It’s September. Summer is coming to a close. There’s a touch of fall in the evening air. The bookbags are back out. The syllabi have been distributed. You’ll notice a loose back-to-school theme to this month’s Rusty Paperweight.
NVR published its inaugural issue last month. It is freely available here. Check it out if you haven’t yet. In a few days, on September 15, we open for one week of submissions for our Halloween-themed mini-issue. You can find all the details here.
Kindred Spirit
Last month, before I returned to the classroom as a professor, I had a chance to be a student. I attended the Frost Farm Poetry Conference in Derry, New Hampshire, hosted by Bob Crawford and the Hyla Brook Poets. It was a great experience. A.M. Juster gave the keynote address (and kindly mentioned NVR). I participated in a workshop on ecopoetry led by Jane Satterfield and Ned Balbo. (Other workshops at the conference included an intro to rhyme and meter with Midge Goldberg, a focused study of the sonnet with Joseph Bottum, and a class on mixed meter with Brian Brodeur.) We discussed some intriguing poems, including new personal favorites Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms” and Philip Larkin’s “Going, Going.” I also received some useful poetry tips from Jane, Ned, and my fellow conference-goers. Most importantly, I met some great people. All unfolded on the hallowed ground of Frost’s farm. A highlight for me was reading a couple of my own poems in Frost’s barn. I hope to attend again next year. As Frost might say, “I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too.”
Listen Up!
Sleerickets—“Revision & the Individual Talent”
Before the start of the Frost Farm conference, I had a free afternoon in New Hampshire, so I thought I would drive north to Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall’s farm at Eagle Pond. I managed to get lost. I found Eagle Pond, but I’m not sure I found the farm. At least I had a great episode of Sleerickets on the phone.
In it, Katie Hartsock joins Matthew Buckley Smith for a wide-ranging conversation about the poetic tradition. Touchstones are T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Jorge Luis Borges’s “Kafka and His Precursors,” Jericho Brown’s “Invention,” and Hartsock’s “The old & the new,” where she distinguishes between revisionist and revisionary approaches to said tradition.
Kevin Hart on Hermitix
The Australian Kevin Hart is a leading philosopher and theologian as well as a celebrated poet. Contemplation connects these three vocations for Hart, and contemplation is the focus of this excellent Hermitix podcast interview.
Around the Poetry World
Poetry in Schools
Two great programs for poetry in middle and secondary schools are Poetry Out Loud (initiated by Dana Gioia) and the English-Speaking Union’s Shakespeare Competition. Both require students to memorize and deliver verse. If your local schools don’t participate in these programs, consider spreading the word to sympathetic English teachers.
The good folk at Rattle also accept submissions from bards no more than fifteen years of age for a young poets anthology.
Residency for Translators
This sounds like a fantastic opportunity for up-and-coming translators: a residency in the California Mountains, sponsored by the LA Review of Books, with the opportunity to run your work by Boris Dralyuk. Note that applications are due by September 21.
The LARB + Yefe Nof Translation Residency offers a two-week stay at Yefe Nof house in Lake Arrowhead, California, from December 2 to December 16, 2024. During the duration of their stay, the resident will have the opportunity to complete a translation of a short work—a set of poems, a short story, an excerpt from a novel, for example—in consultation with Boris Dralyuk, former LARB editor in chief and winner of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize.
Victoria Moul, “Anticipating Nostalgia: Back to School”
Back-to-school season can bring back memories of being nervous. It can be saturated with end-of-summer sadness. But it can also stir nostalgia, including the anticipatory nostalgia evoked by the sense that one’s children are growing up.
At her substack Horace & Friends, Victoria Moul writes about her young boys’ return to school in France. One of her nine-year-old’s first assignments was to memorize some lines from a poem by Maurice Carême that recalls the poet’s own school days and wishes that he might return to them. This leads Moul to reflect on a peculiar doubleness in much children’s poetry.
Revisiting Carême’s piece this week made me think about that ambiguous category of poems about childhood which are in their form and content accessible to children, even in some sense “for” children, but imbued with a kind of nostalgia for childhood which is really adult. I have found two such poems, in particular, very moving since I was myself a child, though they are both a couple of hundred years old now. (Carême, by contrast, only died in 1978.) The first is ‘A Boy’s Song’ by James Hogg….
