Charles Wright remembers his teacher Donald Justice

I was twenty six in 1961 when I arrived, and had never written a proper poem in my life. The workshop itself was housed in a group of Quonset huts left over from the time of World War II—there is a parking lot, without plaque, I might add, where they used to be. I was very lucky in having some wonderful classmates who taught me what and how to read, and what and how to write. Mark Strand, primarily, and Al Lee and William Brown. Neither Brown nor Lee write any more, but they were extremely talented and helped me enormously in the early days. Strand still does. Donald Justice was our teacher and controlled the entire technical and moral fiber of the workshop. He was exemplary in all ways. I probably learned more from him than anyone else who ever went through his classes. I was absorbent and soaked up whatever spilled out in the classrooms, in the bars after classes, in the offices, everywhere.

John Berryman’s class at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, with students Philip Levine, Robert Dana, Donald Justice, W.D. Snodgrass

Students recall their time in the Workshop (when classes were taught in the Quonset Huts by the Iowa River) in the collection Seems like Old Times in the University of Iowa archives:

“…to have been in John Berryman’s extraordinary and intense poetry workshop with W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, Philip Levine, Paul Petrie, Robert Dana, Constance Urdang, Jane Cooper, Donald Finkel, Henri Coulette—the list continues beyond the capacity of my memory, but it was a course I approached with rapture and fear, owing in part to Berryman’s sometimes jagged abruptness, as when, having warned me beforehand that he was going to exhibit the profound mortality of one of my works, he held it out at arm’s length in the class, looked at it with loathing, and said, “Now, what are we to say about this ridiculous poem?”

Robert Dana on the Quonset Huts

The Quonset Huts acted as temporary structures on the University of Iowa campus, and were the location of Iowa Writer’s Workshop classes in the early 1950’s. They remained on the east side of the Iowa River after World War II. “None of the classrooms in these huts had air conditioning,” writes Workshop graduate Robert Dana of the buildings “and when the rain drummed down on them, all talk ceased […] Nonetheless, the workshop quarters were basically humble..”

Robert Penn Warren Visits Paul Engle in Iowa City

Robert Penn Warren visiting Paul Engle in Iowa City, 1951. In the background, the corrugated buildings are the Quonset Huts — over Warren’s right shoulder is the original Iowa Writers’ Workshop structure. This location, next to the Iowa Memorial Union, is now home to the Iowa Advanced Technologies Laboratory.