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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Hyam Plutzik (Trinity ’32)– Connecticut and Beyond – an Exhibition and Reading

Opening April 9, 2013 through May 31, 2013

First in Connecticut at Trinity College, an incredible reading and exhibition, done by the Watkinson Library (Richard Ring) in tandem with the Rush Rhees Library Department of Rare Books (Phyllis Andrews), and our very own Edward Moran (literary advisor to the Centennial and Hyam Plutzik Scholar). Guest readers included the poet laureate of Connecticut, Dick Allen. See blog entry below borrowed from Richard Ring’s Blog – at the Watkinson.

Check out the link here to a listening station created for this event, that features Hyam Plutzik reading his own poem, as well as a reading by Poet James Longenbach (Trininty ’1981′). You’ll also hear a musical setting of HP’s Sprig of Lilac with music by Robert Cohen: http://jvillafont.wix.com/hyamplutzikpoetry

Hyam Plutzik’s Horatio – at the Helen Mills Theater in New York City 

Featuring Nigel Maister - April 18, 2013

Playing with Words: An Afternoon Exploring and Singing Poetry is a two-part event, running from 1 to 4:30, collaboratively organized by the UR English Department, the Eastman Voice and Opera Department, and the Eastman Composition Department.

The first part of the afternoon will consist of performances by Eastman voice students of a great range of modern and contemporary settings of the poetry of Emily Dickinson; composers include Aaron Copland, Ned Rorem, Vincent Persichetti, Andre Previn, and Lee Hoiby. The poem themselves will be read aloud by students from Eastman and UR, and there will also be brief discussions of some of the poems and settings, with a group that includes myself, John Michael, Jon Baldo, and ESM voice teacher and pianist Alison D’Amato.

The second part will focus on entirely new song settings of poems by Jennifer Grotz and James Longenbach of the UR English Dept., created by Eastman composition students Jung Sun Kang and Jesse Lozano, and performed by Eastman singers and musicians. The performances will be followed by a conversation with the poets and composers, along with Katherine Ciesinski of the Eastman Voice Department and Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon of the Eastman Composition Department.

The event is free and open to the public, and will be followed by a reception.

We’re excited to announce the opening of a very special exhibition at The University of Rochester tomorrow night that has been created with wide ranging participation from the University of Rochester community, led by Phillip Witte (UR 2010), is currently a graduate student in English at the University of Michigan.

For 50 years, the Plutzik Reading Series has brought major voices in contemporary writing to campus. The series was established following the death in 1962 of Hyam Plutzik, the John H. Deane Professor of Rhetoric and Poetry — to honor and carry out in a formal way Professor Plutzik’s frequent practice throughout his UR teaching career of offering readings of his own poetry, and inviting readings by other visiting writers as well.

For this exhibit, the University of Rochester has invited students and alumni who have filled the audiences of Series readings to contribute brief commentaries on the work of several dozen of the nearly 300 past Readers–including the likes of Elizabeth Bishop, Edward Albee, Adrienne Rich, Bernard Malamud, Anthony Hecht, Angela Carter, and Allen Ginsberg–as a way of continuing the conversation about literature which each event sparks. For each featured Series reader the exhibit includes a first edition or two as well as a photograph and brief bio-bibliography. A large section of the exhibit also revisits an earlier display on the Life and Work of Hyam Plutzik, who held his own readings in the Welles Brown Room in Rush Rhees Library, just down the stairs from the permanent home of The Plutzik Poetry Library and Archive which is the home of this exciting exhibit.

FIFTY YEARS OF POERY, FICTION, AND CONVERSATION is on display until January 11, 2013 in the Rare Books and Special Collections Department on the 2nd floor of Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester, Monday through Friday from 9 AM to 5 PM. For Saturday viewing hours call: (585) 275-4477.

A special opening reception will be held tomorrow night at 5 PM October 12, 2012.

