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:

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 One poem, “Report Prepared…”, would be included in the “Uncollected and Unpublished” section of the Collected Poems.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

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,

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

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

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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

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.”

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

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.

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.

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.

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:

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:

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

Edward Moran

“Hyam Plutzik: Poet,” an archival exhibition in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections of Rush Rhees Library at the University of Rochester, opened over two months ago, so this post may seem like old news. But the exhibit is still open for another month, and my hope is that after giving the readers of “a fistful of words” a taste of the exhibit’s treasures, they will take advantage of the time remaining and go see it. Since this post is longer than usual, I’ll hold off on the exhibit’s final feature, the interpretive cases titled “Rochester Students Read Plutzik,” for treatment in a separate post to come soon.

The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections is a resource which I think too few UR students appreciate, if they even know it exists. To find it, entering the Library from the quad, one proceeds through the lobby and up the marble staircase to the second floor atrium where the statue of Industry stands facing Athena. Continuing through the glass doors into the Great Hall, there is a double door at the left-hand end of the room which almost always stands open. Through it, one finds a long corridor lined with portraits of past professors, trustees, and University presidents; make a right and there, beyond the restrooms and a little hidden door that leads to the stacks, is the Rare Books Department. They keep the doors closed as a climate-control measure, but the staff is among the friendliest and most welcoming to be found on campus.

The Jarold Ramsey Study

To the right as you enter, the wall is lined with display cases which currently contain pieces in a Kenneth Patchen exhibition now on view through January 5 (which also more than merits a trip to the Library). To the left is a wall of glass, through which is visible the Jarold Ramsey Study. This ochre- and blonde pinewood-colored room is the permanent home of the William and Hannelore Heyen Collection of Contemporary Poetry, and the usual venue for the English Department’s creative writing seminars. The Ramsey Study is also where the Plutzik exhibit is currently on display.

Department curators rearranged the Heyen Collection to make room in its middle row of cases for the exhibit. The effect is an interesting juxtaposition: the latter’s austere presentation of manuscript pages, letters, and printed matter from the Plutzik Archive makes a stark relief against the boldly designed and colored spines of nearly 10,000 first-edition works of 20th century literature.

Two views of the exhibit’s display cases along the first wall

The exhibit begins in the far left corner of the room with the portrait of the young Hyam, taken while he was an undergraduate at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. It continues through some 20 cases along three walls of the room, spanning his school days at two Connecticut universities, Trinity and Yale; then his time serving as a U.S. Lieutenant during World War II; on through his 19 years of teaching at the University of Rochester, with cases displaying the first-edition covers of his poetry collections Aspects of Proteus, Apples from Shinar, and the long poetic sequence Horatio. Finally there is a series of cases exploring parts of Plutzik’s life from various thematic angles, including his role as a member of the greater Rochester community, and his poetic relationship to Cold War themes and to his Jewish identity.

First Case

Here is the exhibit’s first case, which contains Plutzik’s corncob pipe—not the pipe he is pictured with in this familiar photo (courtesy of UR), however, which looks as though it were taken by a University photographer (as I always thought) but was actually taken by one of Plutzik’s own students, as Tanya Roth Plutzik told me. The dark metallic wheel displayed below the pipe is a reel of fishing line, giving a nod to that sport which, along with poetry, Plutzik considered one of “the most important philosophical occupations.”

In the next case, showing items from Plutzik’s school days, is one piece I find particularly striking: this is the “Trinity Ivy,” a yearbook showing the young Plutzik, in the middle of the lefthand page, looking ferociously pensive. There are many photos of the warmly smiling Prof. Plutzik about, but rarer is the image of the poet in his brooding youth.

Hyam Plutzik in “The Trinity Ivy,” left-center

Next, there is a sobering item from the years of Plutzik’s service in WWII. It is an entry from Plutzik’s diary, dated June 5, 1944, in which Plutzik records his observations on an English airfield during preparations for the D-Day invasion of France:

Plutzik’s diary: June 5, 1944

The second half of the entry is to me the most disquieting, and I transcribe it here for the sake of legibility:

Years later Plutzik would remember those men, and that image of the bomber’s “belly,” playing on it in one of his most somberly musical poems, “The Old War.”

To me, these pages are among the most fascinating objects in the exhibit for another reason, being the fact that they are handwritten. In this day of digitization so complete that we see less and less handwriting in every facet of life, I think it is tantamount to having a certain indispensible confirmation of a poet’s physical, bodily being (or having been) to glimpse one’s handwriting. Especially when, as this exhibit affords, we can see the handwriting alongside the same language in typewritten form—or best of all, the interplay between the two, the scribbled-over and annotated typescript.

