Hyam Plutzik in the Paris Review Daily

The Paris Review has posted a new essay on their blog, the Daily, telling the story of American poet Hyam Plutzik and the new attention his work is receiving during this Centennial year. The piece is co-written by Edward Moran and Phillip Witte. Plutzik never had work published by the Paris Review, which, founded in 1953, had only been in existence nine years when he died. Published quarterly, it has since become one of the nation’s most respected literary journals. The Daily posts several pieces each day including a wide variety of interesting literary items.

Here is the opening of Moran and Witte’s essay, titled “A Great Stag, Broad-Antlered: Rediscovering Hyam Plutzik”:

The conclusion of Hyam Plutzik’s 1962 poem, Horatio, provide an apt commentary on Plutzik’s own unobtrusive presence in the world of American letters:

A great stag came out of the woods,
Broad-antlered, approaching slowly on the moonlit field,
And looked about him like a king and re-entered the dark.

The seismic shifts in American culture since 1960 have made footing precarious indeed for those broad-antlered poets who wrote in a hieratic and philosophic diction. Eschewing the more vernacular excursions of the Beats or the confessional poets of the 1970s, Plutzik published three full collections of poems, the last, Horatio, an eighty-nine-page dramatic poem in which Hamlet’s friend grapples with the charge to “report me and my cause aright.”

Click here to read the entire article.

Rosanna Warren and the Poetry of Translation

The poet and scholar Rosanna Warren delivered a lecture on Poetry and Translation at the University of Rochester on April 24th as part the Plutzik Centennial Series–reviewed here by Jenny Boyar.

Rosanna Warren

From the outset, Rosanna Warren admitted that her profession is one of “smoke and mirrors.” It seems like an image out of that final scene in The Wizard of Oz—the translator frantically conjuring false images from behind a curtain. Yet as a description of Warren’s talk this scene is inaccurate: her discussion brought the oft-overlooked issue of translation out into the open, and Warren—with her numerous fellowships, award-winning poetry, and lauded translations—certainly does not need to feign her success, and delivered her insights with endearing humility.

In fact, Warren’s work proves that the most successful translations are the ones that don’t announce themselves. She shared several of her translations of Latin and French authors: Catullus, Horace, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and Michael Glück. Each piece was unique, which is surely a testament to Warren’s ability to inhabit and then carry over varying voices. Some of the authors had been translated numerous times before; others, Warren brought into English for the first time. Warren said that regardless of the project her goal is to “make an illusion” that captures what she sees in the poem. And in translating poetry, it seems that seeing necessarily encompasses hearing—that a translator must hold an image before her eyes while also listening for a sort of music.

Warren prefaced almost every reading by plainly stating, “I have failed.” It was less of an apology than a calm acceptance that every translation will fail inasmuch as it will never replicate its original; something will always be lost and no translation will escape the mediation of interpretation. Translating, according to Warren, always involves “determining what will be your own particular heartbreak.” Warren described, for example, how, in Catullus’ poetry, a character’s appetite is enhanced by Latin words that phonetically “gobble each other up” in ways English renders impossible. But with every heartbreak comes some kind of restoration. In one example from Michael Gluck’s “Thirteen Poems,” the English word “rest” and its multiple meanings, unavailable in the French, only enhanced the way the poem inscribed deep remembrance into the ordinary day. All of these instances of triumph and defeat make translation difficult to theorize (Warren spoke at several moments of the divide between translation in theory and in practice) but they are also a testament to translation’s virtues.

Three times during the lecture Warren remarked that when it comes to translating poetry, there is “more than one way to skin a cat” (I counted only because I, as a loyal cat owner, shirked every time). It seems like a crude analogy, especially for a process that has brought us some of our most cherished pieces of literature. But when I wasn’t thinking protectively of my own cat, I was thinking of the (translated) Greek myth of the Nemean lion and how Heracles discovers, in his attempt to fight the lion, that he will not be able to skin the cat—in any way—without using the animal’s own claws. Although this brings even more brutality to Warren’s analogy, it speaks to the fact that translating necessarily involves taking, or trying to inhabit, the very work that is being shaped. The product will never be returned to its original form, and might always be slightly exposed (and I’m sure violence, too, is in some cases a part of the game). But in the hands of an artist like Warren, it will always be something to be valued and worth complete visibility.