For ten weeks, from the first week of April through the first week of June 2012, I had the privilege of leading a course at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) that featured the poetry of Hyam Plutzik. This was my contribution to the Plutzik 50/100 Centennial celebration. Here is the story of that course. How class members, a number of them poets with several volumes of poetry to their credit, reacted to being made aware of the person and poetry of Hyam Plutzik. How one of the class members shared with us the Hyam Plutzik he knew as his professor and the influence that experience had in his becoming himself. How, astonishingly, our attention to just one of his poems led to its identification as a novel form invented by Hyam. How the study of his war poetry shed light on the contrast between his experiences of World War II and those of Anthony Hecht, who also became the Deane Professor of Poetry and Rhetoric at the University of Rochester (UR). And how this writer, a former physicist, ended up leading poetry courses at OLLI and the cascade of events over more than twenty years that culminated in this unique course.

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Having spent the bulk of our time on the substance of [“The King of Ai”], I found it necessary to comment on its unusual form, since no one seemed to see it until I pointed it out. The poem is formed in ten couplets with the end words of the first couplet, “eventide” and “city,” repeated in reverse order in the second couplet. The alternation of these two end words continues throughout the remaining couplets.

Now David Hill, a retired Professor of English whose specialty was the intricacy of language, decided to follow up on the form of this poem. He contacted a friend, Lewis Turco, who is noted for his poetry but especially for The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, which has seen several updates and revisions since its original publication in 1968. Turco was fascinated by the poem and asserted it was a novel form invented by Hyam Plutzik. He intends to include it in the next edition of his Book of Forms.

But the story gets even more astonishing. Just a few days later, David Hill told me that Turco had used this new-to-him form in a poem about his father, a poem he had been contemplating for a long time until the stimulus of “The King of Ai” and its novel form provided the push he needed to write it.

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The last few classes were devoted to the war poems of Hyam Plutzik and of Anthony Hecht. Here were contrasted the differing experiences of war that each poet endured and the different poetic expression of these experiences. Whereas Plutzik enlisted in the Army in 1943 when he was thirty two, ultimately becoming an officer in the Air Force, Hecht was drafted before completing his undergraduate degree. He was placed in the ASTP—Army Specialized Training Program. Those selected for ASTP were assigned to one of the more than two hundred participating universities where they took courses designed to train them to serve in Army Intelligence or other specialized units. They received college credit for these courses and Hecht completed his degree with these transferred credits. But suddenly the Program was terminated and all of the two hundred thousand or so participants were assigned to infantry combat units.

A class member, Bob Nolan, spoke up when I referred to Hecht’s experience in ASTP and told us all that he too had been drafted out of college and assigned to the ASTP unit at Princeton. The credits from Princeton were enough to complete his UR degree. But he too found himself in the infantry and in combat when ASTP was terminated. Just as Hyam Plutzik and Anthony Hecht found in poetry the way to capture the effect of World War II on them, so did Bob Nolan who later shared with us some of his war poems. Hecht’s “A Friend Killed in the War,” which describes the death of a comrade in combat,

is echoed in Nolan’s “The Orchard”:

Here was yet another extraordinary coincidence in this course, and one that had each of us in our own particular way feeling the emotion of the combat experience from which we were personally spared.

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The course was a remarkable experience for me and for the class members. For me there was the wonder, the excitement and the joy in being the transmitter of Hyam Plutzik’s poetry to such a receptive group. The impact on the class members was well put by one of the well-published poets in the class when she said how marvelous it was to become aware of and to study the work of such a truly remarkable poet. I hope the reader of these words comes to feel just how remarkable this course was, a fitting contribution to the Plutzik 50/100.

Sidney Shapiro
June 2012

Click here to read the entire essay.

Here is the opening of Moran and Witte’s essay, titled “A Great Stag, Broad-Antlered: Rediscovering Hyam Plutzik”:

The conclusion of Hyam Plutzik’s 1962 poem, Horatio, provide an apt commentary on Plutzik’s own unobtrusive presence in the world of American letters:

A great stag came out of the woods, Broad-antlered, approaching slowly on the moonlit field, And looked about him like a king and re-entered the dark.

The seismic shifts in American culture since 1960 have made footing precarious indeed for those broad-antlered poets who wrote in a hieratic and philosophic diction. Eschewing the more vernacular excursions of the Beats or the confessional poets of the 1970s, Plutzik published three full collections of poems, the last, Horatio, an eighty-nine-page dramatic poem in which Hamlet’s friend grapples with the charge to “report me and my cause aright.”

Click here to read the entire article.

