Ted Enslin’s father had begun teaching him languages ancient and modern as soon as he started to speak, and he had continued his studies since then. His first efforts as an artist were not in poetry but in music. As a student of Nadja Boulanger, he had been in a perfect position to hear and learn from both re-discovered Baroque and Renaissance music and the avant-garde compositions of the first half of the 20th century. As a complete individualist, he was also perfectly capable of ceasing to compose music and to write poetry instead. He could get along with the poets in many circles and cliques, and remained a great source of stories about the scene for decades; and he could turn his back on the city and the urban milieu and live as a subsistence farmer in backwoods Maine. Of course, he wasn’t what you’d expect of a farmer, either. Among unusual accomplishments, he managed to buy a mountain, an acre at a time, and as long as he built nothing or deliberately planted crops on it, had to pay virtually nothing in taxes. He liked taking visitors for a drive past a place with a good view, and announce “that’s my mountain.” He and his family could also have a good time gathering wild berries, nuts, and fruits from the mountain. Ted gathered fallen ash wood branches and made walking sticks out of them to give to friends or to to sell or trade. He practiced homeopathic medicine, and believed that walking was essential to good health and to creativity. With the manuscript of Mahler’s unfinished 10th Symphony in his desk drawer, and a mountain all his own, he could write some of the most continually new poetry in a work room with a sign reading “The 20th Century stops here” on the door. Friends can tell Ted stories for a long time. What I’ve mentioned here bears directly on his work and his reading style. Someone reading his poetry, particularly the longer workings, on paper, without hearing him read or getting some guidance in what to listen for, might find his opus as a long internal monologue. It is that. But this misses its dynamics. As someone with an extensive knowledge of languages and of music, he could hear endless possibilities in American English. His verse composition works from a sense of melodic development, without devices such as rhyme or alliteration or assonance that either complement or replace musical effects in song. Given the constant melodic invention of his poetry, he has been one of the very few contemporary poets who could turn out huge volumes of work without repeating or plagiarizing himself, or working from formula or from a theoretical position or ideology that produced cookie-cutter verse.

In reading his poems, Ted’s delivery was immaculately clear, even, and decisive. Some of his casualness might keep him in the realm of some of the hipsters of the 60s, but this was not part of a pose or an act. It simply reflected his unpretentious self-confidence. After listening to him for a few minutes, attentive audience members could start picking up on the melodic base which informed and gave resonance to the lexical content of the poems. As with other poets who came of age with him, listening to Ted could become almost addictive. At least it was so to me, as was Ted’s conversation, and as soon as money became available to do so, I arranged for Ted to read in Milwaukee at least once every year or two between the later 1970s and middle 80s.

Concerned that most readers probably had never heard him read, and that the plethora of books by him might fall on deaf eyes, I initiated a symposium on him as part of my Margins series before I started publishing any of his books (though I had published some poems in Stations before this). John Taggart volunteered for the job as guest editor for the symposium, and his own background in music seemed to make him ideal for the task. The symposium was one that was not completed when Margins folded, but I was able to turn it over to an enthusiastic David Wilk, who brought it out as an issue of his Truck magazine. I published Ted’s Opus 0 and Markings at about the same time as the issue of Truck came out, and continued with another three books at regular intervals from 1979 to 1985, and a final one in 1990. Ted regularly sent me manuscripts, and those I chose to publish each showed a different facet of his poetry. At the same time, each of them seemed part of the continuum of his opus, and as a device to emphasize this, I printed all of them (except for some copies of The Weather Within for sale by Woodland Pattern) with the same cover stock. This was a blue-gray recycled paper, which, with the colored text and graphics printed on it, suggested the rock outcroppings I had seen on Maine: initially it might seem dull, but if you look at it for a while you can see a range of colors in the rock, in the lichens, leaves, and grasses that grow or fall around and on it. The design of these books came to share one of my practices with books of visual poetry: As I proceded, I made the designs ever simpler, suggesting, in this case, not that the covers should not be seen as part of the graphic nature of the poetry, but that graphics didn’t matter much. To the extent that appearance had anything to do with sound, the continuity of voice and the concentration on ground were all that mattered. I still had some of the cover stock when I printed Love and Science on my photocopier in 1990.

Impromptu criticism from the audience was an essential part of the reading scene on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1960s, of which Ted had been a part, and the one that seems to get ignored most easily by those who look back on it from the outside. I had this in mind in trying to set up Water Street Arts Cewnter and Woodland Pattern readings. To me a sort of apotheosis of this practice, and an example of Ted’s complete self-confidence, came after a reading I set up for him in Milwaukee in 1981. As was the custom as long as I shared in the organization of readings, we always had a party after the reading. The whole audience was often invited to these parties. After this particular reading, a woman who seemed high on something other than alcohol or marijuana with their noticeable smells, came tromping in with the rest of the crew. As we settled in, with me sitting next to Ted, it became apparent she thought that I rather than Ted had been the reader. The lady began berating me for reading poetry that she couldn’t understand and thought was sick, dirty, and malevolent. After she had ranted for a while, Ted joined in the critique of his own reading, without giving any hint that he had been the reader. His dissection of the work was not only as detailed as it could get, but also devastatingly hostile to the poems he had read. As he warmed to the opportunity, he became more nasty in his condemnation, and moved on to criticism of the character of the author himself. No critic other than Ted himself could so thoroughly trash his poetry. When he either finished or paused before launching into another salvo, the woman, who probably couldn’t follow much of the critique, nonetheless said something like, “that’s much better put than anything I could have said. I hope you’ve learned something from it, and never make anyone listen to such awful poetry again.” Having felt that virtue had been served, she left. Some of the people who came to the party were busy with the glass and pipe and didn’t pay any attention to this farce, but those who did couldn’t stop laughing for some time. Ted and I continued running gags based on this for several years.

When the whole audience was invited, and the audience was larger than a dozen people, most left after an hour or so. The parties took on their own character according to the reader. Sometimes everybody simply got drunk and stoned and engaged in merriment. Sometimes these events became serious discussion sessions almost immediately. The best tended to be those that followed events such as conferences, performance art festivals, and other large events, most often sponsored not by us but by University of Wisconsin. These usually involved several parties or conferences within the larger party, and had the greatest tendency to generate other projects. Large or small, there was a tendency for a small group to engage in conversations that often lasted all night, sometimes with brief interruptions for naps in our chairs, and usually moving away from heavy intoxicants to alternating sips of cold coffee and cheap wine. These mellowed-out sessions tended to be the most important, and to take part of their source of discussion from the readings or performances. A good reading generated energy that could keep the most inspired participants talking for days. Readings such as these included something like the communion of the church I grew up in, and you could see part of their function as sacramental. At times the conversation could focus very sharply on what had been read, and this could make expansions and returns from an individual poem or even from a few lines. Sometimes they moved away from the poems read into other matter, yet the sense of the reading, or the sacrament of the reading, ran under the conversation, whatever direction it might take.

Click here to go to 3 sequences from Enslin's House of the Golden Windows.

Click here to go to the complete text of Enslin's The Weather Within