Gratitude
It is Thanksgiving and I am thinking about gratitude and Roland Flint.
Roland taught English and poetry at Georgetown University and presided over a workshop that nurtured generations of finely tuned undergraduates. He also wrote poems and when he read his work, ancient Healy Hall rocked. In a reversal of fortune, this great red bear fed a ravenous audience metered tales of what he knew, what he’d yet to learn, his journey toward gratitude and acceptance.
Roland was never morose, not that we saw, but we knew he had his sorrows (his six-year-old son had been hit by a car, near Healy, killed). He chose to live as a smiling troubadour, a raconteur of the greatest order. With relish, he quoted the great bards of our day, many of whom he knew, and sang of the joys in his life: his living children, Rosalind, friends, his young poets.
His young poets often were morose and wrote about loss and dread in journal entries, which he assigned and carefully read, and in our poems. In our journals he helped us find the questions we should be asking in our trek toward adulthood. As for our poems, he looked enchanted when we read aloud, then encouraged us to go deeper, listen harder, find a better way to “say it.”1
“Keep writing,” was his parting maxim when we moved on, as if each of us had the magic.
Few of us became “professional” poets, instead chose careers as editors, lawyers, diplomats, doctors, journalists. And as misfortune dappled our journey, surely the wisdom of gratitude—for children, grandchildren, a fine book, “a singing in the mysteries connecting us”2—helped light our way.
1 From “Say It,” Say It (Dryad Press, 1979), by Roland Flint.
2 From “What I Have Tried to Say to You, Easy (LSU Press, 1999), by Roland Flint.
Roland Flint taught at Georgetown University for 30 years, published nine books of poems, and served as Poet Laureate of Maryland (1995-2000). He died at the age of 66 in 2001.