Author’s note:  Dr. Robert Kirkpatrick was an English Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill.  He passed away in 2004. 

                    It was 1982. I was a callow and very adolescent 18 year old college freshman at UNC-Chapel Hill. I felt very lonely. I moved back home from my dorm. Things were looking bad, and then I met Dr. Kirkpatrick. He looked past my immaturity and eccentricities. He met me on the high ground of poetry.

He made a huge impression on me – so informal and natural and friendly, in his conservative, formal and very elegant professorial attire, the very picture of a dignified and civilized southern man-of-letters – laughing that childlike and mischievous laugh of his – as he walked across the “Pit” at UNC, or sat in his chair in his office helping a student. So often when I stopped by his office he was helping a student. He was very devoted, very attentive.

Dr. K was always full of the joy of poetry, and was one of the least stuck-up, least stuffy, and yet most civilized and poised persons one could meet. For some reason I felt like I was able to talk to him in a way I could not talk to other teachers. He was uniquely approachable and empathetic. More than that, he was genuinely happy and liked his job. I mean, he flat out loved poetry. There was no doubt about it. He was not tortured, or tormented, or depressed, or weird, or mean, like some of the other professors. He radiated authentic well-being – of the rarest sort. You often see well-being coupled with ignorance. What you don’t know can’t hurt you. But Dr. K was very smart, very wise. He knew about the horrors of the world and he understood the association between knowledge and sorrow. Yet he still radiated this curious joy. It was the joy of poetry. It was the pure spirit of poetry – in the person, even more than on the page. I think he wrote the poem that was himself, his presence, his friendship and cordiality. He also wrote “real” poems, poems on pages, but they were almost beside the point. He was sort of a physical incarnation of the spirit of poetry. How else could you account for the basic joy of life in his intellectual aspect? I mean, it was a very peculiar thing. Most people aren’t like that. Most people are broken and sad, and if they are happy they are usually deluded. He was very rare because he was a non-gloomy intellectual.

He had a very unusual family. His wife and kids were unusually bright, cultivated, educated, humane and civil. His household was an example of what happens when a marriage goes right. His household was like a warm hearth. There was a spirit of life there. I used to make a point to come knock on his back door whenever I was back in Chapel Hill. Sometimes he wasn’t there but when he was he always let me in and talked to me for a while, even if he obviously had other things he needed to do. It was like he could sense that I had come because I was in need of a dose of the light and warmth and safety of his household. When I left I always felt warm. The sense of it in memory is like what light and warmth are like in memory.

He was a living walking rebuttal to the belief that you have to be tortured and depressed and mean to other people to be a poet or understand poetry.

He didn’t care if his students were rednecks or jocks, preps or punks – what mattered to him was the interest in English literature, particularly the poetry of the British Romantics and American Modernists. His mind was encyclopedic and “eccentric” in the Asian sense of the word, i.e., original, not bizarre. His lectures were these amazing labyrinths of digressions that deposited you dizzily on the Greenlaw Hall stairwell at the end of class hour with a million swirling lyrical thoughts in your head.

Before I met him I had known about poetry from high school English classes, but it was just sort of back there in the distance. He changed my life (as with so many students) by making me see how poetry was so important. His classroom approach was very eclectic. In some ways he was a throwback to the personalities of a person like William Hazlitt or Charles Lamb, a Romantic sensibility and essential optimism, leavened with civility. He more resembled a Charles Lamb than a Shelley because he was not unstable or neglectful.

Although he tolerated the occasional craziness of lyric poets he did not personally indulge in it or inflict such things on his own family. He did not sacrifice his personal life or his family responsibilities to his interest in the lyric. Therefore teaching became a natural place for him because he knew poetry like a good poet would, and yet, was more comfortable and adept at being a role model and counselor to impressionable students than a lot of poets I have met would be (because of their personal instabilities and failings).

I never saw him harm anyone the whole time that I knew him.

If someone could fully understand his character they could understand how to bring happiness, peace, calm, optimism and even spiritual sanctity and safety back into poetry, for oneself. In other words to reflect on him is to try to learn from him or absorb something important but difficult to describe, from him.

