Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 10, 1991 TAG: 9102070224
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"I do admit to doing a little cogitating," said Carleton Drewry, who will be 90 years old in May.
Drewry's cogitations on the eternal mysteries once gave birth to poems in copious number. Five collections were issued between 1933 and 1975, and hundreds of others poems appeared in magazines and newspapers.
"Things came to me faster than I could use them," he said. "I've forgotten more poetry than was written by a lot of people who were considered fecund."
The old poet rarely writes a verse anymore. Fashions in poetry have changed, and he is not favorably impressed by what is being written today.
"It has no rhyme or meter, which comprised what I call the beauty of poetry," Drewry said. "Almost anybody can write a few free-verse lines and call himself a poet now. And few know enough to deny him."
In the family tree of poetry, Drewry's branch is somewhere between those of the modernists and what he calls "the forsooth poets." His is a fluid and lyrical style that falls comfortably on the ear whether read aloud or heard only in the reader's mind.
"It was very available to general readers but was by no means the kind of popular poetry that was common at the time," said Richard Dillard, professor of English at Hollins College. "He had a real dark view. . . . Readers could understand it, but it didn't give them the message that a lot poets of the time were giving them."
For the last eight or nine months, Drewry has been writing short stories. They are based on his recollections of Franklin County, though he said they contain "not a sprig of actuality."
His parents were born in the county, and Drewry spent a good part of his younger days there. A friend on the West Coast has expressed interest in publishing the stories after they are collected.
Prose comes easily to Drewry, like the poetry did before it. Getting it onto paper is not so easy.
Bedeviled by allergies, three strokes and a mysterious affliction that progressively took away his ability to walk, Drewry is an invalid. Typewriters wait conveniently on both sides of the recliner and at other places in the house, but using them is a labor.
"I'm a one-finger artist," he said.
Elisabeth, Drewry's wife of over 48 years, helps him transcribe his stories. She used to do readings for him too, back when he was too shy to face an audience.
"I just hated for him to miss those opportunities," she said.
"I'm not modest anymore," Drewry said. "But neither am I as sensitive to criticism as I once was. That's a good thing to get over, because it holds you back. You're afraid to do anything."
\ A Franklin County boyhood
\ Elisabeth Drewry is a retired teacher and former chairwoman of Roanoke's library board. She graciously presses refreshment on a visiting reporter, settling for cold orange juice after fuel of higher octane is declined.
After her husband has been interviewed, she walks the reporter outside and talks animatedly of the couple's pets, their two children and the handsome red and white car in which she takes her husband for rides in the country. It's one of his favorite diversions.
One of her stories is about the commotion that ensued once when their cat caught its tail inside the works of her husband's electric typewriter. The cat was picked up in Key West and is said to be descended from feline members of the Ernest Hemingway household.
The couple's daughter, Louise, lives in California. She is a Ph.D. and petroleum geologist who spends weekends playing fiddle for an all-woman country band called Lilies of the West. The couple's son, who is named for his father, lives in North Carolina and is a consultant in the computer industry.
Guy Carleton Drewry was born in 1901 in the Culpeper County community of Stevensburg. He was the youngest of the eight children of Samuel Richard and Julia Pinckard Drewry.
His father was a Methodist circuit minister. It meant that the family moved often, usually from one rural parish to another.
As a result, the future poet laureate received no formal schooling. He was taught to read by an older sister. He practiced on hymnals and other church publications.
Drewry was living on the family property in Franklin County during Prohibition. Liquor was obtainable despite the law, and Drewry would occasionally find a jug or two for friends. One of them was a Norfolk & Western Railway supervisor who in 1922 wired Drewry the offer of a job in Roanoke.
Drewry accepted and moved to the city. He was 21. He remembers that Roanoke's public library opened at about the same time, providing him with consistent access to books of poetry for the first time in his life.
Drewry never much liked his railroad work, certainly not as much as he liked writing poetry, but it wasn't in him to let go of a secure job. He stayed with the railroad's accounting department until 1966, when he retired at age 65.
By then he had published five volumes of poetry, all written during those precious hours away from the railroad. Never good at sleeping, he wrote a lot at night.
His was a reliable muse, though Drewry wasn't averse to helping her. He credits cigarettes and sometimes a sip or two with helping to evoke those moments of inspiration when
The striking of one match
Will make the sky go blind.
Unable to ignore the dangers of cigarettes, Drewry gave them up 15 or 20 years ago. It was a sacrifice.
"They put me into this other dimension," he said. "They changed my whole mental attitude. I believe my quitting the use of tobacco was responsible for my quitting writing."
Drewry still enjoys a drink now and then. He nursed a beer while being interviewed.
"The little pleasures of life help to relieve the overwhelming strain of living at all," he said. "I know my time is limited. That's the reason I indulge myself in anything that's reasonable and that I can afford. I figure life owes you something."
\ Streams of verse
\ Drewry always wanted to write. He started with stories, aiming to become a novelist. Poetry intruded itself as a natural outgrowth of the notes and snatches of prose he was always jotting down.
