The Plutzik Series: 60 Years of Poetry, Fiction, & Conversation

This online exhibition celebrates the sixty-year history of the Plutzik Reading Series, and is a migration of the exhibit which was created in 2012 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Series.

The Serieshas become a trusted meeting-place for the robust literary community at this University and in the city of Rochester at large. It carries on a tradition fostered in the UR English Department by Hyam Plutzik. This tradition of campus readings continues to be developed and enriched by the numerous poets and novelists who have served on the English faculty; and it has been overseen by a long line of Series directors. Thus there is an interesting historical narrative to the Plutzik Series, as documented by Professor of English Emeritus and longtime Series director Jarold Ramsey in “An Informal History of the Plutzik Reading Series,” an excerpt of which is found in the exhibition guide. The exhibition here, however, takes a non-historical approach. The curator, Phillip A. Witte, a graduate of the UR Creative Writing program, felt that the best way to honor this history and legacy was to celebrate its present by inviting students and recent alumni to a conversation about contemporary literature, using the Series roster as a reading list.

Here, reading and conversation find no end of rich material for subject matter. This Rare Books and Special Collections Department, including the William and Hannelore Heyen Collection of Contemporary Writing, is a goldmine of first, limited, hand-bound, wood-cut, illustrated, and otherwise intriguing items from the contemporary period. In these cases you will see selected works by 42 of the nearly 300 Series Readers to date (a full chronological listing can be found in the exhibition guide). These represent only a small sampling of the countless items in the collections which are available for perusal in the library.

While the number of Readers to be featured was determined by gallery space, the process to select which 42 to include was a little more nuanced. Final selections were made by the students and alumni who would contribute commentaries, in a process guided by several sets of hands. Taking recommendations from members of the creative writing faculty, we generated a list of around 50 sometime Plutzik Readers whose work was thought to merit particular attention, and invited students and alumni to select from the list a writer or two whose work interested them. Commentators were also free to choose Readers not mentioned on our pick list, and several did so. This exhibit, therefore, is no one’s estimation of the “best” Series Readers; they are all without exception serious practitioners of their craft, in whose work a student or graduate of this University found something as provocative, moving, or challenging as to occasion a careful and deliberate response. Commentaries were then submitted to a workshop and revision process with the curator.

Having been encouraged to respond in personal terms to a specific work, the commentators interpreted the task in a variety of ways. Some of them locate a work in a larger historical or political situation; others describe a writer’s particular technique; still others relate a work to a personal memory or experience. The only element in common is brevity, which posed an interesting challenge: how to articulate a complex reaction to a fine piece of literature in as little as 200-300 words. What results in these commentaries is a startling variety of voice and insight. It is hoped that these incisive statements distilled from careful reading will invite the viewer to further reading and conversation.

ON SEASCAPE BY EDWARD ALBEE
Heavily influenced by the Theatre of the Absurd, Edward Albee wrote plays that are dark, funny, down-to-earth and incredulous all at the same time. A shining example is Seascape (1974), which depicts an elderly couple enjoying a vacation on the beach when they meet a couple of human-sized lizards who have inexplicably evolved the ability to speak and understand English, though without gaining any knowledge of human society or mammalian life. University of Rochester’s own student theatre company, The Opposite of People, produced Seascape at Drama House in 2010. One of the most memorable moments was when the women (reptilian and mammal) discussed motherhood. The old woman is appalled that the lizard just lets her eggs get washed away by the sea, while the lizard is horrified by the prospect of having to take care of her young for eighteen whole years! Although the premise is absurd, the totally alien perspective of the lizards ultimately reveals a great deal about the human characters, and, by the end of the play, the situation feels entirely natural, which is Mr. Albee’s specialty.
JESSICA CHINELLI (UR 2012, English/Theatre) spent the summer working at the Capital Fringe Festival (Washington, D.C.) and returned to Rochester in September to direct a play with TOOP for the first annual Rochester Fringe Festival.

ON “THE SYSTEM” BY JOHN ASHBERY
Ashbery’s poem, “The System,” is a deliberate stream of consciousness—a look at life through a variety of distinct but overlapping lenses. The structure and content are indistinguishable from one another, as the long and complex sentence structure models the concepts addressed. Part self-discovery, part spiritual investigation, part desperate attempt to control the natural processes of life, Ashbery takes the reader on a fifty-three-page journey through happiness, understanding, love and interpersonal connectivity and the dark and light sides thereof. However, amidst this soul-searching quest for the meaning of life, Ashbery makes sure we don’t get too self-important with lines like, “Whole tribes… who mattered very much to themselves have gone up in smoke… with less fuss than a shooting star,” cajoling a chuckle out of the reader who might, right at that moment, have been looking at things a bit too seriously. “Merely to think of ourselves as having arrived at some final resting place is a contradiction of fundamental logic, since even the dullest of us knows enough to realize that he is ignorant of everything.”
KATHRYN STILWELL (UR 2008, English/Creative Writing) became a member of Teach For America after graduating from Rochester. She currently teaches in Portland, OR.

ON GIOVANNI’S ROOM BY JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin’s 1956 novel of an American in Paris, refuses to be a typical Paris book, smitten with the cosmopolitan life along the lines of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. For Baldwin, the city is lived as a series of claustrophobic spaces, as David, a Brooklynite, begins a homosexual affair with the Italian Giovanni while awaiting the return of his fiancée. In settings tight, unattractive, cluttered, and even half-built, Baldwin portrays his limited cast of characters coming to terms: David with his homosexual desires, Giovanni with his poverty and his past, their wealthy friend Jacques with self-loathing in loveless old age. Baldwin’s story, covering a short period of time and not very much ground, still insists on the capaciousness of the experience in that small space: “It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni’s room.” The novel needs only a few meticulously drawn rooms--in Paris, Coney Island, and the south of France, too--to stage David’s crucible of identity, as a wayward son and wayward lover. Baldwin’s characters have no salon, there is little feasting, and the quais of the Seine feel distant: “No one ever came to see us, except Jacques, and he did not come often. We were far from the center of the city and we had no phone.” What emerges is a slow, beautiful work; courageous, too, for 1956. Baldwin would continue to write with courage through to his reading in Rochester in 1972, after years spent marching on Montgomery and Washington and writing thoughtfully and tirelessly on behalf of civil rights.
JOSEPH STADOLNIK (UR 2008, English) is a Ph.D candidate in English literature at Yale University.

ON “CATULLUS: ODI ET AMO” BY FRANK BIDART
Frank Bidart’s poem, “Catullus: Odi et Amo,” was first published in Ploughshares in 1980 and later appeared in The Sacrifice. The poem is very short:
I hate and love. Ignorant fish, who even
wants the fly while writhing.
These two sentences, one declarative and one imagistic, stand in conversation with one another: the first reports a feeling that the second recasts into something more visceral. The simultaneous acts of loving and hating become, in the second sentence, the tragedy of a fish suffering a hook through its mouth for the sake of consuming the angler’s bait.
With this poem, Bidart rewrites and reinterprets a much older work by the Roman poet Catullus. Here is his carmen (“song” or “ode”) 85, followed by my own rough translation:
Odi et amo. quare id faciam fortasse requiris
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
[I hate and I love. Why do I do this, perhaps you will ask.
I don’t know, but I feel that I am made to and I am tormented.]
The Latin poem has no fish, no fly. Where Catullus uses passive verbs to represent the speaker’s sense of anguish and entrapment, Bidart substitutes the writhing fish. I do not know whether to call the poem a “translation” or not; I prefer to think of it as a conversation. Yet it is not only in conversation with ancient texts: Bidart would go on to write two more “Catullus” poems, each time slightly changing the first sentence and making the second more human, more visceral. We need not know Latin to understand and enjoy these very small poems, which certainly have something to say to us in the present age. Yet they also have something to say to the long tradition of epigrammatic poetry that precedes them, and they speak to it quietly, respectfully, and with great devotion to the daunting task of making language new.
MELISSA SCHOENBERGER (UR 2009, English and Spanish) is pursuing a Ph.D. in Restoration and 18th Century English Literature at Boston University.