He had a freethinking aspect that to me embodied a stream or lineage running on down from the American transcendentalists such as Emerson. He had a mature but still fresh and curious interest in things that was allowed to stay preserved in his psyche in the academic environment despite the incursions of petty office politics which he detested.

His interest in the poets and writers he constantly brought up in class, and in my meetings with him years later, was always real in a completely unfeigned way. He never approached his job from any standpoint of cynicism or jadedness. He genuinely loved his job, since his job involved poetry. He loved good writing. And he had a light sense that made such a difference with students.

His way of conversing was neither distant nor opaque. Nor was he ever intrusive. He was there, as a resource for anyone in need of the light (or shade) of poetry. He was not depressive. His light sense, light touch, sense of humor, comforted and relieved. He had very high standards but was never harsh about them. All of this made him into a role model.

His interest in good poems was something that came naturally to him. He never had to feign it. So, it provided a basis for him to be natural and to know himself, which gave him psychological stability. Somehow he kept calm in the midst of the strong thoughts, strong moods, that poetry brings. He navigated the conflicting demands of a love of poetry, which encourages speculation and idealism, along with the demands of making a living and having a family – he did this better than most of his students and therefore kept a special existential place in my mind and other students’ minds as a father figure and advisor, because he represented a goal of stability which many of us found hard to achieve after (not to mention during) college.

Although his real love was the British Romantics, he balanced this love against a basic eclectic classicism and an I suppose genetic equableness that prevented him from hurting people emotionally the way that many of the Romantic poets themselves did (for instance Shelley), and also, he was more civil and equable than many of the other poetically inclined teachers he worked with.

When we talked, it was always 100% about poetry. Everything else was sort of a side issue. You have to consider how different this is from, say, talking to a car salesman. Around him, it became natural to talk about writers and lyric for hours. Around the rest of the world, of course, to do so is to isolate oneself.

As time passed after I left UNC, I gradually began to realize that I would likely not for a long time be able to get to the kind of personal calm and stability that he represented. However, one way that I was able to deal with my own instabilities was by remembering that he himself existed as an example of how, yes, it was, in some cases, possible to couple a love of poetry with a calm and practical life. So he was a sort of beacon or guidepost when I went through hard times.

Note how much of this relationship, and influence he had, was not necessarily known to him. I doubt that he ever knew how much of an effect he had on so many people. One thing that was noble about him is that he never needed to know this – he was satisfied as he was, he did not seek after praise.

His mind was essentially speculative, i.e., nondogmatic and nondoctrinaire. However at the same time he was anything but relativist and had very stern views about certain poets and poems and whether they were good or bad. However out of a sense of southern propriety and discretion he never lost his cool and did not enter into the lower wars of schools and scholars, did not write nasty critical articles and that sort of thing. You could tell that he had a very refined and idiosyncratic sense of literary taste because the writers he liked were not limited by any particular epoch or school of poetry.

In our largely secular society, the function of the English professor at school combines attributes of the spiritual advisor, almost a sort of secular priest, an informal counselor and shrink, a cultural mentor, etc. It is very important not to damage the young minds that pass before you if you are a teacher. Because of his refined personality which never got low, mean or vulgar, he was constitutionally incapable of doing anything but help his students.

Often, with English majors especially, what you have are young people with strong tendencies toward the rash, the impractical, the highly emotive, the psychologically tormented, budding Sylvia Plaths, crazy artists, that sort of thing. For this particularly vulnerable and susceptible class of young minds, the benefit and guidance he gave us, as much from his basic personality as what he said, was invaluable, and there was a double effect to this – he encouraged and led some of us, like me, to make the love of poetry and pursuit of lyricism into a permanent part of our desires and lives – but at the same time, he always acted as a remembered figure of calm and familial stability – i.e. as a very refined, understated and subtle influence against self-destruction or private ruin. My guess is that there are many others who would say these things. Again, he did not necessarily know that he had this effect. Realizing that he may not have known how important he was to me makes me feel grief, but then the grief calms down, because I remember that he really was, as he was, happy – he did not need to know, and if he was alive and I had told him, I can just see him in my mind, waving it off. He refused praise like a waxed car finish does rain.

