9TH ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 15 :: TYRONE WILLIAMS on STEPHEN TUDOR
Although I’d been writing poetry since the age of thirteen, I entered Wayne State University as a chemistry major. I’d long been interested in the sciences, so the only real issue was whether to go in as a physics, biology or chemistry major with my buddy from high school, Anthony Luffboro. All throughout high school Anthony and I had exchanged sketches for electric cars and post-fossil fuel cells for automobiles and nuclear-powered spaceships as well as poems. We were both in the Latin Club and part of the high school newspaper staff. We took our science classes together but by sophomore year I’d started taking more English classes while he continued his track with additional science classes as a pre-med major. Although we continued to socialize, we were slowly drifting apart.
One of the first creative writing classes I took was with Stephen Tudor, then the only poetry teacher I knew at Wayne State. In those days students couldn’t just sign up for creative writing classes; you had to put together a portfolio of your work and get the professor’s personal approval. Fortunately, Steve like what I was doing and let me in his class. He was very encouraging and even though I would eventually take additional poetry classes with poets like Judith McComb and Faye Kicknosway, Steve became my unofficial poetry tutor and mentor. Eventually he invited me to his little house at the end of Freud (pronounced Frood) Street off the Detroit River. He had a small boat docked in a slip in the back of his house and we’d sit there and talk about poets and poetry.
Although I’d sit out on his dock with Steve, I only understood Steve’s love of his sailboat as a form of escape, a desire consonant with my own dreams of getting away not only from Detroit but from the United States. Canada, of course, was less than a mile away, just across the Detroit River, and though I visited Canada many times, I did not have the wizened view of “escape” Steve memorializes in his poem “Detroit River North To South.” A series of indicative fantasies (“You are mixing Manhattans at Peche Island/ over on the Canadian side…”), the poem concludes with a didactic thud: “No one has free will. You are the seasons.”[1]
A baby boomer in my early twenties growing up in the inner city, I could no more appreciate Steve’s love of the Great Lakes (where “looking into such slopes at/ lake edge you look back into time…”)[2] and his rudimentary stoveboats, dinghies and sailboats (“hull designed to an old rule/ generous underbody, long keel,/ rig that limits its sailplan.”)[3] than I could the weathered clarity of his poetry. Like most undergraduates, I never thought about the life that Steve had led up to his arrival at Wayne State. I didn’t know that he was from the Northwest, that he loved Oregon, that sailing was, in some way, his attempt to maintain connection with the Pacific. Reading these poems now, several decades later, I am attuned to the searing loneliness, the wistfulness, that penetrates Steve’s words. “Mask Maker” is, in my estimation, Steve’s “The Road Not Taken,” though the desperate imploring near its conclusion also conjures Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee”:
…My plan was
to marry you from the time you were five
and us run off to beautiful Bend, Oregon,
or coastal Maine. Can’t you rise from
your ashes, take wing like the grown
woman you are and you and me go fishing
and build a fire and cook those always
brainless bluegills?…[4]
I never got Steve’s poetry in college, though we remained friends as I was finishing up my graduate classes in the late Seventies and early Eighties. However, by that time there were more poets at Wayne State, including Ed Hirsch and M.L. Liebler. Mike Liebler (M. L., to his friends) had, and still has, one of those exuberant, outgoing, personalities and we quickly became friends. Steve seemed undeterred by the arrival of these poets with more glowing reputations than he’d ever had or, as it turned out, would ever have. In fact, he had started a small chapbook venture, Hundred Pound Press, and wanted to do a project with me. As it happened, M.L. also had a small chapbook publishing project, Ridgeway Press, and wanted to do a book with me. I was so excited and even a little cocky: I ‘m going to enter the poetry world, I thought, with two initial publications.
I wrote Steve a little note about how excited I was about my two poetry projects and suggested a potential theme for my chapbook with him. He responded with a curt note, essentially saying that if I was doing a chapbook with Liebler and his press, I wouldn’t have enough “quality” work for two projects and so he was “graciously” withdrawing his offer to publish me so I could concentrate on the Liebler project. I was stunned. In those days I knew nothing of the poetry “business”; I just knew there was a poetry “world” that I wanted to be a part of. I knew nothing of bitterness, rivalries and competitions among “professionals,” so Steve’s remark and rejection hurt me more than anything I could have imagined; the first cut is indeed the deepest.
Of course, it never occurred to me then that Steve, sitting on the sidelines as the new kids in town arrived with poetry prizes and well-received books under their arms, had to be seething. I didn’t know that he had struggled to get his work published; that he was, well, at sea…
I’m happy to say that Steve and I made up and resumed our friendship, though not as mentor-mentee but, after I moved to Cincinnati, as more or less equals. As a poet, he’d stopped at a certain point of development or interest. He was in his fifties by the mid-Eighties, a mature nature poet, and that suited him just fine. I wasn’t a nature poet. Until I sat on his boat that afternoon I’d never been on open waters except for those Bob-Lo mini-cruises my dad took the family on when I was a kid. Sitting on Steve’s sailboat was my introduction to a world I could appreciate but only from a social and cultural distance. And while I imagined sailing as some kind of timeless romance, Steve was already chronicling the bitterness of changes on the river and lakes. “Not Allowed To Anchor” is the new injunction, but the poem that Steve composes beneath this title is his pre-law memory: “Such a pleasure/to take the dinghy ashore, walk up town,// savor the houses, the faces…//(strolling to the Fogcutter// for a beer and burger).” (48)
When they found Steve’s empty sailboat in the middle of Lake Huron in the summer of 1994, I was, again, in shock. Speculation about what happened continued long after his death had been ruled an accident (he’d been competing in the Mackinac Island boat race). His body was never recovered and so I attended the memorial for him and spoke to Ellie, his wife, and Michael, his son, for the last time. Like so many other Detroit friends and acquaintances we drifted apart and lost whatever had bound us together in the past. Although I still consider myself a Detroiter at heart, the truth is, I’ve lived in Cincinnati longer than I did in the Motor City. It would be a sentimental lie to say that Steve “influenced” my particular aesthetics and poetics (except by contrast) — for that I’d have to credit Ed Hirsch and, in particular, Susan Howe — but what Steve first offered me was a model of what a poet’s life might look like. That was also true with Mike Liebler and especially so with Ed Hirsch. For first taking a chance on me I will always be grateful to Steve.
Tyrone Williams teaches literature and theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the author of several chapbooks and six books of poetry: c.c., On Spec, The Hero Project of the Century, Adventures of Pi, Howell and As Iz. A limited-edition art project, Trump l’oeil, was published by Hostile Books in 2017. He and Jeanne Heuving edited the anthology, Inciting Poetics (2019). His website is at http://home.earthlink.net/~suspend/