ON “THE MOOSE” BY ELIZABETH BISHOP
What I find most fascinating about “The Moose” is Bishop’s juxtaposition of permanence and transience. Initially, she establishes a scene that appears stable, referring to the tides and the setting of the sun, both elements of continuous cycles. Soon, though, we find the real stage of the poem is a bus traveling through this land of reliability. Its passengers are in a limbo that is clearly somewhat frightening—the woods around the bus are
hairy, scratchy, splintery;
moonlight and mist
caught in them like lamb’s wool
on bushes in a pasture.
The only stability here, with the dependable environment constantly being left behind the moving vehicle, is in the conversation of the elderly passengers. Discussing unsettling changes like deaths, marriages, and illnesses, mediates those changes. Continuing this habitual conversation on the bus ameliorates even the uncertainty of this trip through the darkness of a splintery forest. Their talk means that
Now, it’s all right now
even to fall asleep
just as on all those nights.
The moose arrests this mediation when it appears—the bus stops; the headlights are put out; the comforting conversation is abandoned. It forces a pause that is not regretted, but nor is it a sort of stop-and-smell-the-roses moment. The moose is “homely as a house/(or, safe as houses).” The passengers on the caroming bus have stumbled upon a sort of reprieve from their transition that is extremely weird but also will itself pass. The moose reminds us that even the seemingly solid environment has unpredictable elements and that they can be not only intimidating, but also wondrous.
CHRISTINE M. ROSE (UR 2012/T5, Anthropology and Studio Arts) is an artist of many media, currently based in New York City. In the fall of 2012, she performed in 44 Plays for 44 Presidents at Geva Theatre.

ON “THE ERL-KING” BY ANGELA CARTER
I first encountered Angela Carter’s story collection, The Bloody Chamber, in Professor Peck’s Myth and Fairytale course, and I was immediately engrossed by the task of puzzling out each heroine’s relationship to her imminent threat (most often a male captor or seducer). In revisiting the book, I fell in love with “The Erl-King,” a story that I had previously overlooked. The title character is a sort of male siren who lures young women into his forest and turns them into birds. Yet he does so without fully understanding that he does the women harm. One passage that struck me was a potential victim’s description of the vertigo that this strange man inspires in her:
Falling as a bird would fall through the air if the Erl-King tied up the winds in his handkerchief and knotted the ends together so they could not get out. Then the moving currents of air would no longer sustain them and all the birds would fall at the imperative of gravity, as I fall down for him, and I know it is only because he is kind to me that I do not fall still further.
What I relish about this simile is that it is easy to forget that the tied up winds and the plummeting birds are figurative; they seem plausible within the world of the story. There is a particular tension to the phrase, “fall at the imperative of gravity.” An imperative is usually a discrete, verbal exertion of will, whereas gravity is a continuous physical force. The combination of these seemingly opposite words led me to re-read the passage, as I tried to imagine gravity as a sudden burst and what this implied about the narrator’s feelings for the Erl-King.
SARAH YOUNG (UR 2013, English/Creative Writing) is a peer writing tutor and aspiring playwright from Portland, OR.

ON ELIZABETH COSTELLO BY J.M. COETZEE
The eponymous protagonist of J.M. Coetzee’s 2003 novel, Elizabeth Costello, has much in common with her creator. She, too, is a novelist, a resident of Australia, and a vocal and uncompromising proponent of animal rights. She is a frequent guest to the world of academia, as lecturer and award recipient. The biography of Coetzee’s fictional familiar and his own are so strikingly congruent that one naturally assumes Costello speaks for the author when she speaks a bit about literature, but mostly about ethics, in a series of speaking engagements. Coetzee tempts us into this identification between himself and his novelist before scripting for Costello some explosive arguments that compare the killing of livestock for food with the systematic killing of human beings at Nazi death camps; she casts all of us, vegetarians and meat-eaters alike, as the willfully ignorant Poles living naively outside the gates. Coetzee even makes Costello say, in a lecture: “We are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing that rivals anything the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it.” I put down Elizabeth Costello still unconvinced—I am not a vegetarian myself—and taken aback by Costello’s rhetorical exploitation of genocide. Yet, I wouldn’t say that the novel ‘failed.’ I found Elizabeth sympathetic and well-drawn. Coetzee’s mixture of conviction and invention is at times complicating in all the right ways—calling attention to how any novel might actually argue for something, including the ways they so often do not express an opinion, their writers choosing to avoid moralizing while indulging in the depiction of evil acts. (Such is her criticism of fellow, and actual, novelist Paul West in a later chapter.) Elizabeth Costello succeeds as a richly embroidered piece of polemic and as a novel about polemic’s place in fiction and in the lecture hall.
JOSEPH STADOLNIK (UR 2008, English) is a Ph.D candidate in English Literature at Yale University.

ON “HOWL” BY ALLEN GINSBERG
Ginsberg is best known for his long poem, “Howl,” which perfectly captures the attitudes of the Beat Generation by expressing Ginsberg’s frustration with the way “the best minds of [his] generation” were oppressed by the conformity and materialism of mainstream culture. Ginsberg’s epic, free verse style is exemplified by his manipulation of syntax to create the feel of a stream of consciousness. He writes about intellectuals “who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality.” Ginsberg’s evocative diction brings urban imagism and deep emotion together. “Howl” electrified its audience at its first reading in 1955 but was subsequently banned from being sold after going to print. By 1957, Ginsberg was at the center of an obscenity trial brought forth against “Howl” due to its graphic depictions of drug use and homosexual intercourse. Ultimately, Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled in favor of Ginsberg and his work saying that it was not obscene and adding, "Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?"
JESSICA CHINELLI (UR 2012, English/Theatre) spent the summer working at the Capital Fringe Festival (Washington, D.C.), and returned to Rochester in September to direct a play with TOOP in the first annual Rochester Fringe Festival.

ON “PURPLE BATHING SUIT” BY LOUISE GLÜCK
Louise Glück’s poem, “Purple Bathing Suit,” demonstrates her command of language and her ability to bend emotions to her will. Reading the line, “your back is my favorite part of you,” I toy with the romance of this idea. Perhaps the speaker likes the spray of freckles on the subject’s shoulder or the curve of her lower back; but Glück clarifies: “the part furthest away from your mouth.” I smirk at the unexpected twist but also feel the sting of the line. Whatever tenderness was once inspired by shared love is long gone and in its wake—bitterness and disdain. The love, though morphed and abused, remains a morbid testament to the complexities of human emotion. We see this clearly illustrated in the last lines of the poem: “because you are all that's wrong with my life/and I need you and I claim you.” Here, we are presented with the ugly side of love—the vampiric need, void of compassion or gentleness. Glück states so simply the things we dare not admit to ourselves.
KATHRYN STILWELL (UR 2008, English/Creative Writing) became a member of Teach For America after graduating from Rochester. She currently teaches in Portland, OR.