I was reading the other night a poem by Milosz in which he mentions “the sin of despair.” Again one of the most interesting things about Robert is that while he knew the directions of the poems and thoughts of even the wildest and most unstable Romantics such as Shelley to the core, he himself was not wild or unstable. In his own life he did not commit “the sin of despair.” So, one sees how even at this juncture, when I learn that he has died, I find a strange calming effect as I think about him and think about things, and it is as if his memory is the balm which offsets the very deep sadness about what has happened. I am very sad about what has happened but I can almost hear him describing to me the religious and spiritual limits even to sadness and of how there is an essential godly sense of things, which is inextinguishable.

The Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus is said to have said “Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.” There is a limit to the amount of despair a child playing can feel since it is after all just play. Dr. Kirkpatrick was limited in the amount of despair he displayed, in a manner that might have been related to his insistence of the area of literature as an area of play. He treasured intellectual play, the play of ideas. He avoided the sin of despair.

Something that is “in play” is in change. Speculative, nondoctrinaire thought is related to play. The difficulty of this approach to things is uncertainty. I got the sense that his uncertainty was alleviated by a religious perception. I was invited along by him to church on one occasion. I remember it was a church up the road from where he lived. I did not get a sense of irony from his affect in church. He seemed to have a sort of faith or belief in religious things in a very open-ended way, like Wordsworth’s belief in natural religion, or Coleridge’s, or Blake’s. If someone has a sense of the religious aura or tint of things, this eases the corrosive effects of uncertainty, it limits uncertainty. At this juncture Dr. Kirkpatrick separated off from the more nihilistic strands of post-WWII philosophy and poetics such as one might find among some of the Nietzscheans, existentialists and sometimes in writers such as Lowell, Larkin, maybe Ashbery. His optimism somehow resisted that.

All of human life can be seen as “play,” if it is firmly held, as it were, within something more real than the play-area – i.e. within a transcendental matrix. If there is an underlying divinity, then human life can be viewed as a “divine comedy” occurring upon that ground. Otherwise it is just so much sound and fury, signifying nothing. Dr. Kirkpatrick at heart did believe in a transcendental signifier, as one might call it; he did seem to believe in a ground of being, though not one that could be stated in some sort of rigid doctrinal way. Thus his character was a role model for pure intellectual speculativeness without, however, giving over to a corrosiveness of nihilistic uncertainty.

This was a very reassuring character trait for us undergraduates, who were yet still in the existential process of waking up into adult self-consciousness and realizing such things as that we were going to die.

Heraclitus also said, “character is fate,” and it is Dr. Kirkpatrick’s fate to impress a memory on me which curiously lacks despair. I say “curiously” because I would not have expected it, given how much he has meant to me as a role model and intellectual guide. Yet it is true that I am somehow while grieving unable to carry that sadness all the way over into despair, for the simple reason that he would not do so.

I do believe I can recall the time when he informed me that his own father had died. At that time, he also added how one author (I cannot recall who) had written that how the son reacts to the death of the father is a critical thing. In other words, he was able to frame the situation. The situation did not purely lead to psychic collapse and breakdown for him, psychic caesura. There was as if a residual sheath of intellectual, speculative reference – the quote he mentioned – which he could reflect upon, which was conducive to rumination – which counteracted despair.

Despair depends upon an end, cut, to the sacred chain of signs. Even facing his own father’s death, Dr. Kirkpatrick found a way to allow the sacred play of signification, thought-following-thought, to germinatively continue, in a way which, because it was natural, was neither avoidant nor vulgar. From what I have been told, the same residual sheath or running spring of signification was occurring even at his hospital bed, even in a condition of physical and psychological extremity. I other words, the play of thought continued, the play of reflection.

Thus one can see how a liberal education, as he hoped, could have a civilizing effect, in a non-cliché sense: he demonstrated how there was even a way to be lying on one’s own deathbed without cut, gap, despair. So, for a strange reason, it seems that the cut or gap that would lead me to collapse into despair is still not occurring, even after his death. This is very peculiar. It certainly cannot be pinned down rationally and I would prefer to consider it an aura or auspice of grace. Good play is done with grace, as we know from watching figure skaters. Graciousness is a beauty of form. It seems that a grace of intellectual beauty is keeping me from despairing while still allowing me the interval for grief, as in the tenth elegy of Rilke in which a mythological landscape is set aside for the meandering of the women known as Laments.

