Growing up in East Texas on the border of Louisiana, poet and DU Professor Bin Ramke had a conversation with his uncle one day which raised the possibility that ordinary words harbored extraordinary secrets.
“I was probably ten or twelve years old,” he recalls. “My uncle was an aeronautical engineer. He was talking about developing materials for the outside of airplanes and said they were experimenting with ceramics, a word that to me meant things like ashtrays.”
Ramke asked his uncle what ceramics are and received a surprising response: “nonmetallic, inorganic compounds. That was almost sixty years ago,” Ramke says, “but I still remember the phrase. It had a musical quality. Over the years I realized that if you take away all the metals and you take away the organic, there is a negative way of focusing in on something. And to me, that’s actually the kind of thing that poetry does.”
Long interested in science, Ramke began undergraduate studies at Louisiana State University in 1965 as a mathematics major. But in his second semester he took a freshman English composition course based on five books of poetry including works by Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens and William Butler Yeats.
“Yeats was the one that I most readily responded to,” he says. “But there was something in particular with Wallace Stevens that appealed, although at first I was almost annoyed. Not knowing quite what was happening and feeling left out in some way. But I became quite interested in him and he remains a favorite today, even though there are things I have learned about the work and the person that I don’t like. I think the element of his life that was so intriguing was that he was kind of like the people I grew up with.”
By the end of that class Ramke had begun writing poetry and eventually switched majors to English. Married at twenty in the thick of the Vietnam War, Ramke also faced the possibility of being drafted.
“There was a good chance that through being married I would not be, but it was still uncertain. Student deferments had ended, and my draft number was something like twenty-three. So I thought I really need to get more focused and get my credits together for this degree. But it was taking classes from a poet named Stanley Plumly that caused me to think, I’m just going to do this.”
Ramke earned a master’s degree from the University of New Orleans in 1971 and a PhD from Ohio University in 1975. He then taught at Columbus College in Georgia and the University of Georgia before joining the faculty at DU in 1985, where he also edited Denver Quarterly from 1994-2014. He has authored a dozen volumes of poetry, most recently Missing the Moon (2014). His many literary accomplishments include serving as editor of the University of Georgia Press Poetry Series from 1984-2005.
From early on, Ramke reveled in connecting “the language and thought processes of the more scientific disciplines with the aesthetic and literary. In the first several books, I would come up with some phrase and just play with it and find some way to make it into a thing that had a shape,” he says. “I think my writing is actually influenced by everything that appeals to me short-term and long-term. I just sort of follow these connections as they occur.”
In later years, the etymology of words has become something of an obsession and a palpable force in Ramke’s work.
“I’m fascinated with the historical development of words and how meaning could change, how words are in process,” he says. “Even as I try to pin the meaning down on the page it’s slipping away.”
An essay he read about the words “constellation” and “consideration” (which should have the same meanings based on their Latin roots but for mysterious reasons evolved to mean something different) has influenced both his writing and teaching.
“The word constellation remains referring to a group of stars,” he says. “But that constellation would look completely different if we changed our angle. And then you get to consider as you look up at the stars what you’re looking at and end up finding relationships, seeing patterns. I actually think that’s sort of a model for poems, too. Maybe words are in a way the equivalent of those stars, for me. What happens when they are put together? Is there a connection already, or is there one that forms after?”
While the terrain his poetry explores has shifted over the years, the art form’s delivery methods, transformed by the dawning and development of the digital age, have likewise continued to evolve. Ramke points to a framed picture on his office wall of the cover of a past issue of Denver Quarterly.
“When I first became connected with the magazine an artist actually sat there with us and we said this quarter we’d like to have these words on the cover and it was all done by hand,” he says. “All of that now is done digitally. I observed over the years the hands-on publication process moving through various stages of digitizing. And then, with the parallel development of the internet, at a certain point the thought of ‘why bother turning this into paper and mailing it, why not just send it out to everyone in the world’ seemed to be a good idea.”
That said; Ramke still believes that the particular form in which readers partake of poetry carries intrinsic power.
“Whatever physical manifestation you encounter it in matters,” he says. “The matter of poetry matters, whether it’s listening to a folk singer in a bar, seeing things printed in a certain typeface on the page or dealing with it in ghostly formats that can be enlarged and decreased on the screen. Right now it seems that people appreciate all of those different formats and there is also very strong interest in the physical quality of books and journals. So it’s a kind of golden age for all aspects of book publishing.”
Likewise the digital age has influenced and expanded the ways in which younger poets actually write poetry.
“I sometimes teach courses at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and last fall I did some advising with graduate students,” he says. “Two of the students did a significant portion of composing their poems on their mobile phones while on the trains to and from where they lived and worked.”
In the end Ramke believes poetry, like all the arts, responds to the times in which it is written.
“For me, poetry has been able to respond to an awful lot,” he says. “On one hand it does tend to hold onto something. In certain ways you can feel in the making of poems that you’re doing a thing that has been done since presumably language was developed. It’s also extremely flexible in that it allows for newly recognized groups of people to find ways of saying what needs to be said, while there is also this opening up of all these digital forms, the development of the spoken word and the merging of different media. There are no real boundaries anymore in what a book means and lots of people are participating in ways that don’t fit into the established.”
For Ramke, teaching young people often pushing established boundaries of all kinds within the academic environment has proven the perfect complement to writing poetry. “A university education has this strange simultaneous need to both protect from and introduce [students] to the world,” he says. “I’m going to borrow a metaphor from a beautiful book I read recently, Membranes, a study of the discovery of membranes in cells. We are constantly, all of us, required to both be available to and protected from everything around us. We need the sun but we also need sun block because too much will kill us. It’s the same with all the pressures out there. I guess that’s what I find really exciting about teaching. We have to give people an opportunity to make a few bad decisions that they’re not going to be destroyed for and (allow them) to try to find ideas and connect with people that maybe they later on won’t want to connect with again. It’s quite an amazing privilege.”
Editor’s Note: the book referred to above by Dr. Ramke is Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth Century Literature, Science, and Politics, by Laura Otis, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2000.
