lots of fun.
(LAUGHING)
And, let's see,
Mona van Duyn was the next. She was a lovely lady.
She stayed with us at Lake Forest Park, too.
We put up a lot of them, which saved.. I think they collected the hotel money and then used it. (LAUGHING)
I have a list of ones that we put up and I was surprised.
Oh yes, Robert Fitzgerald and Bill Merwin, I know Bill very well.
He'd read here before he came back for the Roethke Reading.
And I'm still in pretty close touch with him.
REED: How about Adrienne Rich?
MATCHETT: Umm,
Yeah, she was the last one. Yeah.
McCUE: So you chose Adrienne Rich--
MATCHETT: Yes! Yeah. Certainly.
I'd known her, we...
I had known her in The Poet's Theatre days in Cambridge.
REED: Oh. Yeah. McCUE: Oh! Do tell.
MATCHETT: We gave a joint poetry reading at Harvard once, oh very early, very early.
Yeah, she was still married at that point.
Uh, so yeah, I'd known her for a long time.
And I was very pleased, she...no no...
Oh, I remember, yes. Like Elizabeth, she couldn't stay with us because we had cats.
(LAUGHING)
Elizabeth couldn't go anywhere where there was a cat. (LAUGHING) REED: Oh no.
MATCHETT: Elizabeth came out, spent the day with us in Nellita. And out there she,
we had to spend the whole day outdoors on the lawn because she couldn't go in the house because we had a cat.
McCUE: Bill, when did you stop picking the Roethke Reader? MATCHETT: Well, Adrienne was the last.
McCUE: Adrienne Rich was the last. MATCHETT: Yeah.
Ad-drienne, excuse me. McCUE: Ad-drienne. Thank you. MATCHETT: Ad-drienne was the way she pronounced it. I always come back to that. So
I'm pleased to see that the second person after I was choosing was Denise Levertov because
I had tried to get her earlier.
And I gather she was a lovely person. I had no contact with her, ever.
And everybody says how wonderful she is. But anyway,
I wrote to her asking if she would be interested in giving the reading, and
after some weeks got an answer from her secretary
with her name and "Ms Levertov is not able to do this" or something like that,
and that just seemed so remote that I would really rather
be (LAUGHS) pissed off with her but (LAUGHS) but actually, I've read that whole collected Levertov since then
and there are some superb poems in there, yeah,
so I was sorry I never got to know her
because she was right here in Seattle.
REED: I was going to say a few years after that must have been when she moved here.
MATCHETT: Well, she was here...
she was here some years before she gave the reading here.
I dunno, when she, when she turned us down it was fairly early. She wasn't here then.
Anyway, so she would have been one of the early women if she'd said "Yes."
(LAUGHING)
And, I'm pleased to see she came in later.