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

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:

Edward Moran

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

On November 19, poet Ruth Stone died at the age of 96 in Ripton, Vermont. She and David Ferry, now 87, were the last two surviving poets who read with Hyam Plutzik at the Spring Poetry Festival at Wesleyan College in April of 1960. Stone received much acclaim later in life for her poetry: she won a National Book Award at 87 for her collection In the Next Galaxy (2002) and was named Poet Laureate of Vermont in 2007, at the age of 92. Her collection What Love Comes To was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009.

When she read at the Wesleyan Spring Festival in 1960, the 44-year-old Stone had just published her first collection, In an Iridescent Time, published a year earlier. Hyam Plutzik’s collection, Apples from Shinar, had just been published by Wesleyan, one of the first books in its acclaimed Poetry Series (the book was reprinted this year to mark his centennial). Plutzik and Stone were part of an august gathering of writers at the Festival, with readings by some of the leading lights in American poetry at mid-century: Robert Frost, Stanley Kunitz, Charles Olson, Theodore Roethke, and William Carlos Williams, among others.

The Festival program printed one poem by Ruth Stone (“The Captive”) and two by Hyam Plutzik (“Man and Tree” and “The Bass”), both of which had appeared in Apples from Shinar. The last lines of Plutzik’s “Man and Tree” seem an appropriate tribute to Stone: “She cannot reach your leaves, but she will return / When they are ready to fall to her. / Her feet will rustle among them, and I shall be waiting. / But she will already be in yesterday.”

Edward Moran

Additional information about Stone, as well as several of her poems, can be found here.

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