Jenny Boyar is a first-year Ph.D. student in Medieval Literature at UR and a regular contributor to a fistful of words, having previously reviewed lectures by Susan Stewart and Christopher Ricks.

Three Generations/Three Poets: a literary evening at The Betsy, Apr 29

The Betsy Hotel in South Beach, Florida, one of our partners in the Hyam Plutzik Centennial, has been celebrating this National Poetry Month with aplomb, breaking in its brand new Writers Room with residencies and readings by the poets Melissa Broder, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Malachi Black, and Ariana Reines, as well as a community reading featuring Billy Collins–all in partnership with the University of Wynwood Poetry Series.

On April 29, The Betsy will round out the month’s festivities with an evening of readings by the poets Daniel Halpern, founder and editor of Ecco; Campbell McGrath, Professor at Florida International University and winner of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant; and P. Scott Cunningham, founder of the University of Wynwood and O, Miami, a local poetry festival. After the readings, award-winning writer Les Standiford, Chair of the Creative Writing Program at FIU, will lead a discussion exploring the inextricable link between writing and teaching that is a reality for writers in our time and of all time.

The evening will also include a screening of the last interview the poet Stanley Kunitz gave before his death in 2006, originally shot for the documentary film Hyam Plutzik: American Poet.

The program will begin at 7pm, with a reception to follow at 9pm. The event is free and open to the public. View the full press release and invitation for additional information.

Philip Levine’s world of sound and memory

On April 10, 2012, US Poet Laureate Philip Levine appeared in the Plutzik Reading Series at the University of Rochester. David Krinick, a recent UR graduate, returns to a fistful of words to share his reflections on the reading.

Philip Levine, Poet Laureate

April 10’s Plutzik Series Reading diverged from its standard fare, opting out of the intimate Welles-Brown Room’s fifty-person capacity for a mostly-filled Hubbell Auditorium, which can accommodate over four hundred and fifty people. That is the draw Philip Levine is able to produce, and yet, his frank speech and quick wit kept the afternoon’s proceedings free from any over- bearing gravitas that one might expect from our nation’s Poet Laureate. Interspersed between readings of “Soloing,” “The Mercy,” “The Poem of Chalk,” “Ode for Mrs. William Settle” and “Gospel,” Levine drew laughs from us all with candid remarks such as recalling his son asking him, “Hey pop, so how many poems do you have out there working for you?”

His speech, however, seemed a foil when compared with his poetry. What was candid in conversation became simple truths and meaningful observations; what was humorous was spread out into a range of human experience: visceral pleasures, misery and being subject to grinding work. Levine’s work is historical, capturing and reviving fragments of American history through studies of the millions that helped build this country.

You know what work is – if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother…
“What Work is”

It is this unblushing free verse and an early life filled with labor in Motor City that earned Levine the title of “working class poet.” He admitted however he is not completely comfortable with the epithet, saying “I stopped doing heavy work when I was twenty-seven,” though playfully adding “I feel comfortable with the middle class, especially when they grab the bill.” Levine’s discomfort may arise from the fact that while his poetry is indelibly stamped with the effects of an industrial world, he has other facets: music, rural contemplation, and as one of his favorite poets, Federico García Lorca, said, “the constant baptism of newly created things” all run though his work.

Before reading “Gospel” he quipped, “I had a cat that was more spiritual than me, had more character than me too.” But regardless of intent or the source of the poem, its isolation and meditative quality speak to another side of Levine’s work.

