April is National Poetry Month, created in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets to celebratean ancient literary genre that captures readers’ minds and hearts as powerfully today as ever.
Rochesterhas, for generations, taught students the pleasures and possibilities of poetic expression, counted famed poets among its faculty, and hosted anarray ofwriters who have made exceptional contributions to the art of verse.
Canpoetry thrive in an age of instant communication? Seven years ago, Rochester Review asked that question of the University’s poetry faculty and students, and found that the answer was an emphatic “yes.” The pace of digital life has only quickened since 2010, but the slower process ofreading and craftingpoetry continues, robustly, at Rochester.
This story originally appeared in Rochester Review, MarchApril, 2010.
A cell phone trills. ABlackBerry vibrates, bristling for immediate attention. Tweets accrete, each bearing fleeting news of someones latest passing thought on Twitter. Now, now, now, now, now.
In an era of such frenzied exchange of language, it might seem that there would be little place for the poem. But poetry never has been more alive at Rochester than it is today, in writing workshops and poetry readings, informal gatherings and solitary sessions where awriter confronts ablank sheetor screen. Far from being blotted out by contemporary mores of communication, poetry provides akind of corrective.
Poetry, like all great writing, whether poetry or prose, forces you to be very slow, says , the Joseph H. Gilmore Professor of English and an acclaimed poet and literary critic. You have to read very slowly. You have to write very slowly. Thats what Isay to people who say they dont understand poetry.
Poetry, like all great writing, whether poetry or prose, forces you to be very slow.
James Longenbach
If you try to speed through language the way we do in most of our lives, poetry will be not just irrelevant, but incredibly frustrating.
Speed, succinctness, transparent and uncomplicated meaningthese are the currency of now ubiquitous electronic communications. But poetry, which also concerns itself with condensation of thought, is an art of shades of meaning, ambiguities of purpose, and the pleasures of language itself.
Weve become the culture of the sound biteand poetry is precisely the opposite of that, says Thomas DiPiero, aprofessor of French and of visual and cultural studies, as well as the senior associate dean of the humanities. Its away of thinkinga very specific way of thinking. Its been called concentrated thought.
And, judging by the English majors as well as students from disciplines throughout the College who fill English literature classrooms each semester, it has apowerful appeal.
Theres astrong sense, athrilling sense, of writing among the undergraduates, and not just of poetry but of fiction as well; you cant have one genre without the other, says Longenbach, the author of critical works such as The Resistance to Poetry and The Art of the Poetic Line, as well as volumes of poetry including Draft of aLetter and Fleet River.
Offered through the English Department, the poetry workshops that Longenbach and colleague an assistant professor of English, teach are part of the departments creative writing program. Directed by Joanna Scott, a novelist and the Roswell S. Burrows Professor of English, the program is grounded in an understanding that writing is a creative discipline that draws on the study of a wide range of literature.
In workshops, half our time is spent reading the greatest poems we can read, says Longenbach, whose poetry has also appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The New Republic, Slate, and The Paris Review. To write one poem, you have to have read athousand of them.
Grotz, whose poetry volume titled Cusp won the Bread Loaf Writers Conference Bakeless Prize in 2003, says that she teaches students to read as awriter would. Joining the University faculty last fall, Grotz also translates French and Polish poetry and will teach in Rochesters new literary translation program.
Grotz found her own way to poetry slowly, teaching herself by reading other poets before taking up the academic study of poetry. ATexan who grew up in ahouse with no books, she was like amusician who could pick out atune, she says.
In her students, Grotz seeks to develop afacility with writers tools. My philosophy of teaching at least introductory-level poetry is to break it down into what writers call craft lenses. To have the students think of themselves as writers, with skills they want to developimage, music, and so on.
For Giulia Perucchio 13, who took Grotzs workshop last fall, that approach was invaluable. We connect huge, fluid things with very specific images, she says. Agraduate of Rochesters School of the Arts, she came to the University already focused on creative writing. Thats the best thing Ilearned from her: how to be very specific, very direct.