On the other hand I do despair, honestly. Because he kept so much innocence and childlike joy in his being up to his death, it makes the death all the more painful. It is such a full cut-off of someone who was still fully being, still fully here. He had not become narrowed and limited and reduced and degraded into smaller mind and smaller being like so many adults get to be, worn down and corroded by life. He was as fully fresh and present in his consciousness as would be a child, so his death is a bad as the death of a child. Plus imagine the cut-off, the shock, for his own family, who knew his light and warmth every day. Yet they also knew the deep religious sources of his calm and peace and happiness. He knew that the universe is a meaningful and beautiful place since that fact was proven in him, in his own being. So, as I noted, he rejected despair. If his influence and spirit and wisdom persists in me or you it will also act to counter despair in me or you. This is because you will see in glimpses how peace and happiness and calm and wonder extend out strangely over and above nothingness in a way with no logic or reason to it, no proof, foundation or basis. This right here – this crux without foundation, support or proof – this invisible feeling – this is the very heart and power of poetry. This is its nobility: how it is not bronze or unbreakable but actually in falling and in mortal sadness and loss, it is there somehow more fiercely. It can scarcely be explained nor am I one who is strong enough to really feel or know it. Yet I can certainly inhabit it by thinking about the example of the man I am talking about, which sustains me from the inside, like grace.

There were examples of his intellectual playfulness every day in poetry class. For example, I can recall on one day where he held up various Chinese ideograms, and had us guess what each ideogram stood for. Needless to say we racked our brains and hardly guessed any of them correctly. After a while he would smile like someone giving a child a present and tell us (in a suitably dramatic voice) the nature of the ideogram. A man! A man bending over! A man bending over picking rice!

He also stumped us one day with these lines from William Carlos Williams:

It's a strange courage
you give me ancient star:

Shine alone in the sunrise
toward which you lend no part !

(Williams, “El Hombre”).

He asked us what the poem meant, asking with the air of someone for whom the meaning was known. Myriad guesses flourished to no final resolution. Come to think of it, he never did reveal the secret meaning.

(I can see in my mind his typical smile. His glasses would glint and he had a wide smile like the Cheshire Cat. He was always subtle and quiet in his jokes, never loud, lengthy or vulgar. He was never one for self-display, but rather, attentive sharing. He tended to listen to you more than you heard yourself. He wanted you to feel the happiness he felt regarding literature and poetry: the most innocent of exchanges.)

A lot of what he seemed to communicate to us, in an implied manner, was that poetry was a twinkle to things that could be found in many places besides the poem per se. For example, there was certainly a poetry to teaching students about poetry, which he embodied. The german poet Holderlin insisted that people dwell poetically on the earth, if at all, and Dr. Kirkpatrick seemed to embody this aphoristic aside. I now understand, or have grown to appreciate, with time, that there can be a poetry to how a parent raises a child, or to how one engages in a job, or in how one progresses through a relationship. In this sense, a poet per se is merely someone who succeeds in arranging words poetically; just as much credit should be due a mother who arranges a son’s early life poetically, for example.

What I am getting at is that for Dr. Kirkpatrick, it seemed that the actual writing of poems was for him somewhat subordinate to his dominating or obsessively recurrent poetry, which was, the poetry of arranging young minds, of teaching his classes, of counseling his students, of conversing with his friends. Like his mentor Coleridge, he was a master of was once called “table talk,” and he seemed most naturally inclined, as it were, to spill his lyricism there, as opposed to in making a poem per se. Although he did actually write some poems and his poems did win awards, etc., he preeminent value for me, is in the sense in which he actually arranged for my own mind to be, in part, a poem, through the wondrous immersion in his poetry class.

While I suppose there were students who drifted daftly through the class, for myself, and I believe, for many of us, the encounter with Kirkpatrick was an encounter I which our own interiorities, our own nascent adult personalities, were subtly empoemed, one might say, or poeticized . . . so as to mean that we would always, to a greater or lesser extent, live life poetically, as Holderlin said, or in some cases, even try to write poems per se, or perhaps, raise a child poetically, or rise to face a new morning poetically.