The other poem she discusses is Thomas Hood’s “I remember, I remember.”
Seth Wieck, “The Second to Last Row in English Class”
Seth Wieck took me back to sophomore English in this vivid and funny piece for The Pale Fire that moves from personal reminiscence to a reflection on the power of metaphor. Here is the opening paragraph:
I sat on the second to last row in Mrs. Petruccione’s sophomore English class and skimmed a C during the first six weeks while we diagrammed sentences. I rarely did the assigned reading. During the 10 minutes of Channel One News, I’d ask Leia Deyhle and Denise Powers for summaries of The Open Boat and All Quiet on the Western Front so I could pass the quizzes. At some point, they started feeding me bad information, so I had to pick up the slack. So I did read An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, and another short story about a boy who becomes obsessed with snow, and memorized Shylock’s soliloquy, and rewrote the lyrics to Stairway to Heaven around the subject of Hiroshima, and while reading Cyrano de Bergerac had my first entrepreneurial epiphany: I could write-for-hire romantic letters for dudes to win the affection of ladies.
Zina Gomez-Lis, “Blumov’s Bear Method to Teaching Meter to Children”
Zina Gomez-Lis is one of the wonderful people I met at the Frost Farm Poetry Conference. Writing at her substack The Beauty of Things, she recounts her visit to a third-grade class for National Poetry Month. She did what many college profs now avoid: she taught the students about meter. Indeed, it sounds like she taught a master class, and a fun one at that, moving from The Proclaimers to Robbie Burns to Whitney Houston to William Blake to Eric Carle. This one had me smiling from beginning to end.
I also spoke more about meter, and how sometimes we have iambs (da-DUM) and trochees (DA-dum). I used William Blake’s “The Tyger” and the book Brown Bear, Brown, What Do You See? by Eric Carle to talk about trochees. I passed around a copy of Brown Bear and asked the kids to take turns reading it aloud, telling them to stress the words they naturally wanted to. Everyone heard DA-dum.
Helen Vendler
Longtime Harvard prof Helen Vendler, who passed last April, was one of the greatest poetry critics and teachers of her era. Many warm remembrances of her have been written by former students. Here is one from Cinque Henderson in Los Angeles Review of Books:
Many critics before her had, of course, explored the importance of poetic form, but none of them had Helen’s profoundly instinctive understanding of it, the ability to extend that understanding deep into the many constitutive parts of a poem, or the skill to translate for a common reader—writing authoritatively throughout her career on everyone from William Shakespeare to Wallace Stevens—how those variegated parts collaborated to create a convincing, cohesive, and permanent piece of art.
Harvard Magazine recently published two letters from Seamus Heaney to Vendler. Here’s a sample:
I cannot imagine how you live at such a pitch of devotion to the work you do and the people you know. If I think of the achieve of it, I’ll sink under my sheer plod, go cindery rather than gold vermilliony.
Reviews of The Island: WH Auden and the Last of Englishness.
In The Times, James Marriot reviews a new book by Nicholas Jenkins that, at 748 pages, delves deeply into the first thirty years of Auden’s life and poetry. He finds it to be a bit of a slog, in part because the “boyish Auden — charismatic, whimsical, self-delightingly virtuosic — is too little in evidence” in it. He’s also unpersuaded by how Jenkins casts Auden as a poet traumatized by World War I:
It is true that Auden’s father served as an army doctor. It is true that Auden loved the poetry of Wilfred Owen. It is true that Auden was at school in the early 1920s and that “between 1920 and 1923 British state was shipping 4,000 headstones to France and Belgium every week”. But such circumstances do not by themselves make a man a war poet. At points Jenkins is reduced to mentioning Auden’s “camouflaged” fascination with the First World War (ie you can’t see it) and optimistically referring to his silences on the subject as “dramatic lacunae”. You might say I exhibit “dramatic lacunae” on the subject of Peruvian folk dancing. It is easy to forget how little time ambitious young men spend meditating on the recent past.
