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

Former student of Hyam Plutzik remembers his teaching

This piece was written by Arnulf Zweig, a member of the U of R class of 1952, and appears as part of the Meliora Moments project from the University of Rochester. Zweig is a philosopher and has held teaching positions at Baruch College of CUNY, the University of Oregon, and M.I.T., among others.

It’s amazing to me how vivid my memories are of Professor Hyam Plutzik (of the English Department), even at 81. When I think about a particularly significant moment of personal growth during my years at Rochester, what comes immediately to mind is not a lecture or class but Plutzik’s review of the student literary magazine in which I had published a story and some poems. I was a philosophy major but, like most of my friends, I had literary aspirations—“pretensions” would be a better word. And that is what Plutzik recognized. I can still recall his exact words in that review: “Mr. Zweig must take care to avoid the least suggestion of pretentiousness in his work.” Deflationary, when I was dying for praise. Oh, there were some favorable comments as well, a concession that my story (it was called “You Can Stop Crying Now,” a title taken from a poem by Kenneth Patchen) “managed to win a certain victory in the end.” But what counted for me was Plutzik’s seeing my flaws as a writer, my temptation to mimic the language and diction of others. Plutzik set me straight. His honest, accurate criticism taught me more, as a future teacher and scholar, than any applause would have done.

The page on which his review was printed has long disintegrated (along with my undergraduate scribbling) but I thank him still for helping me to see where my talents did not lie, and for showing me how to tell students I have myself had to review that they must find their own voice.

Arnulf Zweig

A Memorial to Hyam Plutzik (July 13, 1911-January 8, 1962)

This Sunday, January 8, is the 50th Yahrzeit of Hyam Plutzik, the anniversary of the day he died. In remembrance, we present this Memorial, as delivered by Robert Hinman at Temple B’rith Kodesh in Rochester, New York on February 16, 1962. Formerly a Professor of English at the University of Rochester, Dr. Hinman later taught at Emory University and the University of Pittsburgh, and retired in 1990. He died January 2, 2011.

He saw the red osier dogwood as winter lightning, vital energy poised in silent flame,

In the naked and forlorn season
When snow is winner…

…in the still red branches
The stubborn, unflinching fire of that time,

he saw the burning bush that was not consumed, he heard the voice that broke the grip of darkness on the face of the waters. He did not flinch before, or even repudiate, the entropic vision of his Scythian philosopher, the vision of Lord Snow as ultimate master, “Under his coat completing his last reduction” ["A Philosopher on a Mountain in Scythia"]. But his own vision extended beyond the “wound that matter makes in space,” beyond the quenching of Lord Fire. He would

…not believe the horror at the door, the snow-white worm

Gnawing at the edges of the mind,
The hissing tree when the sleet falls.

When the red osier dogwood flared motionlessly against the snow, he was certain of the return of

…all the families
Whom the sun fathers, in the cauldron of his mercy.
[from "Because the Red Osier Dogwood"]

The man himself was as much winter sentinel as is the osier of his poem. From any winter landscape, literal or spiritual, he emerged in sharp outline. However bleak that landscape, the man, by his staunch integrity, by his very existence, defied the encroaching ice. For an instant the powerful brow suggested his unyielding confrontation of the pitiless matter-of-fact. Momentarily one was conscious of the stout fibers resisting the destructive cold. Then he smiled and spoke, and one knew that—just as bright wings would flutter leaves on branches that had seemed bare ruined choirs, so had the man seemed fleetingly grim only because he relentlessly shielded warmth, gentleness, and love from whatever chill threatened to extinguish them.

And the poems match the man. They are committed to conserving the spark in the polar crystal. If their exterior resembles the crystal concreted to diamond, that is only because such hardness is necessary to contain the feeling that coruscates within. They are stripped to essentials because no syllable must be wasted in the struggle of meaning with vacuity. Each tightly closed image, like a seed, must enfold in potential the burgeoning tree, so that the pattern of burgeoning shall not be lost. Bare and taut of form, spare and tough of line, his lyrics, when first encountered, are as stark as branches on a grey horizon. But the blossoms and the leaves and the fruit are implicit, just as he knew them to be in the tight synopses of every true artist, even the greatest, when he wrote “Winter, Never Mind Where.”

