Review – Plutzik Reading Series – Ellen Bryant Voigt

(If you have questions about our content, please contact me, Jessica Briggs, at jessicasbriggs@gmail.com, or contact our literary advisor, Edward J. Moran, at emoran8688@aol.com)

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On March 5, 2013, poet Ellen Bryant Voigt appeared in the Plutzik Reading Series at the University of Rochester. Below, Kelsey Burritt, a UR senior, shares her reflections on the reading.

In class two days after Ellen Bryant Voigt’s visit as part of the Plutzik Reading Series, we debated whether or not her reading was a performance. Granted, it might have been natural to describe it as a performance given the vivacity, bravura, and showmanship she brought to bear in the Welles-Brown Room on March 5. What Professor Longenbach argued, and which is entirely apparent when one reads her poetry on the page, is that her work as she writes it is a performance. That the quality is transferred effortlessly into her delivery is only a truer testament to how tightly wrought, expertly structured, and fondly finessed her poetry is. At one point, Voigt told us she was allowing little pauses between the poems, perceptively guessing that we were winded by each staggering utterance and desperately needed the white space of a few quiet moments to recuperate.

I say “recuperate” not to suggest that her poems eviscerate, but rather to say that they exercise. I jotted down, after listening to “Noble Dog,” that processing these poems was an endurance workout for the imagination. In his introduction to Voigt, Longenbach said these poems produced the effect of “a mind thrillingly in motion.” The collection they are a part of, Headwaters, is not due out until later this year, although a handful of these poems have made appearances in publications over the last few years. They represent a sharp turn from her earlier poetry, namely in their complete lack of punctuation. As Longenbach said, she does not stand upon her prior accomplishment. She blazes fearlessly onward, and that brazen impetus is heard in every line.

The mind does not utilize punctuation; that, of course, is a system necessitated by the written word. We may begin to shape our thoughts with punctuation, although that influence would only take shape after we have been introduced to and familiarized with grammatical structures. It’s clear in these poems that the thoughts and the words come before the ability to organize them and make them “reader-friendly.” However, even more curiously, the poems are not lost on us. They do not descend into a muddle of incogitant images strung together without order or sense. The paradox of Voigt’s writing, and an ingenious one, is that such meticulously detailed construction of thought unravels with the hurdling momentum of impulse.

There was a breathless tension in the room as she read her poems, perhaps explained in part by the rush the language created over the line, with a release of air, sometimes audible ooh’s and aah’s, sometimes laughter, at their ends. Often the poems would feature some kind of turn—like a sonnet, but obviously less expected by way of form—that the assertive muscle of the language would render purposeful, as opposed to hollowly clever or downright baffling. Poems like “Bear” and “Groundhog,” which begin with imagery corresponding to their titles, would arrive at statements like “the plural pronoun is a dangerous fiction” and “it matters / what we’re called words shape the thought.”

Perhaps the greatest moment Voigt shared with her audience was in reading her poem “My Mother.” After announcing the title, she quipped that we all have a poem like this inside of us. Then, as she began reciting it—”my mother my mother my mother she”—Voigt stopped and said that we could use that opening line for our poems too.

The poem continued with a smattering of delightful intimations about her mother’s purse, her sayings, her mannerisms, enlisting repetition of words like lipstick, spit, bushel, packed, and lacked. We may not have emerged from the poem with a holistic understanding of her mother, but we did land with a clear understanding of the mother within the speaker’s reflection, the isolated images and memories sharpened and filled out like pictures in a projector wheel.

Indeed, Voigt’s reading was punctuated by her raising her eyebrows, her sustained eye contact with her audience, the contortions her mouth made with the spirited lilt of her delivery. What her presence brought to the poetry, however, was already latent inside it. Voigt only gave voice to the phrases that shape it, the words that “shape the thought.”

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.

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.

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:
¹ New 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.