For it is quite certain to me that it is the life that is lived poetically that is curiously free from the worst atrocious despair in the way I have tried to indicate. For Dr. Kirkpatrick, peace ran ahead of horror, calm before storm . . . and calm after storm as well, in that singular, gentle aftertaste of the sensitive and civilized life.

Without the existence of the liberal university as a fixture of American life, it is difficult for me to conceive of exactly how Dr. Kirkpatrick would have fit into this world. He could, perhaps, have been a man of the church, of some sort, like Herbert or Hopkins, except that the church is some woefully degraded in various ways in our society. I am not sure that his playfulness would have fit.

Because of his sobriety and even-keeled temperament, he could have been a businessman, a professional, but I can imagine how he would have hated many of the more vulgar and coarse and above all unimaginative aspects of modern American corporate culture; “getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” as Wordsworth said.

Without the academic position, it would have been more difficult for him to have navigated the practical realities of American life, all of which depends upon money, while simultaneously protecting his hearts-core optimism from essential corrosion. In this way he becomes a justification for the dignified institution which is the liberal university, because without such an institution, it would be more difficult for someone like him to exist, and we are in need of people like him to exist.

I think this must be why he took it so much to heart when he felt, from time to time, that the English departments and the liberal arts of the land were falling victim to various decadences and cults of academic fashion: he must have sensed that the context that made his own existence possible was being threatened. However, his sense of how the English departments were under assault from dubious ideologies never struck me as reactionary or even conservative, because he was always such a freethinker and was never afraid to get a little radical in his own thinking where he believed it was essential to the health of his academic context. The best example of this would be the controversy about the recommendation that incoming UNC students read a book about Islamic culture. It was viewed by some as a “left-wing” idea but really was in the classic tradition of the ideal of what an education should be stretching all the way back to Plato.

Dr. Kirkpatrick should have lived another 20 more years because he was entitled to have more time with his family, and if he had ever detached himself from teaching, he might have put together a book of some sort. However, I can hear him in my mind responding with something along the lines of how it is intrinsic to the noble freedom and fluidity of time, that it comes and goes from us, and our own lives come and go, in a way so unpredictable, so purely natural, and beyond our comprehension, that it cannot even be formulated in moral terms.

He was not tormented or insane, and yet, not brutish or banal. He was an example that it is not just possible hypothetically but possible in life for someone to be calm and stable and humane and at the same time, fully intelligent and empathetic.

He taught me just how important poetry was by teaching how it was not the most important thing. Life was more important. Unselfishness was more important. Maturity was more important. But the true expression of life, unselfishness, and maturity, in words, is poetry. So the fact of the things that were more important than poetry became a proof thereof.

He was so respectful and proud of his children. He never spoke down to them even when they were little. He met them as strange equals even when they came up to his knees. This was because he had so much of the child still within himself, preserved in his own adulthood, as Jesus says one must become like a little child to enter the kingdom of god. He spoke to his own children on common ground yet without acting “childish.” He met them at a sort of timeless level. You remember those piercing and old-soul intuitions you had as a child. He spoke at that level, also at the level of lightness and joy of being a child, which in most adults is just forgotten. As a result his children as they grew became very self-reliant, independent. It was their independence and difference from him, that showed his influence on them. His influence on them was to want them to be fully alive, i.e. fully individual. The beauty of individual difference resided in his family. All the same, all the folks in his family were similar, in this respect: they were not mean-spirited or dumb like so many people are. His family is unusually smart, perceptive and gentle. None of them would be good presidents or used car salesmen or insurance adjusters. Whatever it is that makes a good Buddhist calm, or a good Zen monk intuitive, or a good Christian compassionate, that is what permeates that family.

He was self-effacing and about as selfless as it is practical to be and still pay taxes, hold down a job, etc. He was not selfless and unworldly to the point of disconnection from necessity in other words. He was an example of how one could exist outside of a monastery or Zen temple and still display self-effacement, selflessness, as a virtue.

He was speculative, without being uncertain. In other words he was not stuck in dogma and he was willing to entertain radical hypotheses and the like when we talked, but at the same time, he never splintered into that kind of uncertainty that disintegrates and decomposes the psyche. I am not sure to this day how he managed this. It must have been genetic, temperament, the blessing of his natural happiness. Again, to find happiness without also finding ignorance or stupidity is a rare thing. Most poets and intellectuals I know are volatile and a lot of them are unhappy campers. He wasn’t like that.