…So I wander
these woods half sightless while
a west wind picks up in the trees
clustered above. The pines make
a music like no other, rising and
falling like a distant surf at night
that calms the darkness before
first light. “Soughing” we call it, from
Old English, no less. How weightless
words are when nothing will do.
“Gospel”

Here is a world of sound and memory. This experience speaks to no one group, but as a sensory experience is open to all.

Finally, one of Levine’s poem’s that struck me most was his “Soloing:”

What a world – when I
arrived the great bowl of mountains
was hidden in a cloud of exhaust,
the sea spread out like a carpet
of oil, the roses I had brought
from Fresno browned on the seat
besides me…
“Soloing”

What a world indeed… The perilous beauty of the Tejon Pass choked with fumes, smog stained roses. What today is commonplace pollution was transformed for me, transfixed by his words.

These images left me in a bleak mood, but also flooded me with memories from hearing of this phenomenon before: Snowboarding in Park City, Utah my friends Chris, Amanda and I were stranded in a yurt while a frozen ski lift forced hundreds to pool into a isolated valley basin. There we met a well-weathered, hard-working couple of Jack Mormons, sipping on Budweiser. After brief introductions, after we shocked them merely by dint of atheism and after complimenting our speech and openness, the husband told us of the unglamorous side of the very resort we were enjoying. Being a child of nearby Pleasant Grove, he was a testament to the birth and growth of the oil sea above his small mountain town. Like the rose in Levine’s poem, he recalled how cars driving through the exhaust clouds would emerge layered in a membrane of soot, how bikers diving through would hold their breath but could not avoid being coated.

Levine revived this memory, not only acting as a confirmation of a phenomenon I have only heard of, but managed to have it grip me through its great and terrible imagery. The poem seems to say, “Look, pay attention.” Levine shows this world is wrought with unending problems, but the love we bear allows us to drive hours through miasma to share in the dreams of others.

David Krinick also reviewed a reading by Eavan Boland last November.

“A Marvelous Lesson”

Among the full house at Nigel Maister’s reading of Horatio last Monday evening was Al Kremer, a gentleman who introduced himself to me as a former student of Hyam Plutzik. I asked him to write us, to share a memory of Plutzik as a teacher; here is his letter.

I thank you for the opportunity to tell you about being Mr. Plutzik’s student and hearing him read Horatio. I can hear him now:

I come from the court. I am Horatio
Who——”

“A pleasant lie! I know you. You’re a scholar
Going to study Pluto and Harris Tuttle…”
[from "The Ostler"]

I roared with laughter. He didn’t stop but before he went on I think his eyes caught mine nodding approvingly. Or at least that is what I like to think. I can’t be sure because it was a long time ago; the fall term 1960. He was teaching Modern Poetry. I now realize that I was probably in the last or second last course he would ever teach.

Horatio hadn’t yet been published; he was reading it from his manuscript. I had never heard a poet read his poetry before. It was unforgettable and I was utterly blown away. As I write I can still literally see him as he read from “The Ostler.” He had repeatedly said, and rightly so, poetry was a form of music and only truly appreciated when read out loud.

I was 21. After a break I had returned to the U of R to get my undergraduate degree after several years of Army service. I had gotten out of the Army one heartbeat before the Vietnam War began in full. My fellow officers who had remained in the service were being sent there as “advisors.” I knew because there were so few of them that during this same fall semester when they fell, their deaths would be reported in the New York Times. Had I stayed in…

I had wondered why I had left the U of R, why I had come back, and what life was all about. Looking back, although I didn’t realize it then, and wouldn’t do so for many years, Horatio was more than the tale of a friend trying to set his late friend’s reputation straight and tell the world who he really was. Horatio was about the essence of living life, positively. As I listened it seemed that Mr. Plutzik was saying that the point wasn’t whether Horatio would ever be able to persuade anyone that they were wrong about Hamlet, but that Hamlet had been his friend and he would keep trying. Life was about friendship, commitment, learning to keep an open mind, having ideals and speaking out for what is right. Writing poetry is about civilization and art and not about war.

What a marvelous lesson for a 21 year old kid. I have never forgotten him.