Christopher Ricks’ Luminous Imagination

On November 30, Professor Christopher Ricks of Boston University delivered his lecture “T.S. Eliot and the Auditory Imagination,” part of the Plutzik Centennial and the George Ford Memorial Lecture Series at the University of Rochester. Jenny Boyar, a first year Ph.D. student in Medieval literature at the U of R, offers her reflections.

In one of many thoughtful digressions to his talk, Christopher Ricks drew a distinction between the critic and the scholar; the latter, he claimed (somewhat in jest) has a habit of assuming or feigning knowledge. Of course, Ricks himself is a contradiction to his own classification: he has been referred to as both critic and scholar in equal measures of high praise, and it takes only minutes of listening to him speak to recognize that his knowledge, conveyed with the ease of true brilliance, is no pretense. Indeed it seems that for Ricks, the scholar-critic pair must naturally expand to include the poet. Not just the poet as subject–which Ricks illuminates with a lyricism that penetrates words to access soul–but also Ricks himself, in whom the roles of scholar and critic are seamlessly tied to a profound poetry of observation and insight.

In keeping with his written work, which ranges from editions of Paradise Lost and Tristram Shandy to criticism on blushing and the atrocities of the tongue, Ricks’ talk was less a driving argument about T.S. Eliot than a sweeping meditation on poetry, prose, scholarship, and, occasionally, Bob Dylan. Ricks took Eliot’s concept of the “auditory imagination” and described its manifestations, or reverberations, in a range of poetic devices: the way meaning can exist in a network of rhythms, the way a phrase can change dramatically by a simple alteration of its words, or the way words can reflect not necessarily the thing to which they refer but the sensation of that thing. These larger claims were supplemented by equally enlightening close readings, as when Ricks described the -ing endings that shape the meaning of Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” or when he observed how Milton in Paradise Lost takes the “h” sound and aligns it with words like “hail holy” and “hell” as a subtle implication that the damning can become, in the breath of an utterance, devastatingly attractive. It’s common to conceive of poetry as being governed by image, but what Ricks seemed to be arguing was that the music of the word itself is image. To imagine, then, is to both see and hear in the mind. The auditory resides not in the conscious but in its underlying sense, what resonates across authors and beneath the surface of their words. Ricks’ ideas can get involved, but they work in the same, intuitive way poetry is often read and understood.

Ricks’ points about pronunciation—important to any consideration of the auditory–were especially fascinating. A modern and unknowing ear would not, for example, catch how Eliot’s choice in “The Dry Salvages” to rhyme “salvages” with “assuages” situates the poem in Cape Ann, Massachusetts during the time of Eliot’s childhood. Something that Ricks did not address, but what seems like a natural consequence of his point, is how pronunciation can render a poem transient, its auditory force inextricably bound by time and place. This is of course frustrating, but also part of poetry’s allure. As readers we are left only with the sense of what a poem might have been, and so we seek to recapture that memory as if it were ours to inhabit, to discover what was lost.

Still, Ricks repeatedly returned to the idea that the reader is in a much greater position to find than to lose. There were several times Ricks claimed that we as readers have the capacity to grasp more about a poem–or prose–than the author (a point that was supported with Dylan’s quote, “I’m the first person who’ll put it to you and the last person who’ll explain it”). To rely on an author’s description alone can be futile, perhaps muffling what we ought to be hearing for ourselves. Ricks’ talk, then, was just as much a celebration of the reader as it was the author and critic.

One of Ricks’ concluding points was that the word “auditory” lacks a suitable verb; to “hear” misses something and “auditorialize” is not even a word, and sounds like an especially vindictive form of tax collection (my comparison, not Ricks’). But based on Ricks’ discussion, it seems the verb for “auditory” would be found not in a phonetic derivative but rather the space of the word “imagine:” the sense of seeing and hearing that is perhaps best described as feeling, which is–as Wordsworth once observed–the province of poetry. And if poetry is by means of the auditory endowed with authority, then it is something Christopher Ricks makes us all feel like we inherently possess.

