With Pen & Dream

Time was when a Chaucer, a Milton or a Goethe could feel just as much at home at a civil servant's desk as in a poet's leafy glade. No more. Washington, no less than other world capitals, is a city of prose--in triplicate, quadruplicate, or burnt brown Thermo-Fax. In such surroundings, Katie Louchheim stands out as clearly as a lyric line, for she is one of the last survivors of a lost race: the poet-bureaucrat or bureaucrat-poet. Which comes first is hard to say, for last week, just a few days after she was promoted to Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs--highest rank ever attained by a woman in the State Department's Washington hierarchy--a New York publisher released Mrs. Louchheim's first book of verse.

Born in New York nearly 63 years ago, Katie Louchheim went to Washington in 1934 when her banker husband joined Franklin Roosevelt's Securities and Exchange Commission. She started work as a volunteer staffer for the League of Women Voters in the late '30s, gradually shifting to partisan work for the Democrats. By 1948 she was a delegate to the Democratic Convention; in 1952--after a bruising fight --she won a place on the Democratic National Committee, and in 1956 was elected vice chairman. President Ken nedy appointed her a State Department consultant on women's activities, later moved her up to Deputy Assistant Secretary for Community Advisory Services, a post she held until her promotion this month.

Mrs. Louchheim started composing poems for her family, to wrap up special sentiment with Christmas or birthday presents. Most of her writing is done late at night at a desk in her Georgetown bedroom or on holiday at the family's summer house on Cape Cod, but poetry has become far more than a hobby. "My psyche demands it," she says. "It's my escape hatch."

In With or Without Roses (Doubleday; $3.95), a collection of 63 of her verses, Mrs. Louchheim shows the influence of her favorite portrait poets, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Edgar Lee Masters, but displays a sharp, sometimes biting, always knowing wit that is all her own. Her subjects, readers will find, are anonymous, but nowhere is she more on target than in "The Bureaucrat":

One seldom sees a bureaucrat without a pipe or with a hat, his habitat is corridors, he takes his exercise indoors, he is always somewhere in between two meetings where he should have

been,

his favorite words are activate, coordinate, evaluate. He can't afford to be precise, indignant, adamant, concise;

A bureaucrat is seldom seen without a pen--or with a dream.

Yet her muse is by no means wholly Washington-pent or satire-bent. In "Grandmother's Mind," for example, she acutely renders childhood memories:

Grandmother's mind was a dark drawing room:

pearls and portraits and cups in their places

she rang for tea and the privileged faces

permitted her sanctum of polished gloom . . .

Her God was good to her, she served

Him well.

She is waiting now in her tucked

black best to pour His tea and correctly express her thanks. There is time and so

much to tell.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.