Bard Nigel Maister is to be thanked. I am extremely grateful that he sang for us. As I told him after his reading, he worked magic freeing Horatio from the pages of the book, bringing him into the Welles-Brown Room.

Al Kremer

We welcome memories of Plutzik or commentaries on his work, which can be submitted by email. Please note that pieces may be edited before posting.–P.W.

The theatrical Horatio in 1962 and 2012

Nigel Maister will read selections from Hyam Plutzik’s Horatio on Monday, March 26th, at 5:00pm in the Welles-Brown Room, Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester. Free and open to the public. Click here for more information.

A few weeks after Hyam Plutzik died, his friends and colleagues at the University of Rochester (where he had been teaching for 17 years) gathered in the Welles-Brown Room of Rush Rhees Library to present a reading of his long poem Horatio. This was fifty years ago today—March 21, 1962. Robert Hinman, who had delivered a eulogy to Plutzik a few weeks earlier, read the introduction to the reading, part of which is below, from a typescript found in the Hyam Plutzik Papers at UR:

Archie Miller read the role of Horatio; Richard Gollin, the role of Carlus; Everett Hafner, the role of Faustus; David Hadas, the role of the Shepherd; and Philip Graham, the role of the Ostler.

[…] It is our sorrow that this reading of Horatio has become a memorial as well as a tribute, but it is our joy and our good fortune that Hyam Plutzik has left to us so significant a monument. He worked upon it for over fifteen years, and some of us had the privilege of looking in upon it from time to time, of watching it grow, of hearing him read from it. We were struck then, as we are stuck now, by the boldness of his conception, by his daring to do what only a true poet can hope to succeed in doing, to build upon the work of a great predecessor without being derivative.

At the end of Hamlet, Horatio finds himself doomed to live on. His beloved friend enjoins him: “Absent thee from felicity awhile / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story.” Horatio must confront the task of living and explaining. But no critic or student of the play Hamlet can have any knowledge of that Horatio’s explanation. To the critic, Shakespeare’s Horatio has no existence outside Shakespeare’s play, where Horatio speaks perhaps 250 lines. However, a true poet can give a post-Hamlet Horatio existence by creating a universe for him to inhabit.

The Welles-Brown Room is cozily dim, wood-paneled, with marble columns at either end, shelves stuffed with oversized books, and an array of the library’s finest couches for napping between classes. It’s a perfect room for listening to poetry, modest and grandiose at once, intimate and regal.

I graduated from Rochester in 2010, an English major, and I could usually be found in the audience at the Plutzik Readings. It was not until last summer, however, that I began to know Hyam Plutzik himself, through his poems and letters. I was initially attracted to Horatio because of its unusual blend of poetic and dramatic characteristics, both in its own right and in its relationship to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I explored some of these characteristics in an essay, but the theory, that there is something theatrical about the poem Horatio, has remained, for me, untested, as I have not yet experienced any performance of Horatio. This Monday, however, I will have my chance.

Theatre is an event which depends on the coordination of three basic elements: a space, a performer, and an audience. Voice, movement, a script, props and so on are just the performer’s tools; imagination and attention are the audience’s tools. The event which results is a transformation, a bringing to life of inanimate things, perhaps, or a merging of many separate bodies into one, or the multiplication of one body into many. In Plutzik’s long poem, Horatio has the potential to become in turn each of the speakers whose voices he recollects. But will it be so? To find out whether Horatio is truly theatrical, it needs to be performed for an audience who has the will and the imagination to transform with the performer. If the audience, performer, and any of their tools (including the text) are thus transformed in a way not possible by any other means, then theatre has been achieved.

Hinman et al conducted such a test, and they seem to have believed the theory; the typescript quoted above refers to the characters as “roles,” after all, and casts them as one might a play. Next Monday, we’ll be able to hear another take on the experiment. This time, one performer, Nigel Maister, will read as Horatio, playing his cast of memory-figures. I can’t wait to see and hear the kinds of transformations that take place.

