Radnóti’s last poem, “Postcard (4),” was written on the back of a label for a bottle of cod liver oil. He must have run out of notebook pages, and it wouldn’t have escaped his ironic notice that he was writing one of his darkest poems on scrap paper. Here again, something like the sublime meeting the ridiculous. The product is described as “Cod Liver Oil Preparation,” the brand is “Jema,” and the label exhorts, “Your Medicine.” The label was inserted into his notebook. The poem is dated October 31, 1944:

3. The Amaryllis

The English and Philosophy Building on the campus of the University of Iowa is ugly. Built at a time when the student unrest of the 1960s might well have been in the minds of its architects, the building looks like an enormous brick box that should be a prison facility or an FBI building. Or, at the least, it looks like a building where one of the hard sciences is taught. Instead, it was where I learned about ambition in poetry. The building, in fact, stands on the green banks of the Iowa River. Nonetheless, the severe solidity that the English and Philosophy Building has in my memory matches the hard lessons I took from the place. We might as well have been doing physics in there. The sort of physics, anyway, that had these for its coordinates:

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here on can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses

As Jorie Graham explained it, in the graduate seminar on modern poetry that she taught on Wednesday afternoons that fall in the English and Philosophy Building, the role of the reader in “The Waste Land” was being re-defined in ways it had not been done before. One read “The Waste Land,” she said, to undergo a process, rather than merely reading to interpret the text’s representation of the world. As one read Eliot’s difficult poem, one had to suspend one’s rational apparatus in order to experience the poem as ritual. In the block above, the ritualistic repetitiveness of the passage’s music was thrillingly in tension with the malaise being described. The poem’s speaker seemed to have beauty and music on their side, even as that speaker’s sensibility became more dissociated. The “auditory imagination” of the passage was doing deep work, and gave the wasted land being traversed by the speaker a musical brilliance. Graham, as she talked that fall about Eliot, Berryman, and Dickinson, noted the intellectual unrest the reader had to embrace in order to read these poets. But she also pointed to the emotional rewards that these poets ultimately gave. Their poems were not difficult for the sake of intellectual exercise; they were catalysts for experiences which tested our emotions. “Emotions are the escape,” Graham said of the stark emotions in Eliot’s poem, “even if they’re also the prison of the self.”

I was finally understanding… what that gasp of speech meant. To be the poem, to enact in one’s self the disorientation and the rescue in a great poem — this was a profound lesson.

Until that seminar session on Eliot, I wouldn’t have been able to say that I had read his poems with any real appreciation. Until then, in those early years of my life as a poet, I had formed deep affections for the work of Frost, Bishop, and Heaney — whose poems’ surfaces were certainly more legible than Eliot’s surfaces. But Graham made me see in Eliot that how I read his poems mattered as much as what the poems said. I was supposed to be the protagonist of these poems, as much a protagonist as the speaker in the poem. “Be thou me,” I remember saying to myself after that class meeting, walking to the bar with my classmates in the November dusk, remembering the invocation of Shelley’s speaker to the west wind. I was finally understanding — as I had not, when I first read “Ode to the West Wind” in an undergraduate class on Romanticism — what that gasp of speech meant. To be the poem, to enact in one’s self the disorientation and the rescue in a great poem — this was a profound lesson.

As it turned out, Graham’s directive on how to read Eliot was also a guide on how to read her poems. In Iowa City, Graham was a figure who struck many of us as formidable and generous by turns. She was an ordinary woman — you saw her at the market, or driving an older Celica in town — who had an extraordinary presence. Her generosity, whether explaining Eliot in the seminar or analyzing one of our poems during workshop, had an unyielding quality about it. Unyielding in the sense that what she gave us felt like knowledge that carried a set of demands. Or not “knowledge” exactly, but a desire to know, to know further into the phenomenon in front of you. Speaking once about the opaque moments that at times arose in truly ambitious poems, Graham said that there are times in life when you can see, you can remember, but you can’t know.