ON “GIN” BY PHILIP LEVINE
There are few things I enjoy more than a piece of writing that captures a child’s bizarre yet logical insight into adult life. One of my favorite poems in Philip Levine’s What Work Is does just that, but through the eyes of a retrospective speaker. Appropriately titled, “Gin,” the poem is a reflection on the first time the speaker drank alcohol:
I know now that brain cells
were dying for no earthly purpose
that three boys were becoming
increasingly despiritualized
even as they took into themselves
these spirits, but I thought then
I was at last sharing the world
with the movie stars, that before
long I would be shaving because
I needed to… that first girls
and then women would be drawn
to my qualities.
The combination of bitterness and humor in this passage makes it a refreshing and accurate portrayal. Just as one does not become drunk the moment alcohol touches the lips, a child does not become an adult the moment he commits an adult act. Rather, inebriation and loss of innocence both take time to settle in, and the speaker’s failure to grasp this concept when he was younger is a source of comedy. He saw shaving facial hair as one of the foremost indications of manhood; what’s more, he implies that he shaved before it became necessary. To the adult, “despiritualized” reader, this behavior seems baffling, but to a child eagerly anticipating maturity, it would make perfect sense.
SARAH YOUNG (UR 2013, English/Creative Writing) is a peer writing tutor and aspiring playwright from Portland, OR.

ON THE FIXER BY BERNARD MALAMUD
Like the popular musical Fiddler on the Roof, Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer addresses anti-Semitism in Czarist Russia, and the book’s early chapters share that musical’s wry sense of humor. However, Malamud’s book quickly shuns humor in favor of a fatalistic tone and a genuine sense of dread. I cannot say that this was a pleasant book to read, but it is a powerful and important text. As the victim of a government witch-hunt, Jewish handyman Yakov Bok is a sane man in the midst of madmen. Yakov spends years in prison for a murder he never committed, and Malamud never reveals the outcome of the fixer’s trial. Ultimately, though, Malamud is not interested in Yakov’s doom or vindication, but rather in the development of Yakov’s spirit. At first, the fixer is a grouchy, somewhat unsympathetic character who thinks only of himself. In the course of his imprisonment, though, enduring torture after torture, Yakov grows into an admirable character. He reads extensively, so he may outthink his prejudicial captors. He learns to manipulate the guards into giving him better food and clothes. Most importantly, Yakov comes to feel compassion for other people, particularly those (Jew and Christian alike) who suffer at the government’s hands. Indeed, when Yakov emerges from prison, he is so appalled by the government’s treatment of innocent people that he imagines killing the intolerant Czar. Prison has strengthened, not broken, the fixer, and Malamud has shown his readers how an ordinary man can (justly) become radicalized.
DANIEL GORMAN, JR. (UR 2014, History and Religion) is a Freshman Fellow, journalist, and aspiring historian from Pearl River, NY.

ON “PEASANT” BY W.S. MERWIN
Poets such as George Herbert, H.D. and Yeats invoked prayer in their works as a means of channeling a voice of solemnity. Where Merwin’s prayer in “Peasant” differs from these is the thick sardonic tone that he directs toward the powers that be on the receiving end. Though addressing himself to a mortal “one percent,” the peasant speaker shrewdly ascribes to these figures a position of godhead. He makes clear his acknowledgement of their influence and how it has taken the place of God in modern society, allowing them to mold the future, independent of the interests of the eternally essential farmer. The peasant’s prayer, instead of conveying supplication, becomes an admission of regret and enervation; instead of a show of adoration, he brings to bear a confession of grievances.
Published in 1967, Merwin’s voice in “Peasant” reflects the confessional mode of many of his peers but also stands out with his talent for weaving myth into his poetry. “Peasant” is a pastoral, though it is undoubtedly set in a modern time. Merwin manages to blend emerging ecological and agricultural concerns in an observer with a scathing, unforgiving eye. The last line of the poem, “I am bringing up my children to be you,” is at first shocking. After such injustice, how could he capitulate to such a corrupt system? But the peasant has created his own agenda, expressed in a kind of secular prophecy: his awareness of these new mortal gods will be passed unto his children, not to be like them but to replace and be the new agents of change in the world.
DAVID KRINICK (UR 2011, English), after spending substantial years under the academic aegis, is now living a bohemian life writing, silk-screen printing, and celebrating himself.

ON THE ENGLISH PATIENT BY MICHAEL ONDAATJE
I first read The English Patient on the verge of summer, leaning into Ondaatje’s luminous prose as though I was slipping into a pool of translucent water. There was a hush in his voice that cast a net of quiet over the story. I was like the nurse, Hana, when she sits down to read in a deserted library during the novel’s opening pages (12):
She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awakening from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.
In a novel which at times takes on the vividness of hallucination, Ondaatje’s more distanced prose allowed me to absorb the characters while I observed them. He translates the motion of a character’s eyes into revelation:
The ladybird circling the nail on his small finger quickly crosses over onto her wrist.
Although I knew that the sapper, Kip, was holding hands with Hana, the inclusion of the ladybird gives the scene a scope and movement that the scene would otherwise lack. How big the humans must look to the ladybird! And who should I, the reader, be focused on? The English Patient illuminates these passing moments. Shown from Ondaatje’s new angles, the hallucinatory and the mundane intersect.
RACHEL GREENE (UR 2012, English/Creative Writing & ESM 2012, Applied Music/Bassoon) is pursuing an MFA in Fiction at the University of Michigan. When she's not writing, she's trying to get the best of her sweet tooth once and for all.

ON “ESCAPE FROM SPIDERHEAD” BY GEORGE SAUNDERS
I heard George Saunders’s writing before I read it. “‘Show your cock,’ she says, and dies again,” my friends would often exclaim, to my bewilderment. Until, that is, a friend lent me her copy of Pastoralia.
In Pastoralia, Saunders burrows under America’s skin and taps into a tasteless, tacky bloodstream, fleshing out his subculture with a frankness that is refreshing and unsettling. I must admit that his stories and characters somehow reminded me of my hometown. At once repulsive, they inspire a pathetic and pitiable kind of love. Sort of like a three-legged dog.
The latest Saunders I’ve read is “Escape from Spiderhead,” a story in the line of Orwell’s 1984. The protagonist is a test subject who receives serum injections that drip into his bloodstream. These serums take traits or emotions and drastically augment them—one forces patients to tell the truth and another makes them poetically articulate, among other less desirable enhancements. The ™ symbol litters the story in such a fashion that at first it agitated my reading, but by the end I hardly noticed it. It makes you wonder what else we have grown numb to in our world that Saunders exposes in his.
His world, after all, is our own. It’s swarming with people dealing with humanity the only way they know how—by being humans. It can be sickening to the core, but man that core is super good.
KELSEY BURRITT (UR 2013, English) is a passionate participant in the Theatre department. Last spring she studied abroad in Granada, Spain.

ON WALKING TO SLEEP BY RICHARD WILBUR
Richard Wilbur’s Walking to Sleep (1969) opens with “The Lilacs,” which describes lilacs blooming as spring begins. Their decayed roots and bare twigs gain shape and beauty over the course of the poem. So, too, does his language develop from sharp to lush. The poem reminded me a great deal of Rochester’s own lilacs, which I watch as I travel to work each day.
As I read the rest of the book, I kept thinking of Robert Frost, whom I have enjoyed reading since high school. The poets have a common interest in natural scenes and fairly straightforward language. However, Wilbur has some affinity for Edgar Allan Poe, in that some of his words are melancholic, and there is some darkness within each poem, though they are ultimately optimistic. Wilbur also seems very comfortable with references to classical mythology, which are scattered throughout his poems.
I have studied the Middle Ages since I was a college freshman. In the spirit of the Plutzik readings, I chose to read some work by a new poet. I am very glad I did, as it has introduced me to some poems that I am sure to enjoy as a teacher and as a reader.
JOHN CHANDLER received a Ph.D in English from the University of Rochester in 2012.

