35:1 Autumn 1985

KENNETH FIELDS

Two from the Book of Odysseus

The Autumn 1985 issue of CR included a feature on poet J.V. Cunningham, with essays by Robert Pinksy, Thom Gunn, W.S. di Piero, and Kenneth Fields. It also included poems by Kenneth Fields, who recently reflected on the two we include here:

These two poems were later part of my book, The Odysseus Manuscripts, which at the time I was calling “The Book of Odysseus.” The opening of “Three Laws Only” came pretty directly from the conversation of my friend Elroy Bundy, a world-famous Pindar scholar and one of the smartest men I’ve ever known. Edgar Bowers traveled to Greece with Roy and his wife Barbara and said that Roy tried to conduct himself in Pindaric Greek, which would be like ordering meals in London speaking the language of Beowulf. He was treated with baffled reverence, Bowers maintained, because in ancient Greek fashion his hosts thought this odd stranger might just be a god. I hope the presence of this remarkable eccentric man is everywhere in my book.

The reverence for strangers, like the reverence for children in other cultures (“youngest smartest”), is a recognition that traditional cultures must incorporate novelty to avoid being rigidly bound to the law. Roy’s daughter Mahala was living in Chicago and married to one of the editors of Chicago Review. The Review invited me to read at the University of Chicago, the first of many happy visits, and it was a pleasure to read these poems with Roy’s daughter in the audience. I dedicated The Odysseus Manuscripts to Roy Bundy.

I dedicated the poem about how Odysseus got his name to David Huddle, whom I met in the summer of 1980 at Yaddo. I admired his book of poems, Paper Boy, a vernacular account of his home town, in the speech of his family and neighbors. It seemed a fitting voice for Autolycus, the disreputable “Lone Wolf” grandfather of Odysseus. Autolycus, trickster and thief, links Hermes to Odysseus, and when he was asked to name his grandbaby he insisted on calling him Trouble. Prescient wisdom from a man who was not bound to many laws himself.

Fields has taught at Stanford since 1967. He is the author, most recently, of Classic Rough News (Chicago, 2005). With Yvor Winters he co-edited Quest for reality: an anthology of short poems in English (Swallow, 1969). A reading he gave last year at the University of Chicago has been archived here.

[ES, 2006]

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