The illusion is one of flatness: the sky
Has no depth, is a sheet of tin
Upon which the blackened branches and twigs
Are corroded, burnt in
By a strong acid:

Hang there, outside the squares of pane—
Work of a gruff but extraordinary artist,
Who has done good things in pastels too,
In summer scenes, leaf-stuff
And the placid

Nuances of snow.
Since, as we know,
Genius is superior to praise or blame,
He will not mind if I suggest:
“Fewer cold subjects please (they do not please!).
Really, your leafy stuff, Sir, is best.”

He found the “leafy stuff” too precious for prodigality. But to husband beauty is to cherish and preserve it, not to spurn it, or the life it gives flesh to. And that life, undefeated, resilient, is in his verse, however somber, as he saw life in Connecticut November’s naked earth.

O she is tired
With too much bearing,
Too little sparing
In young days.

But she is young.
You will discover
She waits a lover;
That they but drowse:

The passionate limbs
And the eager mouth.
She is the south
Awaiting the sun.

[from "Connecticut November"]

That life, appearing so often in his verse as strictly controlled but intense passion, appears also as zest, ebullience, even gaiety, for gaiety is one manifestation of that vitality he saw perpetually threatened and perpetually renewed. Such gaiety rollicks as it mocks and challenges stuffy solemnity in his drinking song celebrating Henry the Eighth, who “Each year spiced his marriage muddle / By trade-in for a newer model.”

And what a most amusing story, O!
When he met up with Queen Victoria!

There she was quietly mumbling a benison
With a couple of friends and Alfred Tennyson,

When who should hail this pious foursome
But old King Henry and a whoresome.

(Do read the gist of their conversation
In last week’s issue of The Nation.)

Up tankards then for old King Harry!
Bad he was, but he was merry!

[from "Drinking Song"]

He wept with Rabbis Elazer and Jochanan for beauty perished, but his grief did not paralyze a sense of fun that saw an “Absurd Cycle” in ontogeny’s recapitulation of phylogeny.

The wombed thing
First like a fish
Will become a man
And make a wish

For a peck of apples,
A pint of dream,
And a leaping fish
In a stream.

Nor did grief incapacitate the wit that could jauntily reduce devouring time to “The Bug with a Nose like an Awl.”

Abednego and Cicero
Were brought down by this monster
Who does the like to lark or crow,
To pundit and to punster;

Who toppled to his doom
The namesake of Big Boulder.
It perches now in this room
Honing its blade on your shoulder.

But, although the serenity that incorporates, even permits, gaiety and wit was certainly his, gaiety is not, in his poetry, his invariable, or even prevailing mood. The spirit of such a poet is the spirit of wholeness, of harmony, not vitiated, but rather ennobled by—as it ennobles—his basically tragic view of life. It is a spirit aware of joy rendered poignant by an undercurrent of sorrow, joy that can revel in the sweat of toil, “make a blessing of Adam’s curse,” without ignoring that it was and is a curse, without blinking at the desperate self-knowledge accompanying it, a self-knowledge he probed deeply even so early as his writing “Death at The Purple Rim,” the self-knowledge of the “wise lost ape.” That self-knowledge is his subject, as it is man’s. It is what Horatio principally discovers as he searches for the meaning of Hamlet’s existence [in the long poem Horatio].

Hyam Plutzik knew that in our world brightness has fallen from the air, that the once-luminous myths have shrunken away: Phoebus and his steeds have become “inanimate forces / and a minor star.”

And Zephyrus eke,
Vulcan or Thor,
Are all together
Weather, weather,
And nothing more.
Useless as Greek.

Yet the apparently restricted poetic horizons did not stifle him, nor did the new immensities terrify. He readily accepted as the poet’s sphere

Loneliest, latest,
The greatest, greatest,
The occult heart
Of the talking beast.
[from "He Inspects His Armory"]

For although the deepest knowledge of that heart is awareness of a man’s tragic destiny, from the language of that heart alone can come any triumph over such destiny. It is the image-making, symbolizing power that has transcended, not only bestiality, but blankness itself. Man has no power over the inexorable process of the suns. But the talking beast, who alone of all creatures can be aware of eternity, can also mitigate its terrors, for he can fill its emptiness, or a corner of its emptiness, at least for a little while. Or rather, Hyam Plutzik says, if the talker is a poet, he brings the eternal to life, forces it up into human consciousness from beneath the endless snow. “There may be little or much beyond the grave” [Robert Frost], but what belongs only to eternity has no existence to those who dwell within time. Therefore, the poet is not an eternizer. He does not lift mutable objects into eternity; to do that would be to cause them to disappear from mortal consciousness. He draws them back from eternity, sets the eternal free in an image, so that it may be known.