Poetrys roots at Rochester run to the Universitys beginning. Ashael Kendrick, ascholar of Greek and one of the professors who came to Rochester when the University was first formed in 1850, translated and anthologized poetry. In 1968, Anthony Hecht 87 (Honorary), the former John H. Deane Professor of Rhetoric and Poetry, received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry while at Rochester, where he was amember of the English department for 18 years.
In many ways, the name most closely associated with verse at Rochester is that of the late Hyam Plutzik, who preceded Hecht as the John H. Deane Professor of Rhetoric and Poetry and taught at the University from the mid-1940s until his death in 1962. Awidely published poet concerned with themes such as the relationship between science and poetry, Plutzik taught writing workshops and gave weekly poetry readings on campus.
Today hes memorialized in the Plutzik Library for Contemporary Writing at Rush Rhees Library, where professor emeritus and poet Jarold Ramsey is also honored with the Jarold Ramsey Study. The library houses the William and Hannelore Heyen Collection, an extensive poetry archive assembled by poet Heyen. Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation also holds collectionsincluding early editions, manuscripts, and correspondenceby John Dryden, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), John Gardner, Carl Sandburg, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and other notable poets.
Tyler Goldman 10, an English major with acreative writing emphasis from Balacynwyd, Pa., took part in the literary translation programs inaugural course, translating Roman lyric poetry into English. He says among the values of literary translation is its ability to heighten awriters awareness of language. It allows you to think critically about the way language operates, he says.
That awareness is key to any writers development, Longenbach says. I teach poetry almost exclusively as craft, he says, how we focus and sharpen the way we harness language. Itell students were almost never going to talk about the subject of apoem. Whats unique is the way the language takes you through the experience.
There arent alot of different subjects for pop songs, he observes, but we listen to our favorites again and again. Why? Its not that we cant recall themquite the opposite. Its our attraction to how they express an experience. Poetry, which he calls a sonic art, is the same.
You read apoem many times, not because you cant remember the words, but because you want to inhabit the way it moves through language.
Pulitzer Prizewinning poet Galway Kinnell 49 (MA) agrees. Apoem is not just an exposition of an idea or an event, but areliving of it, he says. That evocative force lies in the images and music its words create.
In poetry workshops, Ifind, students learn to attend to the precision of their language more powerfully than in any other class Iteach, says Longenbach, who became interested in poetry in college, after having spent a great deal of my youth involved in music, as apianist.
Such exactness is not what everyone anticipates, however. Grotz and Longenbach find ways to help their students appreciate that poetrylike all art formsrequires ablending of feeling and craft.
Youre working with young people who feel passionately about something, and youre helping them learn how to connect that passion to apassion for the beauty and accuracy of language, says Longenbach.
Strong emotion can be an impetus for apoem, but its not enough. People who write not-very-good poems have compelling emotions, too, he says, but they havent figured out how to get it on the page.
In Grotzs workshop, Rainer Maria Rilkes Letters to aYoung Poet, aslim volume of correspondence from Rilke to an aspiring poet, helps frame discussion of the emotive dimension of poetry. She delivers the book to students in asealed envelope, just as aletter would arrive.
To my mind, Rilke really helps to address the other reason young poets turn to poetry: expressing themselves, thinking about what it means to be human, says Grotz. I contain our soul talk to Rilke. Otherwise we focus on technique. It helps us talk more clinically about the craftbut its very hard to talk about one without the other.
Technique is what allows empathy to come through as empathy and not just as I have these emotions, says Emily Claman 06. After graduating with adegree in philosophy, she earned an MFA with aconcentration in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis and credits her work with Longenbach and poet and former Rochester faculty member Sally Keith for her pursuit of apoetic career.
When he was an undergraduate, poet Ilya Kaminsky recalls, Longenbach spoke with him on aline-by-line basis about poets Frost, Lowell, Walcott, andAshbery.