Rachel Cooke’s review in The Guardian is more mixed. While the massive book is often a slog for her too, she notes “lovely moments” throughout, and she particularly appreciates the “earlier parts of the book, in which we burrow down into Auden’s obsession with the escarpments and industrial archaeology of the north – the landscape he would ultimately hymn in the great poem In Praise of Limestone (1948).” But perhaps the most striking passage for me, as an English professor, was this one:
In the end, this is not a volume for the general reader, nor even, perhaps, for the Auden fan. If I’m glad to have read it myself, it’s for somewhat mournful reasons. With university Eng lit now in painful decline, such scholarship (and verbosity) feels like a last gasp. In 50 years, or even 10, will people write books like this? It’s hard to believe that they will.
Oof.
David Schurman Wallace, “Guy Davenport—the Last High Modernist”
My former student and friend Carter Johnson, who is studying for a PhD at the University of Kentucky, first introduced me to the work of Guy Davenport, a long-time English prof at UK. Carter has a great picture of Davenport visiting with Cormac McCarthy, the latter in a very tight tanktop. Godine recently brought out a new edition of Davenport’s The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays in its Nonpareil series. David Schurman Wallace sketches Davenport’s life and reviews Geography for the Nation. Wallace points out Davenport’s penchant for the “literary anecdote”:
Here are some of the stories [Davenport] sorts through: stumbling upon Ezra Pound’s original blueprint for The Cantos while helping the aged, mad poet move into a new apartment in Rapallo; a coffee chat with Samuel Beckett; attending boring Oxford classes taught by J.R.R. Tolkien; lunching in Kentucky with the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard, the monk and writer Thomas Merton (“in mufti, dressed as a tobacco farmer with a tonsure”), and “an editor of Fortune who had wrecked his Hertz car coming from the airport and was covered in spattered blood from head to toe.” He reports that the restaurant treated them with impeccable manners.
Hollins Critic Covers
A colleague recently loaned me her stack of Hollins Critic back issues. Hollins University, right down Interstate 81 from where I live, has a storied literary tradition. The Critic was founded by R.H.W. Dillard, ex-husband of Annie Dillard, and ended its run shortly after his death in 2023. It’s sad to see so many storied journals close, including the Critic, but one shouldn’t focus only on the ending, as if it undid all the good work that these journals did during their active years.
Each issue of the Critic featured lovely portraits by the artist Lewis O. Thompson of prominent contemporary poets. Here are cover portraits of Richard Wilbur and Anne Sexton.
The Thing Itself
Paisley Rekdal’s “Whistlejacket” in At Length
David Middleton’s “Of Literature and Life” in Alabama Literary Review
Brian Brodeur’s “After Visiting a Former Student in a Psychiatric Unit” via The Beauty of Things
Matthew E. Henry’s “when asked why students come to me, ‘the tough teacher, the hard grader’” in Anti-Heroin Chic
Deborah Scott Studebaker’s “Your Question, Dianne” in Anti-Heroin Chic
D. A. Cooper’s “On Petrarch (Not) Reading Dante” in LIGHT
Nicole Caruso Garcia’s “Acquainted with the Spice” in LIGHT
Maya Clubine’s “Sun Inside My Brain” in Poems for Persons of Interest (winner of Alex Rettie’s first twelve-hour sonnet contest!)
Felicity Teague’s “Revenge of the Washing Machine” in Poems for Persons of Interest
Matthew Buckley Smith’s “Stay-at-Home” in The Nation
Shamik Banerjee’s “Sartaaj Lane” in Autumn Sky Poetry
Christine Klocek-Lim’s “The great rift on Saturn’s moon Tethys” via Autumn Sky Poetry
Michael Imossan’s “Softness Lives Here” in Poetry Sango-Ota
Divine Inyang Titus’s “Heavenly descent” in Poetry Sango-Ota
Jared Carter’s “Pharaoh” in Pulsebeat
Susan McLean’s “Emily Dickinson” in Pulsebeat
A. A. Gunther’s “A Testament Against the Mantis” in Mezzo Cammin
Mike Hopkins’s “At the Dog Track” in Rattle
It was wonderful to meet you at Frost Farm, and I am glad to see an account of your experience here. It was so much fun. I’m glad you’re up for coming back to the Farm. It’s truly hallowed ground.
And thank you for sharing my Substack with so many other great links.