Phillip A. Witte

Our World In Ruins

Susan Stewart and the Phenomenon of Representation

On March 5, poet and critic Susan Stewart of Princeton University delivered her lecture “The Ruins Lesson” as part of the Plutzik Centennial Series at the University of Rochester. Jenny Boyar, a Ph.D. student in Medieval Literature at the U of R, returns to “a fistful of words” with her reflections.

It was pointed out more than once during Susan Stewart’s lecture that “ruin” can function as both a noun and a verb. Neither form of the word has a particularly positive connotation within our more colloquial language: to “ruin” something usually means to spoil it; similarly, we might hear—sometimes, it seems, with increasing frequency—that various institutions, places, or in some cases entire worlds, are “in ruins.” Stewart’s lecture did not shy away from these darker aspects of ruins, but her primary focus was on experience and representation: the ways that ruins demonstrate how the world is perceived, as opposed to how it has been destroyed in pieces.

An example of Anglo Saxon poetry in manuscript: the first page of Beowulf 1

Certainly the body of Stewart’s work as a poet, critic, and translator stands remarkably tall. She has published influential critical work on art and aesthetics, translations of Greek tragedies, and poetry collections that take as their subjects anything from forests to mediev- al dream visions. Stewart’s talk, however, did not indicate loyalty to any particular scholarly role—rather, what was most apparent was the eloquent insight that guided her discussion.

Of course, the literary awareness that could be said to unite all of Stewart’s work was not absent from her lecture, especially as she explored ruins as a subject of continued fasci- nation (and anxiety) for poets. The Anglo Sax- on corpus, with its resonances of the ubi sunt motif (from the Latin phrase Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt? or, “Where are those who came before us?”), easily lends itself to any assess- ment of ruin poetry, and so it was unsurprising that Stewart spent some time on the Anglo Saxon Ruin poem from the Exeter book, pair- ing the Old English alongside a striking trans- lation by Michael Alexander. A translation could be seen as a monument in its own right, a reconstruction of something removed by time and place. And indeed all of the poems Stewart showed, when projected on the same screen that had displayed so many images, appeared themselves to be almost ruin-like.

The Pyramid of Cestius and the Bank of England rotunda (19th century etching) 2

In fact, visual examples—mainly of prints of ruins—accompanied almost all of Stewart’s points. The ima- ges were largely of Roman structures, but she also included edifices like the Bank of England rotunda and the Pyramid of Cestius. Some pictures isolated the ruins while others showed people collected at their ed- ges or—in one memorable case—using their shelter for covert copulation. Stewart explained how ruins are located within places but also allow us to place oursel- ves. In some ways they mimic the human body— Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is an obvious example of this, but ruins can also be corporeal in the ways we are unable to see inside them, or know exactly how they were constructed. And then there is the relationship between ruins and speech: our own multiplicity of languages, according to the scriptures, emerged from the ruins of the Tower of Babel.

Stewart frequently returned to the idea of ruins as a joining site for things that are otherwise opposed: light and shadow, space and confinement, nature and artifice, past and present, the living and the dead. The thriving natural settings that so often provide context for ruins also, over time, erode them. Thus ruins are a testament to what is, and not what has been—or rather, a way in which we can construct what has been within the space of what is. They stand stoically before us, but only in pieces.

Stewart closed her talk with the problem that ruins present, the violence of representation that insistently reifies a particular object. She noted that form cannot, ultimately, express everything that has been, which inevitably leaves us wanting more. And in fact Stewart’s lecture was susceptible to these very sorts of problems (I think I heard a few exclamations of “Where was Stonehenge?” as everyone filed out of the presentation venue).

So often lectures are driven by argument, and it would be tempting to compare Stewart’s more meditative exploration against such expectations—as well as against her earlier, theory-driven scholarship. But it seems like any singular analysis would fail to capture a subject that is by its very nature all-encompassing and elusive, only half-standing. As was pointed out during the talk, it is often only through looking at pieces that we can see a greater whole. One of Stewart’s final points was how ruins—whether encountered in life, in print, or on a projection screen in a lecture—ultimately exist and survive in the imagination. The importance, then, is less in what withers or is incomplete than that that which is, through close attention, continuously constructed.

