Dave Etter, the Spring 1987 visiting poet at Austin Peay State University, did not match any preconceived ideas I had regarding what a poet should look like or talk like. Approaching 60 at the time, Etter resembled a former linebacker—squat, husky, and gruff. In the author photo on the back of one of his countless books, he sat in a simple folding chair out in the yard, squinting into sunlight, a pipe in one hand and a glass of Jack Daniels in the other, the half empty/half full bottle on a table at his side.
His was the first creative writing class I took as a beginning student. Back then we were on the quarter system (10 weeks), but those two and half months set a tone and an approach toward writing poems that remain part of my DNA. Etter expressed a genuine fascination with our attempts at poems and made writing them feel like the most ordinary thing one could do. For someone like me, coming from a small town in west Tennessee, I had never met a grown man who wrote poems until I stepped onto that campus.
Etter was ordinary in the best sense of the word. He didn’t come across as an academic—just a man in love with the marvelous simplicities of existence and this gift of language that could be profound and quirky at the same time. His own poems explored the speech patterns, images, and interior lives of small town people—each a vignette that, taken together, approximated an investigation into the human psyche. Though not a formalist, his poems, at times, have reminded me of the tight, explosive poems of E. A. Robinson, another poet whose portrayals of individual lives have become central to my own.
Etter gave himself fully to laughter, even in the middle of class, and found humor in the slightest turn of phrase. Our class sat around a conference table in an historic house—formerly the college President’s house—though by then the mansion housed the Honors program. We were a motley crew of misfits by comparison, a crowd of hoodlums mistakenly let into a museum. Informal and nonchalant, we erupted too often into laughter, and I imagined professors in their offices down the quiet hallways biding their time until the hoi polloi went on their way.
Weeks into his term as visiting poet, he gave a poetry reading to a packed auditorium, and he even read a few of the poems he’d written during the preceding weeks, a couple of which he had shared with our class. He wasn’t just “the teacher,” but at all times he gave the impression that, like us, he was still a student, a participant in class, willing to write with us, willing to share new work alongside us. He made us think that the poem to be concerned with, the poem to be excited by, was not the one published somewhere in a literary journal or collection of poems but the poem before us at the moment, the newest work, the language just emerging.
In that faculty reading, though, about half way through, out of nowhere he began talking about John Wayne, “the Duke,” the macho man of Westerns that had come to define what a man’s man looked like and sounded like. Then, for whatever reason—maybe for the novelty of it or for the laughs or maybe to make a point about masculinity—he began reading several poems in John Wayne’s voice. Perfect swagger, perfect pacing—a spot-on impersonation. One could imagine him sitting next to Johnny Carson, doing impersonations. The effect was dizzying, hilarious, and perplexing. Maybe the poems had more gravitas, each poem a fictional voice from a small-town life suddenly speaking with a recognizable, authoritative voice. Perhaps we were supposed to reconsider what manliness could sound like.
In a letter once, Dave said that only real men wrote poetry and that all the twerps were in insurance and sales. He could be blunt like that, and one could never be certain if he was trying on a statement for the sound of it, to test how true or untrue it was, or whether he really meant the sentiment.
Anyway, in addition to studying English, I also studied Marketing, but in the end I steered clear of that world.
I gave myself fully to poetry.