The poet Theodore Roethke died of a heart attack in August, 1963, while swimming in the pool of some friends in Bainbridge Island, Washington. At the time, Roethke was the poet-in-residence at the University of Washington, Seattle, having served on the faculty there since 1947, where he was a defining influence on a generation of Northwest poets. Roethke won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954 for his collection The Waking.

Roethke's sudden death left the University of Washington scrambling to find suitable replacements in their English department. Into this vacuum came Henry Reed, who accepted an appointment as Visiting Professor of Poetry for the winter quarter, 1964, beginning in January of that year.

Reed returned in 1965 to serve as an Assistant Professor of English, which coincided with Elizabeth Bishop's time teaching at the university. According to the interviews in Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography (Fountain and Brazeau, eds., 1994), Reed and Bishop got along famously, to the point of becoming snobbish cronies who alienated their colleagues. Both of them had a distaste for Roethke: more for the legacy he left with the students at the University, rather than his poetry. Henry Carlile (MA, University of Washington, 1967) remembers:

‘Henry used to say, "If I see the word salmon in another poem..." This complaint was not directed at Roethke so much as at a couple of other Northwest poets Henry disliked. He told me he had written a parody, though he wouldn't show it to me, in which he had managed to use the words clam and salmon thirty-two times. He read it once to another student, but not to me. By this time I think he had already decided it was just a throwaway poem.’

I imagine it was his students' endless imitations of poems like Roethke's "Northwest Sequence" which drove Reed to parody. When I first came across this reference, I paged through Reed's Collected Poems, in the hope that this "salmon and clams" poem had turned up in his papers or notebooks, but I could find no reference to it. Nor is it mentioned in other accounts of Reed's time in Seattle (London Review of Books, 24 October 1991, and 5 December 1991.

If he didn't throw it away, Reed's lost parody of Roethke could certainly stand proudly beside his satirization of other famous writers.

Update: Mr. Carlile comments that it would be inaccurate to call this a 'Roethke parody.' Thank you, sir!