Beyond the image of the willow
There is a willow no man knows
Or watches with corruptible eyes.

Deep in a field where no man goes
Nor bird flies
The willow fronts an empty road.

The bird hovers in other skies:
World where only these wings exist.

As the rays of the sun are drawn together
By a curved glass and rekindled to fire
So, to the poppies of life and death,
So does desire
Draw them and bend them and bind them so,
So the noise of the wings can at last be heard
And the willow-image do grace to a bird
And the ghost on the roadway give them word
Not for forever, only a day.

["The Importance of Poetry, Or the Coming Forth from Eternity into Time"]

Thus the poet guards life, asserts it, creates it, indeed, as Horatio finds that each separate imagination has created his own Hamlet, though none a Hamlet so much alive as has the poetic Horatio, who speaks in the poem for Hyam Plutzik. The wider and more powerful the imagination, the larger the universe that is brought into the stream of time. To accept time, to refuse to be lost in eternity, is to accept tragedy, but it is also to affirm life, to affirm that the osier will flower season after season. So long as a voice speaks the “Requiem for Edward Carrigh,” no man can disappear into the infinite cold.

The sudden translation to the bottom of the hill,
To be with the dull stones and the sterile earth
After the bitter climbing of forty-four years.

You who postponed the quiet amenities,
The lazy conversation after lunch,
The cigarette in mid-afternoon, the daydream
When a certain wind came to your window
Out of that young, beautiful sea, the Atlantic.

Night, Nighttime in the earth.
The body settles patiently into eternity.
Time moves, yes, but like glacial ice.
The tireless eyes stare out of the sky, answering nothing,
And the silence is august and terrible.

While we were lost in our petty commerce
Of coming and going (that day a barking dog annoyed us,
A buzzing insect, a lagging clock)
You suddenly left your house, your city and your country,
Traveling in the night, few knowing,
To fight with a dark archangel in the desert.

Already there is no one to call to.
The body of Edward is not Edward,
Nor the ashes of Gregory Gregory.
Alexander is no longer Alexander in the earth.

Nothing can be done but something can be said at least.

As a tragic and elegiac poet, Hyam Plutzik sought to make the will of God prevail, for he used the power of words to insist that what his fiat touched should not languish in the eternity of Chaos and Old Night.

Robert Hinman

Correction: a version of this article posted on January 4, 2012 stated that Hinman was a former Chair of the English Department at Rochester. He was a Professor of English at Rochester, and later Chair at the University of Pittsburgh.

New Hyam Plutzik Poetry content for the New Year

Hello and welcome to 2012! As we enter this 50th year of the Plutzik Poetry Series and a full year of Plutzik Centennial celebrations, we’re pleased to announce the completion of a whole slew of new content added to the Hyam Plutzik Poetry site. A handy index on the Centennial page organizes the material in relation to 50/100 programming.

Two Centennial-centric additions are the Partners page, which includes biographies of creative collaborators and participating organizations, with links to their websites; and the Creative Opportunities page, on which we will post all invitations to get involved with Centennial projects.

In honor of the 50th Anniversary of the Series, we’ve published “An Informal History of the Plutzik Reading Series” in the Poetry Series section. This is a fond and humorous reminiscence written by U of R Professor of English Emeritus and one of the Series’ longest-term directors, Jarold Ramsey. Additional research into this history was provided by Professor Russell Peck, also of the U of R English Department. The essay chronicles the intellectual climate in which the Series was born and the continuing success of series’ directors in maintaining a variety of high-caliber readings despite logistical and financial challenges. The essay concludes with an entertaining series of highlights and lowlights from Ramsey’s personal recollections. Also available is the complete roster of Series Readers from 1962 to present.

We’ve also added an expanded essay discussing the Life and Poetry of Hyam Plutzik. This essay is divided into sections detailing chronological periods in Plutzik’s life, as well as thematic sections including Jewish identity and the Cold War environment in which Plutzik spent the better part of his professional life in academia.