Jenny Boyar
To read Jenny’s previous contribution to this blog, click here.

Photo credits:
1New World Encyclopedia
2Wikimedia Commons

Plutzik Readers Past: Howard Nemerov

Anticipating the Plutzik Series’ 50th Anniversary Exhibition at the U of R, which will open in Fall 2012–over the coming months, we’ll occasionally discuss the work of a Reader from the Series’ roster of nearly 300 acclaimed and award-winning poets, novelists, playwrights, and essayists. This week’s poet is Howard Nemerov, who gave a reading in the Plutzik Series in 1963. Both the Exhibition project AND this blog series are open to creative contributions by UR students and alumni—visit the Exhibition page for more information.

According to many critics, Howard Nemerov (1920-1991) is a prime example of that mid-to-late-century generation of American poets who had to contend with the ecliptic influence of the Moderns.* For much of his early work, wrote Peter Meinke in his study Howard Nemerov, the poet was “writing Eliot, Yeats, and Stevens out of his system” in order to find his own voice, which manifests in the contemplative, quiet lyricism of his later verse. Reviewing his Collected Poems (1977), Helen Vendler wrote that as “the echoes of the grand maitres fade, the poems get steadily better,” and in a review of Nemerov’s third collection, Hayden Carruth declared that “steady improvement, I take it, is one sign of formidable ability.” Nemerov’s ability was well-recognized: The Collected Poems won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and Nemerov served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 1988 to 1990.

Some of Nemerov’s early poems strike me as moments of promise for their deadly serious humor, if nothing else. I especially like this one, from his first book, The Image and the Law (1947):

A Chromium-plated Hat: Inlaid with Scenes from Siegfried

           Choreography by the New York Times Book Review

Greatness. Warmth, and human insight. Music.
But greatness. The greatness of Socrates
And Dante and Alexander Woollcott, and the
True charm of Horatio Alger, Jr. Also,
The greatness of eighteen-year-old-girls,
The warmth of retired corporation lawyers,
The impossibility of having enough books
About truth. The important thing is
The relation of truth to our time to Kitty Foyle.
In addition, music. It is good to have music,
But not at the expense of greatness:
Better to be truly great and unmusical.
If you are merely musical you are probably
Not one of the great authors. The place
Of the glorious few is in that case
Not for you, but for Thomas B. Costain,
Who is welcome here almost any time.

To sum up, the truth of the matter is,
Quoting William Lyon Phelps, “There is
No masterpiece like Lohengrin, that
Masterpiece,” and it may be better anyhow
To have human warmth than greatness:
Like Grandpa, who sat by the fire all
Winter long, in a buffalo rug with fleas.

Here, in parodying the popular literary critique of his day, Nemerov is playing the terribly serious humorist, a role which he continues to develop throughout his career into late poems such as the incisive “Learning the Trees.” He holds up the vanity of assessments of greatness, when that term can as easily be applied to Dante, the great medieval Italian poet and author of the Divine Comedy; Alexander Woollcott, a vituperative radio personality renowned in the 1920s and 30s; or “eighteen-year-old-girls”–wait, what kind of greatness are we talking about, here?

The opening laundry list of general, abstract terms (“Greatness. Warmth, and human insight. Music”) has no specific context, only the general smorgasbord of Humanities offered by the title and epigraph: decorative arts (an “inlaid,” “chromium-plated hat”), opera (“scenes from Siegfried”), dance (“Choreography”) and literary discourse (“The New York Times Book Review”). After a few lines of random, abstract iteration, the poem shifts into stilted, arbitrary formulations of those abstracts, and further name-dropping: “The place / Of the glorious few is in that case / Not for you, but for Thomas B. Costain, / Who is welcome here almost any time.” The genial tone here is an instance of Nemerov’s early penchant for irony: it is at once honest and inviting in its “welcome,” yet as holier-than-thou as the ivory tower in its deftly qualifying “almost.” His irony is especially acute because Nemerov is a sympathetic satirist, an unabashed participant in the conversation he lampoons.