This exhibit provides many instances of such. Here we have a manuscript in blue ball-point pen alongside a typescript of Plutzik’s poem “Hiroshima,” which similarly deals with World War-cum-Cold War anxieties:

Annotated typescript of “Kaddish”

And here is a version of “Kaddish,” with Plutzik’s handwritten notes for revision. Interestingly, the version that is found in the 1987 Collected Poems and on this website corresponds exactly to the typescript, and does not account for the penned annotations. “Kaddish” was never otherwise published, which leads one to wonder if Plutzik had another, unmarked copy of the same typescript of the poem while this was overlooked, and so the publisher considered the typescript final, while perhaps Plutzik hadn’t actually finished revising it when he died. In any case the example reminds us how difficult it is to know if and when a poem is done.

This barely scratches the surface of the fascinating treasures dug out for display from the nearly 40 boxes of Plutzik’s archived papers that are retained in the Rare Books Department’s collections. I’ll share one more pair of items, however–a personal favorite, which gives evidence of Plutzik’s community spirit: a pair of letters from a local lawyer and friend of Plutzik’s, Sol W. Linowitz.

Two letters from Sol Linowitz to Hyam Plutzik

In the first letter, Linowitz asks Plutzik to comment on some poems composed by “a generally uninspired lawyer,” who, I am happy to believe, is probably Linowitz himself. (In an accompanying note, the curators suggest that this is possible.) To read it this way makes the second letter, in which Linowitz thanks Plutzik for a “very thoughtful and generous letter about the poetry,” sing with a melodramatic irony that is touching and maddening when he writes: “You have rendered a very helpful service to a lyrical spirit.” It is touching that Linowitz, a lawyer, would embrace his poetic inclination so far as to call himself “a lyrical spirit;” maddening (to the poet writing this article, anyway) to think that Linowitz was too embarrassed of his own lyricism to own it, and attributes it instead to another like the clichéd patient who, in shame before his doctor, attributes his complaints to a phantom friend. But maybe I presume too much, and Linowitz really was writing on behalf of a friend—but the melodrama is more entertaining in any case.

Students at the U of R will be heaving sighs of relief this weekend as they cross the semester’s finish line—what better way to enjoy a few free moments before they all flee for holiday destinations than to peruse the scribblings and artifacts of this great figure of the University’s literary past?

Phillip A. Witte

I recently had some time to read beyond my work as an editor – that is, a temporary respite from the responsibilities of my reading duties as a publisher. Not that reading for Ecco is a burden – far from it. But this was a chance to read without purpose, for the pure pleasure of reading without the obligation of response.

I was in Miami, at a wonderful hotel called The Betsy on South Beach, whose owners happen to be the children of the poet Hyam Plutzik. His daughter, Deborah Briggs, had given me a copy of Apples from Shinar, which I hadn’t read in years – in fact, I have a first edition of that book at home and remembered many of the poems from that volume. But reading it, as a collection, this Miami weekend, was a moving experience. Deborah and I had talked over claret about Stanley Kunitz being the reason I ended up in the graduate writing program at Columbia back in the early seventies, and I told her that in my opinion, Hyam’s work is right up there with Stanley’s, although Hyam left us at 51 and Kunitz at 100 – half a century later. Did they know each other? They would have been kindred spirits, definitely.

There are so many poems in this short collection to reflect on. Such range and eloquence, lessons on how to be in the world and truly witness the events that roll out before us, daily. The writing is rich, and unpredictable. Reading Hyam is not unlike the experience of reading Wallace Stevens – each time you re-enter a poem, it’s not where you thought you’d left it. Who ends a poem, “Value the intermediate splendor of birds”? Only those among Rilke’s “hierarchy of angels.” I understand why Ted Hughes would have been knocked out by a poem like, “The Bass.” His kind of poem, and so unexpected a piece of writing. I’m still coming to terms with “The Shepherd,” which I hadn’t read before.

I can’t believe this wonderful poet died so young – another remarkable voice silenced decades too soon. What’s notable is that Hyam Plutzik wrote as a mature poet from his youth. And one can only imagine what poetry he would have produced in his middle and late years had he been gifted a longer life. Still, spending time with his poetry in Miami, at The Betsy, reminded me once again of poetry’s singular power – and how affecting, how enriching is Hyam’s legacy, the poetry he left us with “the song in them.”

Daniel Halpern is a poet and editor, and is currently President and Publisher of Ecco Press. He also was founder and longtime editor of the literary magazine Antaeus.