Jenny Boyar

“The last and most fabulous of beasts – language, language –”

We invite responses to all Plutzik Readings and George Ford Lectures at the U of R–don’t miss scholar Christopher Ricks’s lecture on T.S. Eliot on Nov. 30, and please write to tell us about it. Meanwhile, here’s a second take on Eavan Boland’s reading, by UR senior David Krinick.

To be in a room with Eavan Boland is to be an audience granted glimpses of an old, forgotten world. Not a world of heroes and prowess but one that escapes history. Her poetry rediscovers the domestic past, one of singing kettles, firedogs and clothes horses, a human past that, as she says, you will not find in any textbook. This past is excavated with a delicate hand, found buried deep in legends and keenly seen shrouded in the mist of her beloved home, Ireland.

I was lucky enough to be brought into this forgotten world through her authority Thursday as she read selections of her work, including and amongst others “The Glass King,” “Quarantine,” “The Pomegranate,” and “An Elegy for My Mother in Which She Scarcely Appears.”

Having read Boland before, I was always intrigued by her themes and yet thwarted by a subdued quality that I find in much of her poetry. Hearing her in person, however, having her voice applied to the poems she created made me think: these poems have to be muted; they are delivering accounts of the difficult domestic lives of women of the past, especially in the role, historically, of the repressed. Controversially I began to see how consistent, unique, this made her voice. Even over decades of writing, she manages to retain this confessional narrative that is distinctly her own.

It was winter, lunar, wet. At dusk
Pewter seedlings became moonlight orphans.
Pleased to meet you meat to please you
said the butcher’s sign in the window in the village.

- from “Domestic Violence”

What I came away with most after hearing Boland was realizing her capacity as a storyteller. Not only do her poems contain richly peopled landscapes, but her speech as well is full of anecdotes that draw you in. She described sympathy for mad King Charles VI’s wife, Isabeau, and her ordeal having to deal with a husband who thought he was turning into glass. We were told of her being the writer in residence in Dublin’s National Maternity Hospital, a position she honored (relishing the fact that the “Oxen of the Sun” episode of Ulysses was memorialized there with a placard) and yet she was left curious as to what her job description was.

Before reading “That the Science of Cartography is Limited,” she recounted her experience of the famine roads that the poem is based on. They, as her story and poem describe, are roads that were left unfinished after the workers died during the Great Famine. These roads can be found on no map and yet they cry out just the sort of past that Boland seeks out: fragmented vignettes recovered from enigmatic artifacts.

The line between storytelling, prose and poetry, is ultimately one that Boland brings to bear. Her prose seems dense, her poetry conversational. It is with this voice that she was able to absorb the audience’s attention as we sat content to listen.

David Krinick

Plutzik Reading Series: Eavan Boland

Continuing the Plutzik Centennial Reading Series, Eavan Boland gave a reading in the Welles-Brown Room at Rush Rhees Library, U of R, on November 10th. Rochester local writer Susan Jane McLeod gives her impression.

Eavan Boland

An overflow audience had the pleasure of experiencing a remarkable performance by Irish poet Eavan Boland last Thursday night. The atmosphere was electric as students, faculty, and guests of all ages waited. We knew something special was coming. We knew we were in the presence of a great talent.

Then Ms. Boland got up to speak, and I was struck by the contradiction between my expectations and reality. This is not to say that she disappointed. On the contrary, she surpassed herself. But I was surprised to find that I still had a vestige of an idea of what A Poet should be like. Flamboyant, dramatic, larger than life. Ms. Boland is none of these. She is a woman who immediately puts people at their ease, direct, warm and genuine. These are qualities that Hyam Plutzik also possessed, so there was symmetry to Ms. Boland’s appearance at the Plutzik Reading Series.

She talked about herself a little, and then began with her poem “Quarantine.” I was crying before she was halfway through. It comes from her book Against Love Poetry, but is the most moving testament to love I’ve ever heard. It comes from a true tale of a couple during the Irish Potato Famine. The wife had famine fever, and was too weak to walk, so the husband carried her home from the workhouse. They were both found dead the next day, with the husband holding his wife’s feet to his breastbone in a last, futile attempt to warm her. Boland writes:

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.