ON “SEPSIS” BY C. DALE YOUNG
C. Dale Young is a practicing physician, and his profession makes its way into several of his poems. For Young, medicine seems to serve as a larger exploration into questions that cannot be answered or even articulated with any sort of surgical precision. “Sepsis,” from Young’s latest collection, Torn, describes an unsuccessful surgery with a narrative that moves from Young’s turmoil over his failure, to the dying body on the bed, to the world outside of the hospital, with its “bustle of cars and garbage trucks,” and “wind that kept sweeping the streets clean”—all punctuated by repetitions of the word “God,” which gives the poem a strikingly confessional tone. The connection between medicine and poetry is apparent in many of Young’s poems: both concern themselves with humanity’s (often internal) complexities and both, at least ideally, strive for some type of remedy. And although Torn is not, as its title suggests, a testament to restoration--medical or otherwise—its many parts stitched together are, however broken, in some way healing.
JENNY BOYAR is a second-year Ph.D student in English Literature at UR. This semester she is teaching a course titled “Narrative Medicine.”

 
ON THE ANTHOLOGIST BY NICHOLSON BAKER
In The Anthologist, Paul Chowder narrates his struggle to write an introduction for a new anthology of rhymed poems, a rambling confessional that includes a mixed bowl of theories and metaphors to explain rhyme and meter. He presents the image of his hand resting on his girlfriend’s upturned hip while they are in bed together. This “is rhyme,” says Paul, “the felt matching of two congruent shapes.” While the hand and the hip, like two rhyming words, are felt to be congruent in shape, one at once acknowledges their essential difference in other aspects like function or meaning.
While addressing rhyme in these circumspect and figurative terms, Paul is much more doggedly direct in propounding a theory of meter, one that borrows the terms of beats and rests from musical notation. I find this scheme interesting but, when carried to its conclusions, finally too inflexible; the equally apportioned quarter-notes of a 4/4 measure can’t approximate the rough and relative comparisons of stressed and unstressed syllables. But Paul entertains no counterargument, and his insistence becomes unpleasantly pedantic. As he presents the iambic pentameter line as a waltz of three beats which includes a rest, his hyperbolic emphases might belie some uncertainty in the theory which he is afraid to admit. But I dislike him only until he forgets his pedantry in his sensitivity to “life’s untold particulars,” and then he has a warm and amicable charm.
PHILLIP A. WITTE (Curator, UR 2010, English/Creative Writing)
 
ON “MRS. MEAN” BY WILLIAM H. GASS
In “Mrs. Mean,” Gass demonstrates a certain purpose of his fiction and its limitations. The narrator is a fellow who sits on his porch observing the curious behavior of his neighbors, particularly the eponymous Mrs. Mean (he doesn't know her real name) as she exercises tyranny over her brood.
I can only surmise what her life is like inside her little house; but on humid Sunday afternoons, while I try my porch for breeze, I see her hobbling on her careful lawn in the hot sun, stick in hand to beat her scattered children, and I wonder a lot about it.
This sentence summarizes the whole narrative, which has no plot, as is typical of the stories in this collection. Employing detailed scrutiny and mental projection, the story is not a portrait of Mrs. Mean so much as the narrator's attempt to build an imaginary place that is nevertheless contiguous with observable experience. To conceive an image of the Means' life behind-shutters, without actually going to see it, is the narrator's aim: “My wife would strike up friendships, too, and so, she says, find out; but that must be blocked. It would destroy my transcendence. It would entangle me mortally in illusion.” But he is wary to go too far into imaginary ground and lose contact with what is real: “Indeed I am not myself. This is not the world. I have gone too far. It is the way fairy tales begin—with a sudden slip over the rim of reality.” Gass wants to use fiction not to escape but to extend reality beyond the knowable, and in “Mrs. Mean” he demonstrates the fragility and elusiveness of that enterprise.
PHILLIP A. WITTE, Curator (UR 2010, English/Creative Writing)
 
ON “SELF PORTRAIT AS BOTH PARTIES” BY JORIE GRAHAM
In reading Jorie Graham’s The End of Beauty, I was struck by her series of poetic “self-portraits” as biblical or mythical pairs. In the traditionally visual version of a self-portrait, the painter is also the subject of the piece. Yet in a poem, the relationship between the artist and artwork is confounded by the existence of a third component: the speaker. In what is perhaps my favorite poem of the series, “Self-Portrait as Both Parties,” Graham further complicates matters by establishing sunlight and river silt as metaphors for Orpheus and Eurydice. Graham writes, “he would hold her up, this light all open hands, /… curling around her to find crevices by which to carry her up” (25; 27). The image of sunlight trying to capture ever-shifting silt particles makes palpable the frustration Orpheus feels trying to lift Eurydice’s spirit out of the underworld. However, the silt’s drowning (and by extension Eurydice’s second death) is rendered as a trade-off rather than an evil: “she cannot, the drowning is too kind, / the becoming of everything which each pore opens to again” (30-31). In giving up her finite form, she merges with everything her particles touch. As a result, the sunlight also loses a chance at a body; he seeks “flaws by which to be himself arrested and made” (28). This attempt to find the self by creating a representation of another being closely resembles the crafting of self-portraits. However, delineating the many selves of this poem is as difficult as grabbing hold of silt, given that we can never be sure whether the two “parties” of the poem are the sunlight and river bottom, Orpheus and Eurydice, or perhaps even the metaphor and the myth.
SARAH YOUNG (UR 2013, English/Creative Writing) is a peer writing tutor and aspiring playwright from Portland, OR.
 
ON LES FLEURS DU MAL OF BAUDELAIRE, TRANSLATED BY RICHARD HOWARD
I knew Richard Howard’s voice before I knew Richard Howard. It was a voice of camouflage and of subterfuge, the ventriloquist tongue, the voice of the translator. How often did I read Gide or Giraudoux, Camus or Baudelaire not knowing that I was reading these authors mediated through the voice of an American writer who, like me, once worked as a lexicographer. Howard was an American in Paris in the early 1950s, when its heart still beat young and gay, though fretted by the privations of the war and its aftermath. When I finally made it to the Left Bank during the bagarres of 1968, I was an arriviste, a latecomer to what will always remain for me a moveable feast. In recently reading Howard’s translation of Les Fleurs du Mal, I now realize that Hyam Plutzik (in “T.S.E. Only”) chose one of Baudelaire’s lines with which to chide T. S. Eliot for his anti-Semitism:“Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère!” which Eliot himself had quoted at the very end of the first section of The Waste Land. While my own translation of that line would have resulted in the feeble and pedantic “hypocrite of a reader, my look-alike, my brother,” Howard infuses it with grace in his rendering: “--hypocrite reader, --my alias, –my twin!” Apparently Howard remembered something I had forgotten from our shared lexicographic past: Eliot’s first name, Thomas, derives from Didymus, the Greek word for twin.
EDWARD MORAN was the literary consultant to the production of the documentary film Hyam Plutzik: American Poet. He is currently the literary advisor to the Hyam Plutzik Centennial Committee.