The line, “The impossibility of having enough books / about truth” reminds me of a line from Moby-Dick: “Though of real knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty,” which seems a fair account of Nemerov’s view in this poem; the talkers are talking, and what they say is sweeping, redundant, useless: “No masterpiece like Lohengrin, that / Masterpiece.” The poem’s brilliance lies in its sudden turn, in the last two lines, to a deeply human and compelling image: “Like Grandpa, who sat by the fire all / Winter long, in a buffalo rug with fleas.” In this image the poem is looking for the aforementioned “human warmth” which, the poem concedes, “it may be better anyhow / To have…than greatness”. In that image the “human warmth” is again ambiguous—not morally or politically so, as it was of “retired corporation lawyers;” here the ambiguity involves the difference between figurative and literal senses of human warmth. “Grandpa” is a term of endearment: so it is the warmth of human affection, the warmth of love for another; “the fire,” the “buffalo rug,” even the “fleas” convey the second sense, that of actual, bodily warmth as an independent need.

This kind of ambiguity is Nemerov’s forte. Both are meant, and both reinforce the point; in a discussion of what is important, “human warmth” will always win over artistic “greatness,” which by comparison seems an utterly useless and vain conversation. But the finally disturbing and seemingly irremediable dilemma is that the point has been the stuff of a poem, the very thing about whose greatness we are (says Nemerov, the poet himself) being so vain. And that, I think, is precisely why the poem is so damn funny.

Phillip A. Witte

*For an insightful biography and survey of criticism, visit the Poetry Foundation’s Howard Nemerov page.

Buried Treasure: Typescripts

We recently found a copy of Plutzik’s Aspects of Proteus (Atheneum Press, 1949) which, we were intrigued to discover, was not only signed and inscribed to Plutzik’s friend and fellow U of R Professor Bernard Schilling—the book also included, folded up inside the back flyleaf, three pages of Plutzik’s poems typed on crinkly onionskin paper. Probably a gift to Schilling sometime between 1949 and the publication of Apples from Shinar by Wesleyan UP ten years later, the typescripts include seven poems:

If Causality Is Impossible, Genesis Is Recurrent
The Zero that Is All
A Philosopher on a Mountain in Scythia
Of Objects Considered as Fortresses in Baleful Space
Report Prepared for Presentation to the International Society of
      Anatomy and Psychology
Samuel Huntsman
Mr. Eddington’s Dream

A perusal of the index to the Collected Poems (BOA Editions, 1987) shows that five of these poems would be included in Apples from Shinar (and one of those five would be re-titled “The Mythos of Samuel Huntsman”). One poem, “Report Prepared…”, would be included in the “Uncollected and Unpublished” section of the Collected Poems. It’s possible that the last little poem, composed of two rhymed couplets, does not exist anywhere else.

Above: Detail, with “Mr. Eddington’s Dream” highlighted;
Below: entire typescript page, including “Samuel Huntsman”

Although it is light in both tone and quantity, “Mr. Eddington’s Dream” is a synthesis of Plutzik’s eternal themes, of which the other poems in the typescript are also representative. Here are deific figures; Time, apart, at ease, “rocking,” looks on as characters—who are Lords and, at the same time, dogs—struggle for mere sustenance, uncertain of success, unable to tell “who won.” Presented as a dream, the poem could be at once a reflection of the real on the one hand (the daytime musings of this Mr. Eddington, perhaps, given play on the dreamtime stage), and a pure whimsy in light rhyme, on the other. The name “Eddington,” like “Pollington” or “Ingleshot,” affects caricature, as if it were to distance the poet from his world-weighty material, similar to the way John Berryman imports loopy syntax and wry baby-talk in his negotiation with human suffering in The Dream Songs.