Just my opinion, but suddenly Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee?” seemed trivial in comparison.

It is with ordinary life that Ms. Boland concerns herself. Marriage. Family. She told an amusing story about her husband’s books taking over their house. She made a poem about it too, “Thanked Be Fortune,” where in the books on the shelves above their bed

all through the hours of darkness,
men and women
wept, cursed, kept and broke faith
and killed themselves for love.

But when she and her husband awake, they lay quietly together and listen to their baby’s crying “as if to birdsong.”

We were also treated to, among others, “The Glass King,” “Amber,” “The Pomegranate,” and “That the Science of Cartography is Limited.”

In her verse, told in a straightforward, almost conversational manner, Eavan Boland encapsulates the human spirit. Her poems are extremely powerful. When she spoke about the violence in Irish history, and how people tried to carry on with their everyday lives as it wreaked its havoc, I heard an echo of Yeats and “that dead young soldier in his blood” from “Meditations in Time of Civil War.” It seems to me, through her writings, that Eavan Boland is “building in the empty house of the stare.”

Susan Jane McLeod, Rochester, New York, November 13, 2011

Meliora Weekend at the Plutzik Reading Series

In this post, by U of R senior Noah Friedman, our Meliora Miniseries and Reading Series Commentary cross paths. Professors Grotz, Schottenfeld, Longenbach, and Scott, whose teaching merits former students have celebrated in the foregoing posts, read from their newest work on Saturday, October 22nd as part of Meliora Weekend and 50/100 festivities.

At times, my parents can be wonderfully stubborn people. The most recent example of this shows in their determinacy to make the seven-hour drive from Washington, D.C. to their fourth Meliora Weekend. This is when the University of Rochester welcomes alumni and parents to campus for a program of events celebrating an ever-improving community. I am convinced that they fulfilled the journey merely to maintain their perfect record, appearing at Mel Weekend four out of four years, more than it was their aim to spend a few days with their son. Unlike previous years, though, which have been crammed with lecturers, comedians, and trips to Wegman’s supermarket, there was only one event that I thought was good enough reason to make the trip. This was the Plutzik Reading Series.

As it has already been mentioned in articles on this blog and other related essays, if you have been invited to read in the Plutzik Reading Series at the University of Rochester, you have made it to “the Big Show,” so to speak. The selection of Plutzik readers in the past has always been comprised of great artists. It gave me enormous pleasure to find out that three of the four artists presenting their works at the second installment of the Plutzik Reading Series this year happen to also have been professors with whom I have studied: Joanna Scott, Jennifer Grotz, and James Longenbach. Professor, novelist, and short story writer Stephen Schottenfeld, whose advice and conversation has always been available to me, was also among the selection of artists chosen for the reading.

My elation arose not only because of my close relation to these artists but most crucially because my closest relations, Mom and Dad, would get to meet them and enjoy a display of their craft that I could confidently trust to validate my choice of major: English with a concentration in creative writing. A few weeks ago during office hours, I confessed to Professor Longenbach that I was “concerned for my future.” Before he offered any helpfully sagacious advice, which he is never short of, he responded, “You should be; you’re an American undergraduate,” followed by a list of the catastrophic conditions that awaited me after commencement. Certainly, though, my parents contend with similar preoccupations. I am fortunate enough to have had the Plutzik Series to allay some of their concerns. Seeing my professors read, engage with their students and one another, they could see that I was in good care; that I have people that I should, and do, look up to as mentors and examples of success.

In each of their readings, my professors showed not only an enviable expertise that they each possess over their craft, but an indelible appreciation for the powers of both written and spoken language. Watching my parents listen, laugh, and speak with my professors was easily the most satisfying part of my weekend because they could more concretely understand the motivation behind my passion for literature and creative writing. They can better understand why we are in this business: to teach, to entertain, provoke, and to inspire.

Noah Friedman