 
ON DANCING IN ODESSA BY ILYA KAMINSKY
When Ilya Kaminsky’s collection Dancing in Odessa earned him the Addison M. Metcalf award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2005, the official citation noted: “With his magical style in English, [these] poems seem like a literary counterpart to Chagall in which laws of gravity have been suspended and colors reassigned, but only to make everyday reality that much more indelible.” In the title poem for that collection, Kaminsky writes:
We lived north of the future, days opened
letters with a child's signature, a raspberry, a page of sky.
My grandmother threw tomatoes from her balcony,
she pulled imagination like a blanket over my head.
Still, there is a presentiment of menace:
I kept a suitcase full
of Brodsky’s poems. The city trembled
a ghost-ship setting sail.
At night, I woke to whisper: yes, we lived.
When it comes to discussing the situation that prompted his family’s exile in America, Kaminsky is matter-of-fact. As he told Thomas Lux for an interview in the San Diego Reader: “The problem for my father was that it really looks bad on paper when you are a Jewish man who has friends who write about the government. And he helps them with money. Plus, being Jewish backfired then—when the state collapsed, there was no police to bribe.”
Like Hyam Plutzik, who spoke no English until he was eight, Ilya Kaminsky and a host of other poets from the four corners of the globe are doing their part in enlivening American life and language by bringing to it the rhythms of resistance that have long been part of its soul.
EDWARD MORAN was the literary consultant to the production of the documentary film Hyam Plutzik: American Poet. He is currently the literary advisor to the Hyam Plutzik Centennial Committee.
 
ON “WOODCHUCKS” BY MAXINE KUMIN
Why has the woodchuck become such a torturer of Jewish-American poets? Hyam Plutzik’s “Death at The Purple Rim” recounts his confrontations with one of the pesky critters during his year-long sojourn in the Connecticut countryside in the 1930s. (He eventually blasts the beastling to Kingdom Come, his shotgun a “tube of lusterless metal/Cold blue in the sunlight and held by hands without will…”) And then there is Maxine Kumin, whose considerably shorter poem “Woodchucks” appeared in 1972. Again, woodchuck and poet are engaged in deadly combat, but unlike Plutzik, whose battle is with a single animal, Kumin is faced with a plague of them. Gassing them with cyanide proves futile, so Kumin, “a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace,” dispatches them with a firearm, “righteously thrilling to the feel of the .22, the bullets’ neat noses.”
How aptly do these two poems serve as bookends to the genocidal history of the mid-twentieth century. From the relative innocence of the prewar years, Plutzik exults, “O drinker of sunlight, how drink we together the darkness! … What holds you back? … What menace looms there?” And from the darkened shores of memory, Kumin wails, “If only they’d all consented to die unseen/gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.”
EDWARD MORAN was the literary consultant to the production of the documentary film Hyam Plutzik: American Poet. He is currently the literary advisor to the Hyam Plutzik Centennial Committee.

 
ON “THE NIHILIST AS HERO” BY ROBERT LOWELL
Robert Lowell’s “The Nihilist as Hero” is a beautiful contradiction. The speaker begins the poem with an opposition—a “happy day for Satan” counters the “beautiful unchanging fire of childhood,” for innocence is to let time pass completely unaware of change, and evil is the painful discovery that things have changed. The image of youth is just one of the many ways that, in his translations and original poems, Lowell establishes a sense of longing, wishing for a time that has passed. Another is his portrayal of change in the sonnet: “life by definition breeds on change.” Change disables poets from putting half a dozen decent lines down in sequence and elucidates the contrast between the quick future and simple past. The nihilist’s desire to “gaze the everlasting hills to rubble” is another counter intuition, for how can one passively destroy nature? Even the title of the poem is contradicting—a nihilist believes in nothing, whereas a hero believes in a cause and acts on it. Lowell’s juxtaposition, an artful reflection of his serious manic depression, was influenced by Baudelaire’s duality and influences in long-lasting ways countless poets and readers who also miss what is gone.
STACY KRAVITZ (UR 2012/T5, English and Linguistics) is a student passionate about language. She studied German in Berlin in the spring of 2011, and she is a journalist for the Athletic Department here on campus.
 
ON “X” BY ADRIENNE RICH
In the emotional “X” from Twenty-One Love Poems (1976), Adrienne Rich writes resolutely, vulnerably, and beautifully. The speaker (whom we assume is Rich herself) stops to gaze into the eyes of her lover's languid pet. She acknowledges “human arrogance” before engaging, propelled through cosmic reflection, her deep animalism. In the cosmos she encounters is our ache, the “voices of the psyche driv[ing] through the flesh”—the ache to find refuge in physical union and “bodily comfort,” to understand the most ingrained tendencies of our “dense brain,” to escape inescapable loss and death, and to survive in a harsh, frigid, and lonely universe. Above these, or at the root of these, is the true and most human factor saving us “creature-traveler[s]” from misery or oblivion as we traverse these barren “planetary nights”: the propensity we have in the grimmest of circumstances for gentleness, compassion, and love. This poem asserts, at its heart, that our longing and pain is shared and that meaning, happiness, and hope are found together. From a mere twelve lines, that idea is unforgettable. This is what it means to be human. As Rich writes, “without tenderness, we are in hell.”
CHARLES N. GENESE (UR 2012, Psychology) has moved to New York City to study and produce electronic music alongside other desperately creative people in a relaxed and economical environment.
 
ON “THE FEEDER” BY ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT
The speaker of Voigt’s “The Feeder” regrets her foolish pride in expectations when setting up a bird feeder. Within the first stanza, she condemns herself for “wanting/ large, crested, rare” birds and not appreciating the beauty of the common birds. She doesn't withhold any part of that realization from the reader. What, then, is the allure of this poem? Voigt sophisticatedly designs a poem where the speaker describes the events as they happened and places those events in context of the speaker’s realization, to let the reader come to the same conclusions. Through her reflection, the speaker discovers that her foolishness and pride in trying to create something beautiful was self-deceiving; the belief that people have an unfettered ability to change their lives and environment is replaced by the acceptance of what is innate and familiar. That is why, in the end, the “bird of [our] childhood” will always come back. Uninvited, it is the only thing left from our attempts at self-creation. Voigt's use of an introspective speaker develops this awareness, beyond the immediate feelings of foolishness. It is this new consciousness that the poem becomes steeped in and that surrounds the reader.
MEGAN WILSON (UR 2015, English/Creative Writing) is a mental health advocate and poetry enthusiast from Naugatuck, CT.
 
ON “THE ANSWER” BY BEI DAO
(TRANSLATED BY BONNIE S. MCDOUGAL)
Lessons learned in times of suffering and change are imperative to share. However, passing on the lessons of the past to those who were not there can be incredibly difficult. In “The Answer,” Bei Dao succeeds in conveying some part of that anguish in just a few words and relates what needs to be taken away in a few more. His spirit of activism is very clear in this poem, where “Debasement is a password” and the noble are marked for death. His conviction, challenging tyranny even when it seems hopeless, comes through strongly as he declares “If a thousand challengers lie beneath your feet, / Count me as number one thousand and one.” The prospect is frightening, but his message of courage is inspiring. Finally, his ending, “glimmering stars / … are the watchful eyes of future generations,” is a reminder of the most important reason to protest: that time is passing—the present rhetoric is but a moment in the universe. The next generation deserves our best attempt to improve the world and will condemn us harshly if we comply with injustice.
EDITH HANSON (UR 2012, Japanese and Computer Science) is currently an Assistant Language Teacher in the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program.
 
