Poets on the Farm

"We don't believe that we can make a poet out of a sow's ear," says Poet-Professor Paul Engle, "not even in Iowa, where we've got some damn fine sows' ears." But Paul Engle, 48, professor of English at the State University of Iowa in Iowa City, has fashioned the best workshop in the nation for young poets in an area surrounded by cows and corn.

This week Engle's Poetry Workshop is commemorating the centennial of the publication of Flowers of Evil by 19th century French Poet Pierre-Charles Baudelaire. High point of the centennial: the publication of Homage to Baudelaire, a book of poems by workshop poets. "The way to praise a poet," Engle explains simply, "is to write a poem."

Zealous Recruiter. For 20 years Iowa-born Poet Engle has fanned the thin flame of poetry down on the farm. He is helped by the fact that the university gives advanced degrees--including a doctorate--in creative writing. Armed with this selling point, Engle recruits fledgling poets with the zeal of a Big Ten football coach wooing a high-school halfback. He gets them jobs on campus, finds them apartments, has even supplied pots and pans for their wives.

In theory, Engle's system of teaching poets is simple. "We believe that if you begin with a person who has talent, you can make a better poet faster by exposing him to real criticism and putting him in contact with a community of poets." After a rugged session in the converted barren barrack that houses the workshop, a few students have felt like quitting. But most recognize the need for criticism. "You can't go on showing your poems to your Uncle Louis all your life," shrugs Phil Levine, 29, who has cracked the Chicago Review. Engle's blunt teaching methods leave his students (30 men, seven women) precious little time for cult cultivation. "Any time you get the men in a room," says the wife of one, "all they talk about is poetry or sports. At least three of them are frustrated second basemen."

The Master's Tools. Engle, a lanky figure with penetrating blue eyes and an awesome store of energy, grew up in Cedar Rapids, just 24 miles away. He graduated magna cum laude from Iowa's Coe College in 1931, took his master's at Iowa City and in 1932 won the annual prize of the Yale Series of Younger Poets with his first book of poems, Worn Earth. Later he went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, tended wicket and pulled an oar for Merton College, returned to Iowa in 1937 to start shaping poets.

In the workshop, students gleefully lay into Engle's poems with the master's own tools of cutting criticism. But few critics carp at his ability as a teacher, and no one doubts his talents as a recruiter of potential poets. Even British Poet Stephen Spender has referred a prospect to him. Englemen wrote fully one-third of the poems in Poets Under Forty, to be published this summer by the Meridian Press. And Henry Rago, editor of Poetry magazine, says: "No poet in the U.S. has done as much for young poets as Paul Engle."

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