"It really began as a shortcut," he said. "I got into it and it became a habit. I always loved poetry, and it had been my special reading pleasure."
At age 22 he sold his first poem to a national magazine, The Dial, which was one of the premier literary journals of the time.
"I thought I had it made, but I was wrong," he said. It turned out to be the only piece The Dial ever bought, though Drewry was steadily successful with the New Republic, The Nation and numerous other periodicals.
The first book of poems, "Proud Horns," was published by Macmillan in 1933.
"I thought again I had it made," the poet said. The barest flicker of mirth crosses his face, which is long and bearded and has been described as "Lincolnesque."
It was 1948 when the second collection appeared. Titled "The Sounding Summer," it was published by E.P. Dutton.
The same publisher released "A Time of Turning" in 1951, "The Writhen Wood" in 1953 and "Cloud Above Clocktime" in 1957.
They were followed in 1975 by "To Love That Well," which contained both new work and selections from the earlier collections. It was published by A.S. Barnes.
The Poetry Awards Foundation named "A Time of Turning" 1951's best volume of poems in English.
He was named Virginia's poet laureate by act of the General Assembly in 1970. It was a lifetime appointment that carried no salary and imposed no responsibilities.
"They called from Richmond," Drewry said. "That's the first I knew of it."
As poet laureate, Drewry has taken it upon himself to arrange occasional readings at Hollins College. He worked through the Poetry Society of America, of which he is a vice president, and usually paid the visiting speakers from his own pocket.
Drewry is a former president of the Virginia Poetry Society and a member of the Authors Guild and the Authors League of America. Among his many honors is a lifetime achievement award from Artemis, a Roanoke-based journal of art and writing of the Blue Ridge region.
Donald Adams, late editor of The New York Times Book Review, once called Drewry one of the 10 best lyric poets in the country.
Not bad for someone who never studied in a grammar school classroom, much less a college class.
\ A poet born
\ Irv Broughton, editor of "The Writer's Mind: Interviews With American Authors," describes Drewry in the book as "a true hinterlander, operating away from the major poetry centers and the academy. Still, he is a remarkable poet who has persevered in his own quiet, intense way."
"One reviewer said I was a natural-born poet," Drewry said, "and I guess there is such a thing. I literally came from nowhere."
That's the unschooled country boy's best explanation for his ability to arrange words into verse acceptable to editors, publishers and anthologists. Grammar came easily too, and so did the gift of concise speech.
"I don't strain for anything," the old poet said. "It seems to be natural for me to speak correctly. It's always been that way."
Drewry always loved words "for the simple beauty of words themselves." He had a facility for rhyme and rhythm - perhaps, he said, from reading the old church hymnals.
And between his love for nature and his lifelong musings on the riddles of life, poetic inspiration was never a problem.
"The love of animals had something to do with it," said Drewry, a longtime vegetarian. "I never killed anything nor expect to, and that is my whole philosophy of life as far as character is concerned."
He has had acquaintances who pulled the trigger or drew a bow on animals, but none could be "down-to-earth, nature-to-nature friends."
After accidentally killing a toad with a mower, the poet wrote in part:
I am not your God.
I can not give life back
Into your body. I can only carry for awhile
The feel of your cold warty flesh upon my fingers.
It is my poor atonement for your death
That I write and I remember.
When Drewry was 3 years old, a neighbor died, and the curious child asked his mother about it. With her answer, he learned of human mortality.
"It has been glued in my memory for 86 years," he said of the incident. It launched the poet's acute preoccupation with death and the human burden of foreknowledge.
"Now am I mocked with my impermanence," he wrote in one poem. In others, death is "the unerring arrow," "the eternal snake," the "incredible cold imminence."
Life is a thing of "hot intolerable distress" and
. . . the malevolent herder
Driving us ever before you
Over this barren pasture
To our stalls in the stable of death.
"Life is too strange to be analyzed and explained," Drewry told his interviewer. Because of man's capacity to recognize and ponder it, he said, "that strangeness is my hope."
It is the shred that makes the minister's son an agnostic instead of an atheist, and it's the wellspring of much of his poetry.
"These things won't let me alone," he said.
Drewry speaks deliberately and with care. There are pauses to search for words or to peer intently through the window at life along Maiden Lane on a midwinter afternoon.
He accuses himself of talking too much because a visitor is there.
Perhaps, Drewry said, there is "a modicum of insanity in my nature." It could account for his "oracular outbursts" and maybe even for his being a poet.
"That's the way it is," he said. "I'm full of words. I do not know why. It makes a character out of a person, which I do not wish to be."
\ The Forest of Time
As one living long on a wood's edge I have seen
The bud's explosion in sun and the bloom's expansion
On boughs grown timeless from frost to frost, between
Spring's green collective cloud and autumn's declension.
\ That time begins by ending, that now is never,
I have learned by watching the trees let go their leaves:
In the forest of time the leaves are falling forever.
It is not time that goes nor the goer that grieves. \
- From "To Love That Well," 1975, by Carleton Drewry
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