ON THE DREAM SONGS BY JOHN BERRYMAN
John Berryman wrote as a master of misperception. Split, nervous, passionate and intelligent, Berryman’s The Dream Songs are a product of his life’s poetic ambitions. First one way, then another, first one character, then the other, the songs are unpredictable in process, yet precise in their constitution, and though products of the confessional renaissance, speak wholly of the modern American way.
So may be Henry was a human being.
Let’s investigate that.
… We did; okay.
He is a human American man.
That’s true. My lass is braking.
My brass is aching. Come & diminish me, & map my way.
(Song 13)
We are already diminished, as we have lost our selves. Our thoughts are recognized, but left unexplored. We pray now that our way be mapped, and so our words become a gamble, become but symbols on a page; what simple expression of independence, and with it all its pleasure of existence, comes from the trivial separation of “may” and “be.”
Framed with the worlds of business and politics, race and gender, sex and corruption, and of the self, The Dream Songs masterfully illustrate problems now common to contemporary society. “The mind is incalculable,” admits song 337, and such words suggest a belief of the contrary; John Berryman predicts what his changing society might do to the individual, and now, forty years after his death, the complex world John Berryman saw is our own.
JON STARR (UR 2011) lives in a carriage house. There are no horses anymore.
 
ON TWO STORIES FROM BREAK IT DOWN BY LYDIA DAVIS
In “The Fears of Mrs. Orlando,” Lydia Davis plunges her readers into the world of her title character, an elderly lady who distrusts everyone and everything around her. Near the beginning, the narrator matter-of-factly declares that Mrs. Orlando was attacked once on an elevator and that she was "molested several times in a crowded bus." At first, these traumatic events seem to explain Mrs. Orlando's fearful and neurotic tendencies. But as the story continues, the reader learns that Davis writes the world according to Mrs. Orlando, blending fact and fear until the reader is just as confused and mistrusting as the poor old lady herself. Davis entangles the reader with her words until his mental state seems to mirror Mrs. Orlando's. And yet, this does not have the effect of aligning the reader’s sympathies with the character because Davis makes certain that the reader cannot even trust the old lady.
Another story, “The Mother,” is only ten sentences long. In its short and repetitive rhythm, the story captures the tight control of a mother over her daughter through verbal criticism. The girl performs an action, the mother speaks her critique; the girl performs another action, again the mother critiques it. It is interesting to note that the mother never engages in any action with her daughter and that the daughter never speaks in the story. The mother's criticisms escalate from seemingly harmless (though quite loveless) criticisms to the extreme implication of the final sentence: proposed suicide. The mother is, quite literally, killing her daughter with criticism. In just ten lines, Davis manages to give her reader an extremely intimate sense of this twisted relationship built upon control, obedience, vulnerability, and suppression.
ANNALISE BAIRD (UR 2013, English) has traveled to ten different countries in the past year, including a semester studying abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark.
 
ON THE CONSERVATIONIST BY NADINE GORDIMER
“If I had your money…” (The Conservationist, 71)
Although Mehring’s lover doesn’t finish her thought, the unvoiced implication resonates with good intentions—that one might buy freedom and development, that money in the right hands could end apartheid. But she merely falls prey to Mehring’s capitalist sensibility: as currency for change, cold hard cash reigns rather than hard-fought relationships.
If I had his money, I would buy beachfront property in El Jadida, Morocco, where I worked this summer at an English immersion camp for Moroccan youth. Because the beach here is clean, the water warm and shark-free; because my fictional fortune can’t resolve the gender discrepancies I face daily. Affluence alone won’t eradicate the harassment and violence.
With his money, Mehring possesses the luxury to own a farm, a refuge from city life. Ownership suggests control, but as seasons pass, Mehring’s authority diminishes. The land—this waterlogged pasture—proves to be a powerful character because Mehring perceives it as such.
The mud’s clutch undermines his claim to the farm—the tighter the land’s stranglehold, the less control he possesses. His attempt to get the right footing, to rationalize his escape ultimately fails, and he slips into ridiculous, uncontrollable laughter. He succumbs to nature’s mercy, finally freed when the mud releases its grip.
As a reader, I empathize with Mehring’s panic. During my first encounter with the ocean, swimming felt more like being carried, cradled tenderly by the water, yet my stomach tensed with each passing swell, fearing this wave would drag me under. But Mehring’s fear runs deeper than mine. He struggles for ownership because his land deed represents his prevailing relationship in the novel. Through his ties to the farm, he attempts to fill the void of human connection. A hopeless effort, in my opinion, for our ability to connect person-to-person is our greatest asset and a priceless bond.
LEAH SQUIRES (UR 2010, English and Ethnomusicology) is currently serving as a Youth Development Volunteer with the Peace Corps in Morocco.
 
ON “TARANTULA, OR THE DANCE OF DEATH”
BY ANTHONY HECHT
As the speaker nostalgically reflects on his time during “the plague,” I find it hard, not solely as a critical reader but as a human being, to gauge how to react. At first expression, the speaker’s sentimental longings for a time of plague seem comic. But as we continue reading and better understand the horror that the speaker has endured, the indescribable devastation that greeted his doorstep daily, the speaker’s sentimentality becomes unnerving, disturbing even. And then I think, Was it wrong of me to chuckle? What would an appropriate response have looked like? This is one of Hecht’s most consistent preoccupations: how do we cope with the unimaginable when it indiscriminately befalls us? Confronting trauma of such enormous proportions, one’s emotional response tends to depart from any kind of reason.
Critics and biographers often make allusions to Hecht’s experience as a liberator of a concentration camp in attempts to improve our understanding of his work; whether knowing this or not makes us better readers of his poems (I tend to think not necessarily), such biography might help us understand how a writer comes by the ability to see horror simultaneously through sardonic and sensitive lenses, and it is this quality that pervades Hecht’s poems and makes them worth our attention.
NOAH FRIEDMAN (UR 2012, English/Creative Writing) is currently a member of Teach for America in Phoenix, Arizona.
 
ON “BIG GRAB” BY TONY HOAGLAND
In Tony Hoagland’s “Big Grab,” two men at a snack-food company conspire to decrease the number of corn-chips in a bag they call “The Big Grab,” so that “the concept of Big is quietly modified / to mean More or Less Large, or Only Slightly / Less Big Than Before.” This theft, made possible by language, is more than petty larceny because language is more than just personal property—it’s interpersonal property. It is how we connect with one another, how we identify and express our experiences of the world. As language is appropriated we undergo a sort of collective atrophy of the mental tissues that connect us to our world and to each other.
This is Hoagland’s diagnostic opinion of the condition of the twenty-first century self: “Nothing means what it says, / and it says it all the time.” So I want to be particularly careful when I say that we should think of Tony Hoagland as a pathologist. That word refers to a physician whose primary responsibility is the analysis and identification of disease. It derives from the Greek pathos and –logia, meaning “the study of experience or suffering.” Poets study human experience through the precise use of language. The purpose of that study and careful naming, in the case of poetic- and medical-pathologists alike, is to better understand what ails us, and how we might go about treating, preventing, or even curing it.
Hoagland understands that diagnosis can be a profound treatment in and of itself. He understands, too, that a healthy concern about language is not where the most engaging art ends but where it begins. His poems are instantiations of the idea that language, if it can cut us apart, can in the right hands stitch us back together again.
TYLER GOLDMAN graduated from UR in 2010 with a degree in English and Creative Writing.
 