Just think of it: James Longenbach, famous poet and literary scholar, has spent hours and hours of his time reading poems of afirst-semester freshman who did not even know English well at that time, says the Odessa, Ukraine, native who is now aprofessor of poetry at San Diego State University. Such generosity of spirit is what makes education possible and what truly propels talent togrow.
Workshops are not the only courses in which Rochester students encounter poetry, of course. And poetry doesnt stand alone, says LongenbachTheres aclimate of writing here: fiction, poetry, and increasingly, playwritingnor is it separate from the work of the larger English department.
When Kenneth Gross, aprofessor of English who has published extensively on Renaissance and modern verse, teaches his course on lyric poetry, he guides students in slowing down, and dwelling on images and ambiguities.
Such ambiguities are an irreducible part of poetrys complexity, and its powera dimension, in fact, of the very precision Grotz and Longenbach instill. Poetry works, and sticks around, because its not clear. Theres something that cant be put into words, even though it is words, Gross says.
Poetry makes you consider multiplicitiesoften contradictory multiplicitiesof meaning, says DiPiero. Reading poetry is like reading the world.
And while students in his coursesnot just English majors, but an impressive range, says Grossmight be uncertain in approaching poetry, he reminds them that they have alot of experience with rhythmically shaped language: nursery rhymes, prayers, music lyrics, epitaphs, even jingles.
In his lyric poetry course, Grossauthor of books such as Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm and Magic and Shylock is Shakespearefocuses on Shakespeares sonnets and the poems of John Keats, Emily Dickinson, and Elizabeth Bishop. Theyre short works that give them asense of asingle poetic intelligence, he says. For these poets, the major poems are the intense, short lyrics. Theyre very meaty objects of analysis.
But he shows students, too, that poetic language inhabits places they might not expect. In one course, he spent aweek examining with students the texts of national anthems such as the Star Spangled Banner and La Marseillaise.
It made them take up things they didnt think of as poemsor even as things to be readand see them as rather charged.
Not to be overlooked, either, is the sheer enjoyment that engaging with apoem as awriter or areader can provide. However dark or difficult apoem, in some way it has to foreground pleasure, says Gross.
That pleasure is what feeds literary readings like the Plutzik Reading Series, which brings readings by contemporary novelists and poets to the Rochester community.
The Plutzik Series pulls an audience beyond the classroomand also feeds back into the classroom, Gross says, as faculty membersparticularly Longenbach, Scott, and now Grotzincorporate work by visiting writers into theircourses.
Like the Neilly Series, awriters lecture series supported by an endowment from Andrew H. 47 and Janet Dayton Neilly, the Plutzik Series is a huge part of the literary community here. It transcends poetry, says Goldman.
Often, when Itaught poetry classes, even workshops, before coming to Rochester, there was apart of my job that was being asalesman for poetry, Grotz says. Here Idont feel the need to sell poetry at all. The students come interested and hungry. How to keep them fed, she adds, is awonderful problem to have.
For Samantha Miller 11, adouble major in English and philosophy from Henrietta, N.Y., who is in Grotzs workshop this semester, poetry counterbalances the more impatient and utilitarian interaction with language she has in other facets of her life. Were so used to text messaging, e-mailsinstant gratification and immediate answers. And poetry takes alot more time, she says. In asense, poetry doesnt fit with our times, but Ithink that makes it even more important and valuable.
Miller hopes one day to teach poetry at the college level and says her literary study at Rochester has shaped not only her professional ambitions but also the very way she sees the world.
What you can gain by studying poetry is anew set of eyes, says Miller. You have anew appreciation for even the most minute things around you.
It engenders, says Kinnell, a tenderness towards existence.
Ultimately, Grotz suggests, theres even something elemental toit.
Everybody knows poetry isnt what you do to make money, she says. And its not read the way popular fiction is, by any means. It may seem like an old-fashioned thing to do. But its the perfectly packaged thing for ahuman being. Its totally human-shaped, human-made.
Its breath.