When it came to philosophical or poetical discussion or debate, it was always exciting because I was quite aware that I was dealing with someone who might well beat me on whatever particular point or idea we were debating. I can see him rolling his eyes up to the ceiling and going “noo nooo noo noo noo” or “yess yess yesss” and dropping the name of some new “essential” author or book, always someone I had never heard of, “who you just have to read. . . promise me you’ll read him. . .” I always left his house with a reading list. It never failed. There always came a time in our debates where he would a) roll his eyes, b) nod his head “tsk tsk” if what I had just said was definitely erroneous, or c) let out a deep sigh, then sit with his eyes closed, gathering his thoughts, if what I had just said was not only erroneous but also vulgar or involved the bathetic mispronunciation of the name of a German author, or, worse, invoked the evil specter of Derrida “the unreadable” . . . and then here it would come, some ingenious intuitive line of reasoning from left field, like a ju-jitsu move, which somehow always made more sense than what I had been saying, and then it would end with “you will really need to go read [insert name of obscure author I had never heard of before]” and if I was lucky, he’d scribble the name of the author on a scrap of paper for me (which sometimes I could not decipher later – his handwriting was, to be charitable, a little bit like some weird Martian stenography cursive, sometimes). Plus when we had these debates and discussions, he loved to pace the discussion with these very effective, sometimes hilarious dramatic pauses, wherein whoever was in the room would wait with bated breath, before he triumphantly yanked the name of [insert name of obscure author or Manichean sect or quote from lost poem of Keats recently found in a haberdasher’s attic in York] out of his magic hat and dropped it on us. It was like a continuous process of discovery, always with a light touch and never with a sense of him lording it over you or trying to outdo you.

The sadness which I feel is a sadness which I must approach and deal with through trying to be good to those around me and trying to promote the spirit of poetry. I do not seek an answer but a healthiness of exploration. Again I cannot help but think of how with Dr. Kirkpatrick, digression would lead to digression, one thought would unexpectedly give off to another, as if one were getting pleasantly lost into some endless labyrinth.

As Emerson wrote in his essay, “The Poet,” “the highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or, shall I say, the quadruple, or the centuple, or much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact. . .” It is the endless chain of signifiers of the deconstructionists, but in a positive light. I think one can tease out from the character example of Dr. Kirkpatrick a whole way of looking at things, a whole poetics, which follows along the lines of Thoreau and Emerson, Whitman and Dickinson, as well as the British Romantics, as well as the deconstructionists . . . but one would have to sit down and write the unwritten Biographia Literaria that he was not afforded the time to write, if one were to bring this all out. Let us end with one of Robert’s favorite quotes from the Gospel of John:

And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.




*



“Chapel Hill has beautiful sunlight”



Chapel Hill has beautiful sunlight
That falls on the backs of cats
And on college girls carrying ice cream cones
Past the sour smell of the Baskin-Robbins door.

It has little boutiques where everything is light blue,
Gleaming earrings hung in the plate glass of shops,
Old black women selling flowers on Franklin Street,
High old trees in the university fields,
So high it takes a leaf a few minutes to fall, it seems

As I sit with my back to the rough bark of one oak,
Watching the wonderful sunshine of Carolina spring,
The rows of roses near the Planetarium sundial,

The thatched thick grass of the arboretum behind it,
Shadowy gravel walks where lovers sit,
I avert my eyes in shyness. No matter – look away

From one thing, you’ll see another beautiful thing
In Chapel Hill in April.

Do you remember the quaint tin chairs
Of the Café Driade, where you can drink tea outside,
Watch the robins hop, and maybe
Back in under the awning if it starts raining? How about

That carnival at Greenlaw Hall – the mean
Professors, the nice ones, the Marxist ones,
The ones we gossiped about,

And the one who I loved to see, the one who was you?
What is it like now being part of the universe
Even more mysteriously than before, your meanings swirling
Still, in the minds and lives of the students who meant so much
To you, and who are you now, in bits and pieces, scattered everywhere
Like Orpheus? Yet there’s more than that. I see a light,
And something singular. I can say no more.
(You taught me when to speak and when to stop).

But I miss you.

 

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© Jack Anders 2005.