ON THE BOOK OF NIGHTMARES BY GALWAY KINNELL
My introduction to Galway Kinnell came when I had just begun my degree in English Literature, and in the wake of high school instruction, I was devouring poets not part of my earlier education. Surely I had never read Kinnell's grizzled poetry when I beheld a lovely tattoo on a coworker’s arm, the kind my mother would hate and therefore the kind I secretly fetishised: the image of a dead or dying man, a crow perched upon his hands, angels drinking his life force, stars, symbols, etc. When I commented on how appealing I found these images, the response was, “Yeah, it's the cover of Galway Kinnell's Book of Nightmares. Pretty freaky shit.”
What understatement! For the fledgling poetic mind, what excitement there is in the lines “Lieutenant! / This corpse will not stop burning!” when all I had read before were love poems or pastoral scenes. The Book of Nightmares is a full experience, prophetic and infectious like Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and the more one reads, the harder it is to escape. Woodcuts in a style from the Middle Ages—images of a witch sacrificing a hen over a cauldron, a dissected man lying on a table before what appear to be priests, bones, gravemakers, severed hands—lend their perverse intrigue to a book that has to me become a kind of kinky Satanism, like The Velvet Underground singing of leather whips. Perhaps this will frighten some readers away, yet let them go away; for others this book may become a kind of prayer.
KIRK CHILAS (UR 2011, English) has studied classical languages and plans to pursue a Master’s degree in archaeology.
 
ON DIEN CAI DAU BY YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA
The lure of Yusef Komunyakaa’s voice is undeniable. Dark colors of mud stain the poems of grass, cicadas, soldiers, tigers and bright insects found in Dien Cai Dau. With these subjects and his powerful control of stress, Komunyakaa paints vast portraits of the beauty and the horror that was war in Vietnam.
We hugged bamboo & leaned
against a breeze off the river,
slow-dragging with ghosts
from Saigon to Bangkok,
with women left in doorways
reaching in from America.
We aimed at dark-hearted songbirds.
(Camouflaging the Chimera)
Komunyakaa’s vision of line, stanza, and clause lends image to the invisible. A breeze becomes a bed for the weary, ghosts of the slaughtered are fish for the hungry, cities of foreign tongue are homes, their women the embodiment of love, the catalysts for memories of the lives we’ve left behind. Birdsongs: the reminder of why we are here, of what we have done, of the regret of a war we’re not sure if we want to win.
When asked a question at his reading, Komunyakaa responds in passing, “There are so many voices out there,” and hastily continues, as though to forget he spoke the truism. It does not matter; we are lost still in the rhythm of his poems. So many voices, he says, and his, one of song and sorrow in a single breath, is that which truly defies emulation.
JON STARR (UR 2011) lives in a carriage house. There are no horses anymore.
 
ON DIVINE COMEDIES BY JAMES MERRILL
James Merrill is a writer of lines in the spirit of prose; in the way Lowell and Baudelaire add paragraph to their poems, Merrill adds poetics to his stories. And his stories, lengthy meditations on simple things, echo the confessional mind, yet give transition to the beat world brewing around them. The division of prose and poem is crafted with unpredictable grace, and this change, this curiosity of story, turns the pages forward.
… Finally take
Any poor smalltown starstruck sense of “love
That makes the world go round”—see how the phrase
Stretches from Mystic to Mount Palomar
Back to those nights before the good old days,
Before the axel jumped its socket so
That genes in shock flashed on/off head to toe,
Before mill turned to maelstrom, and IBM
Wrenched from Pythagoras his diadem.
Adamant nights in which our wisest apes
Met on a cracked mud terrace not yet Ur
And with presumption more than amateurs
Stared the random starlight into shapes.
(Divine Comedies, Verse for Urania)
“A prose that is altogether alive,” says T.S. Eliot, “demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.” And such a view has hindered many writers and discouraged countless readers. Merrill, however, with allusions arcane and formidable in number, and with poetics resonating with force and with volume, is yet intimately accessible in what’s writ, and so with the time in which he lived. To a man who bound his spirit to a craft, to a man who saw friendship transcend life, to a man who used an Ouija board to write poems, to this man we raise our glass, and we drink.
JON STARR (UR 2011) lives in a carriage house. There are no horses anymore.
 
ON “CLEAR, CLOUDLESS” BY CARL PHILLIPS
Transcription of recorded speech into text is one of a handful of ostensibly simple tasks that human beings still perform better than computers. Our syntax is chronically fragmented and irregular, full of false starts and repetitions, hesitations and self-corrections. Listening to some of our sentences unfold from a distance, it is a wonder that we make ourselves understood at all. And yet we do, because the rhythms of our language are as natural to us as thinking.
Few poets have utilized syntax to transcribe the experience of the actively thinking mind as precisely and compellingly as Carl Phillips. Listen to the beginning of “Clear, Cloudless” from Phillips’ most recent collection, Double Shadow:
Tonight—in the foundering night, at least,
of imagination, where what I don’t in fact
believe anymore, all the same, is true—
the stars look steadily down upon me. I look
up, at the stars…
Consider the sentences: “Tonight…the stars look steadily down upon me”; “I look up, at the stars.” Both simple sentences, so why do they feel so thrilling in this poem? Phillips fractures the first sentence after just one word, suspending the resolution of the sentence until the second stanza. We can hear this syntax of deferment even more clearly within the interrupting clause itself, where two qualifications (“at least”; “all the same”) and one enjambment (in fact / believe) create the impression of a mind groping, struggling to get something just right.
The comma in the poem’s second sentence creates a short pause, which echoes the interruption of the first sentence and draws attention to the semantic symmetry of the two sentences. Or is it a hesitation, as though the speaker, disoriented by the turning of his own mind and the intensity of his experience, needs to remind himself what it is he’s talking about?
TYLER GOLDMAN graduated from UR in 2010 with a degree in English and Creative Writing.

 
ON THE INFERNO OF DANTE: A NEW VERSE TRANSLATION BY ROBERT PINSKY
“Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself/ In dark woods, the right road lost. To tell/ About those woods is hard—so tangled and rough/ And savage that thinking of it now, I feel/ The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.” So begins Robert Pinsky’s rendition of Dante’s Inferno. Pinsky captures the speaker’s disorientation and desperation: from the first lines, we understand how difficult it will be for the speaker to relate his journey through the starless pit of Hell.
I read Pinsky’s translation twice at Rochester. I took Professor Russell Peck’s survey of Classics as a first-semester freshman: while I was truly “in dark woods, the right road lost,” I was captivated by the poem. When I was a junior, Professor James Longenbach presented my classmates and me with several translations, pointing to Pinsky’s as the most successful. Unlike many other translators, Pinsky chooses not to attempt the original aba, bcb, cdc rhyme scheme, or terza rima, that Dante designed. Instead, he repeats final consonant sounds but allows vowels to change. This technique frees the poem from the sometimes forced sound of modern English rhymes at the same time that it recalls the earlier text.
This past year, I taught Pinsky’s Inferno in a course at Boston University. I initially instructed the class, a group of first-semester freshmen, to read selections. After reading a few cantos, however, they asked to read the whole poem. Delighted, I agreed. Several students became so interested in translation that they devoted their final papers to the subject. Though I have not been teaching long, I have never had students ask for more reading. I am truly grateful to Robert Pinsky for creating a text that elicited exactly that response.
MELISSA SCHOENBERGER (UR 2009, English and Spanish) is pursuing a Ph.D in Restoration & 18th Century English Literature at Boston University.
 
ON HAROUN AND THE SEA OF STORIES BY SALMAN RUSHDIE
The tale of a young boy transported to another planet on a quest to bring back his father’s ability to tell stories, along the way finding he must also save the world he has stumbled upon, Haroun and the Sea of Stories combines a compelling storyline with artful writing. I often feel as if Rushdie is more a poet in prose than a novelist. As in poetry, it seems that there is not a word overlooked, nor a sentence written without the most deliberate intention. A line like “Haroun had already smelled unhappiness on the night air, and this sudden mist positively stank of sadness and gloom” epitomizes Rushdie’s ability to render tangible concepts that we so often find clichéd in other books. My students, 8th graders on the Leeward Coast of Oahu, were initially resistant to the book—it was too weird. By the end, they were begging to read more and, after surveying them, I found that nearly all of them not only loved the book but were pleased to have read something so different from what they were used to.
KATHRYN STILWELL (UR 2008, English/Creative Writing) became a member of Teach For America after graduating from Rochester. She currently teaches in Portland, OR.
 