Next, you should visit two additions to the Resources section: The new Plutzik Library page provides information about the Hyam Plutzik Library for Contemporary Writing at the University of Rochester, including descriptions of exhibits held there as part of the Plutzik Centennial and Series 50th Anniversary celebrations.

Another new page, the Audio Library, presents a selection of audio materials relating to Plutzik’s poetry including musical compositions inspired by the poems; a recording of Plutzik reading and discussing his last published work, the long poem Horatio; and an NPR interview from 2007, in which Literary Consultant Edward Moran discusses the documentary film Hyam Plutzik: American Poet.

And there’s more to come–an online database of recent scholarly essays concerning Plutzik’s work will be available soon.

The art of Kenneth Patchen: Photos by Samantha Miller

From September 2011 to January 2012, the Department of Rare Books at Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester held an exhibition called An Astonished Eye: The Art of Kenneth Patchen. The aggressive colors and broad-brushed calligraphy of Patchen’s picture-poems drew a stark contrast to the austere papers of the Hyam Plutzik exhibits which were on view in the adjacent space.

Photographer Samantha Miller (University of Rochester Take Five/2012) made these images, below, of several items in the Patchen exhibit. Bushes can seen in the background of a few of the images: part of the display was mounted directly on the courtyard-facing windows of the Rare Books Room.

Miller’s photographs faithfully represent the vivid colors of Patchen’s exhibit, yet she uses rhythmic composition and a slight soft focus to create artworks of her own.

Paintings by Kenneth Patchen; photos by Samantha Miller

Hyam Plutzik, Spirituality, and Poetry: A Unitarian Connection

I spoke the other day with Rev. Dr. Frank Carpenter, a Unitarian minister in Cincinnati, who makes a reference to Hyam Plutzik’s “I Am Disquieted When I See Many Hills” in his 2002 sermon, “Unitarianism as Poetry.” Dr. Carpenter tells me he was introduced to Plutzik’s work through Hayden Carruth’s 1970 anthology The Voice That Is Great Within Us. In his sermon, he places Plutzik squarely within that rich spiritual and metaphysical tradition that includes English poets like Milton and American transcendentalists like Emerson. As can be gleaned from his lecture notes and correspondence, Plutzik admired both these writers, as well as other poets like Donne, Herbert, and Eliot, who saw poetry as a window on the other-worldly. Even though Plutzik always remained faithful to his Jewish roots, he had a deep understanding of the symbolism and significance of Christian imagery—thanks, in part, to his undergraduate studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was one of the few Jewish students in a college founded by Episcopalians. At Trinity, he came under the tutelage of Odell Shepard (1884-1967), a preeminent scholar of American Transcendentalism in his day.

Dr Carpenter writes:

Recalling moments of transcendence, Emerson describes the intoxication of the poet, “suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him. Then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law.” The poet must surrender to such moments, trusting “the divine animal who carries us through this world.” Perhaps no distinction between mythos and
logos is more compelling than time itself. Poetry “was all written before time was.” This aspect of mythos is implicit in The Rhodora, beauty requiring no excuse. Hyam Plutzik makes it his theme:
Where time is not, event and breath are nothing,
Yet we who are lost in time, growing and fading
In the shadow of majesty, cannot but dumbly yearn
For its stronger oblivion.

These lines come from “I Am Disquieted When I See Many Hills,” a meditation on time and eternity that was included in Plutzik’s 1959 collection, Apples from Shinar (Wesleyan University Press).

Hyam Plutzik himself strongly believed that poetry could and should be used to enliven the words used by a faith community at worship. Around 1960, he was asked by the Prayer Book Committee within Conservative Judaism to create new English translations for traditional prayers. Several of his suggestions appear in his Collected Poems (BOA Editions, 1988). One of them in particular seems to resonate with Emerson’s paean to the “life of the Universe [whose] speech is thunder.” I am referring to the concluding lines to “El Anon Al Kol,” where Plutzik writes:

The spirits, instruments of God, named after fire—
The spirits named for a whirling wheel—
The spirits called the Creatures of Heaven—
All chant his grandeur and might.

Dr. Carpenter has graciously allowed us permission to link to the full text of his sermon, which can be found here.

Edward Moran