It’s a small addition to a well-established body of work. But if it sends the reader back to look over that work with slightly recalibrated sensibilities, then it’s worth the world.

Phillip A. Witte

Hyam Plutzik: U.S. Army Poet in England, 1944-45

I’ve recently been in touch with Cameron Self, a poet based in East Anglia in the United Kingdom. Specifically, he’s in the city of Norwich, county of Norfolk, and runs the Literary Norfolk website. During World War II, that region of England was the nerve center of the Allied military operations that led to the successful D-Day invasion of Normandy and the subsequent victory over the Axis powers in 1945. I had been to Norwich myself two years ago, visiting the 2nd Air Division Memorial Library, which houses many reference works, letters, and other memorabilia relating to the American presence there.

Hundreds of thousands of American troops were stationed in Norfolk, at 67 airbases, including Shipdham, which inspired Hyam Plutzik to write two of his most significant war poems, “Bomber Base” and “On the Airfield at Shipdham.”

Cameron Self was so impressed with these two poems that he posted them on Literary Norfolk, making Hyam the only non-English poet to be so honored. He told me he drove out to Shipdham the following day to photograph the long-abandoned buildings, which can be viewed on the Literary Norfolk site.

As I gazed at the crumbling buildings at Shipdham, I immediately envisioned the site as a most theatrical venue. Suddenly, the old air base was no longer a 1940s relic but an ancient castle from East Anglia’s storied past, when Vikings and Saxons roamed the countryside. Hyam Plutzik was so inspired by this historic landscape that he drafted the prologue to Horatio, his long narrative poem published in 1961 that won him finalist status for the Pulitzer Prize. When I looked at the parapets of the Shipdham base, I could envision Horatio, friend and confidant to Hamlet, as he

went out on the platform, where the guard stood—
Bernardo, my friend—staring down at the city.
“What ghosts could come tonight if they so wished?”

It is obvious that the Norfolk countryside had a profound impact on Hyam Plutzik’s evolution as a poet. Through his wartime duties as an Ordnance and Information Officer at his base, he spent much time visiting local landmarks and meeting the movers and shakers of Norfolk’s literary culture, including the author Ralph Hale Mottram (later Lord Mayor of Norwich) and Lady Ironside, wife of the commander of the British forces in the early days of the war.

Cameron Self tells me that the British are planning a three-year-long program of events to commemorate the contributions of the American forces in Norwich during World War II. The poems, letters, and journals of Hyam Plutzik provide valuable insights into what life was like for military personnel during this crucial juncture in world history.

I am particularly moved by a letter he wrote to his wife, Tanya, on the eve of the D-Day invasion, just as the bombers were taking off for the invasion of France. When Hyam wrote this letter, he had no idea whether their mission would be successful or not. Enjoying the vantage point of hindsight, we know the outcome. But on the evening of June 5, 1944, nothing was certain, adding a deep poignancy to these words:

June 5, 1944

The invasion of France began this morning, after all the years of preparation and all the wrongs suffered at the hands of the evil ones. It has been a cold and bitter day and now in the evening the sky is overcast and a drizzle is falling. The planes are out on a mission. Another officer and I stood under the wing of a grounded plane and saw them take off, one after the other, roaring in the long takeoff and then rising laboriously in the air. For hours later a roar could be heard above the clouds.

How cold it must be in the sky now, and on the coasts of France!

I went around with the men as they loaded three of the planes. The hoisting contrivance for the 500-lb’ers is ingenious. They worked as though fiends were pursuing them. Then when the bombs were up in the plane’s belly, we fuzed them and threaded the arming wire. It was such a routine task, yet to think that this was a load of death for the enemy. The men are almost nonchalant in their work, except for their haste, yet even still they have a detestation for the fragmentate [sic] bombs.

On a bomber base in England, with a farmer harrowing an adjacent field behind a plodding horse, I pass the D-day of this war.

Edward Moran