ON THE MUSIC SCHOOL BY JOHN UPDIKE
The summer of 2008 I worked in my small town’s bookstore. We carried work by local authors, and many of them would come by the store. Everyone’s favorite regular was John, and while I knew he was one of the authors on our Locals’ Shelf, he never talked about himself much. One week when he came in, I told him I wanted to read one of his books. He went to the Locals’ Shelf, pulled out a hardbound copy, and signed it. “You’re not paying for that,” he said. “I’m getting it for you.” That’s when I looked down and realized that the man I knew simply as John was in fact John Updike, and he had just given me a signed copy of The Music School. Each story may seem simple, but Updike writes so beautifully that ordinary life turns into extraordinary tales of relationships, religion, and American culture that can captivate any reader. He certainly has a way with words, and his distinctive style has made him a voice of middle class America. The Music School may not have been the first book I read of John Updike’s, but it certainly made me feel like I got the chance to know “John” a little better.
MORGAN JAFFE (UR 2012, English and American Cultural Studies) is currently at the Warner School of Education studying for her Masters in English and Inclusion.

 
ON “THE COMPANIONS” BY HOWARD NEMEROV
In “The Companions,” Nemerov evokes Wallace Stevens, whose poem, “The Snow Man,” wants us “not to think / Of any misery in the sound of the wind” – wants us, in other words, not to ascribe a human emotional capacity to the non-human things of nature. “The Companions” dramatizes our tendency to do so using language that is less gnomic than Stevens but no less searching, and no less wrought, even for its casually idiomatic diction. In singsong hexameter couplets, the speaker acknowledges “the deep folly of man / To think that things can squeak at him more than things can.” Amidst a march of tamer monosyllables, squeak pops rudely out as if to deride him for that folly. But he revises himself in the third stanza: these companions, the small gods the speaker had imagined to inhabit a stone and an elm branch, are not figments of any folly but once had actual being, and now are gone—not lost to, but left by the speaker. Arriving at this, I feel a new twist of poignancy in the title, as if the gift of companions is only to be known and named when we have left them. The strangest thing is how the speaker's little gods came to be, but close inspection is difficult: they must have had voices prior to “articulate sound”—language—which becomes an agent independent of but at the same time identical to them, and so the little gods are spoken to themselves in the poet's own head. Is this too abstract? In the final stanza, it seems to have been this very attempt to understand how these gods came to be that is the speaker’s turn away from them, as if to look too closely at a phantasm were to take away its power.
PHILLIP A. WITTE (Curator, UR 2010, English/Creative Writing)
 
ON EDWIN MULLHOUSE: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF AN AMERICAN WRITER 1943-1954 BY JEFFREY CARTWRIGHT, A NOVEL BY STEVEN MILLHAUSER
Edwin Mullhouse is a fictional biography, both subject and biographer being Millhauser's creations. But the first character we meet is Walter Logan White, author of an Introductory Note. White claims, in an offhand way, that “The search for Jeffrey Cartwright continues. I, for one, hope they never find him.” He goes on, speaking of Edwin's novel: “I myself have sternly resisted the temptation to read Cartoons, knowing full well that the real book, however much a work of genius, can no more match the shape of my expectations than the real Jeffrey could, should he ever materialize. I shall probably succumb, one sad day.”
The indirect warning appears superfluous at first; why should we be tempted to meet a boy or read a book both of which, we know, are figments of Millhauser's making? Only when I neared the end of the book, where Edwin declares, “I aspire to the condition of fiction”—an aspiration which is finally accomplished by his death—did I realize that White's words were not a warning, but an allusion to the workings of desire and imagination. I too by that point was longing to meet the brilliant kid of such depth and insight as Jeffrey Cartwright and to read the unreadable (because non-existent) novel, Cartoons. It felt like being eleven years old reading Harry Potter for the first time and harboring a quite unillusioned, almost expectant hope that I would, any day now, receive a letter of admission to Hogwarts. Succumbing to that temptation to long for the thing we know to be fictional—not to resist that desire simply because we are aware the desired object doesn't “actually” exist—is the source of fiction’s power. Implicit in the impulse of fiction is death, or, in less morbid terms, limits to actual experience, beyond which fiction allows us to look.
PHILLIP A. WITTE (Curator, UR 2010, English/Creative Writing)
 
ON “LYING IN A HAMMOCK AT WILLIAM DUFFY’S FARM IN PINE ISLAND, MINNESOTA” BY JAMES WRIGHT
For twelve lines, a solitary speaker basks in the peace of a rural summer evening, giving no attention to self except in the location of his body, the movement of his senses. Then he leaps into an abyss of introspection in a final line that is devastating in its ambiguity as to the nature of the lamented waste: is it the pursuit of abstractions—career, relationships, who knows what—that he regrets, never having spent enough time lying in a hammock and looking, listening? Or is it the opposite, has this speaker in fact spent his life doing just this, only now to realize the insignificance of it?
The language of “the bronze butterfly, / Asleep on the black trunk, / Blowing like a leaf in green shadow” becomes an image that we can join the speaker in seeing. He likewise transforms the sound of bells into the familiar movement of cows over the landscape. But which of his senses perceives horse droppings that “Blaze up into golden stones”? How does the violence and heat of “Blaze up” resolve in the inert “stones” that we have already seen, in the previous line, as horse droppings lying in the grass?
Language, in capable hands, can transform what seem straightforward experiences into the unresolvable dilemmas they actually are; but where, in the end, does that leave us? Is this what the poet means, to have wasted his life in the complicated pleasures of language? Reading the poem again I thrill to that pleasure. Reaching the end I too ask, how have I wasted my life?
PHILLIP A. WITTE (Curator, UR 2010, English/Creative Writing)
 
ON IN OTHER WORLDS BY MARGARET ATWOOD
In Other Worlds is a ruminative, personal, largely conversational account of Atwood's lifelong investment in myths, and in such fiction as falls under her umbrella term “wonder tale”— where the “speculative fiction,” “science fiction,” and “fantasy” subforms are each too limited and contested in their distinctions to cover her field of interest.
In her discussion of those genre terms, I am reminded of Coleridge's theories of imagination and fancy. One kind of storytelling, she writes, depends on our faculty to create mental images of things and events that, we suppose, could have taken place based on circumstances of reality present to our awareness—a dystopian future under a totalitarian regime, perhaps. Another kind of storytelling projects images of worlds and beings that, we acknowledge, could not conceivably come to be in our plane of existence—time travel, a wizarding school, a ring that makes the wearer invisible. Stories of all kinds, says Atwood, have the power to extend the reader's ego beyond rational, mortal limits, “beyond our own body...to include country, past and present.” In this way, myths “gather in and circumscribe their target audience.”
Atwood discusses the contradiction in the terms science and fiction, and the popular notion that one must obstruct the other. This is true, if the two are taken to refer to static, established quantities of knowledge on the one hand and make-believe on the other. But if science is taken in an active sense as the pursuit of knowledge, it must depend on fiction – fiction likewise in the active as the pursuit of invention, in that scientists depart from known facts into speculation: the hypothesis (a kind of story meant to explain a phenomenon) which they then attempt to demonstrate. No more can fiction exist without science, for fiction needs experience, knowledge, to be its fuel.
PHILLIP A. WITTE (Curator, UR 2010, English/Creative Writing)