Rosanna Warren

From the outset, Rosanna Warren admitted that her profession is one of “smoke and mirrors.” It seems like an image out of that final scene in The Wizard of Oz—the translator frantically conjuring false images from behind a curtain. Yet as a description of Warren’s talk this scene is inaccurate: her discussion brought the oft-overlooked issue of translation out into the open, and Warren—with her numerous fellowships, award-winning poetry, and lauded translations—certainly does not need to feign her success, and delivered her insights with endearing humility.

In fact, Warren’s work proves that the most successful translations are the ones that don’t announce themselves. She shared several of her translations of Latin and French authors: Catullus, Horace, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and Michael Glück. Each piece was unique, which is surely a testament to Warren’s ability to inhabit and then carry over varying voices. Some of the authors had been translated numerous times before; others, Warren brought into English for the first time. Warren said that regardless of the project her goal is to “make an illusion” that captures what she sees in the poem. And in translating poetry, it seems that seeing necessarily encompasses hearing—that a translator must hold an image before her eyes while also listening for a sort of music.

Warren prefaced almost every reading by plainly stating, “I have failed.” It was less of an apology than a calm acceptance that every translation will fail inasmuch as it will never replicate its original; something will always be lost and no translation will escape the mediation of interpretation. Translating, according to Warren, always involves “determining what will be your own particular heartbreak.” Warren described, for example, how, in Catullus’ poetry, a character’s appetite is enhanced by Latin words that phonetically “gobble each other up” in ways English renders impossible. But with every heartbreak comes some kind of restoration. In one example from Michael Gluck’s “Thirteen Poems,” the English word “rest” and its multiple meanings, unavailable in the French, only enhanced the way the poem inscribed deep remembrance into the ordinary day. All of these instances of triumph and defeat make translation difficult to theorize (Warren spoke at several moments of the divide between translation in theory and in practice) but they are also a testament to translation’s virtues.

Three times during the lecture Warren remarked that when it comes to translating poetry, there is “more than one way to skin a cat” (I counted only because I, as a loyal cat owner, shirked every time). It seems like a crude analogy, especially for a process that has brought us some of our most cherished pieces of literature. But when I wasn’t thinking protectively of my own cat, I was thinking of the (translated) Greek myth of the Nemean lion and how Heracles discovers, in his attempt to fight the lion, that he will not be able to skin the cat—in any way—without using the animal’s own claws. Although this brings even more brutality to Warren’s analogy, it speaks to the fact that translating necessarily involves taking, or trying to inhabit, the very work that is being shaped. The product will never be returned to its original form, and might always be slightly exposed (and I’m sure violence, too, is in some cases a part of the game). But in the hands of an artist like Warren, it will always be something to be valued and worth complete visibility.

Jenny Boyar is a first-year Ph.D. student in Medieval Literature at UR and a regular contributor to a fistful of words, having previously reviewed lectures by Susan Stewart and Christopher Ricks.

On April 29, The Betsy will round out the month’s festivities with an evening of readings by the poets Daniel Halpern, founder and editor of Ecco; Campbell McGrath, Professor at Florida International University and winner of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant; and P. Scott Cunningham, founder of the University of Wynwood and O, Miami, a local poetry festival. After the readings, award-winning writer Les Standiford, Chair of the Creative Writing Program at FIU, will lead a discussion exploring the inextricable link between writing and teaching that is a reality for writers in our time and of all time.

The evening will also include a screening of the last interview the poet Stanley Kunitz gave before his death in 2006, originally shot for the documentary film Hyam Plutzik: American Poet.

The program will begin at 7pm, with a reception to follow at 9pm. The event is free and open to the public. View the full press release and invitation for additional information.

Philip Levine, Poet Laureate

April 10’s Plutzik Series Reading diverged from its standard fare, opting out of the intimate Welles-Brown Room’s fifty-person capacity for a mostly-filled Hubbell Auditorium, which can accommodate over four hundred and fifty people. That is the draw Philip Levine is able to produce, and yet, his frank speech and quick wit kept the afternoon’s proceedings free from any over- bearing gravitas that one might expect from our nation’s Poet Laureate. Interspersed between readings of “Soloing,” “The Mercy,” “The Poem of Chalk,” “Ode for Mrs. William Settle” and “Gospel,” Levine drew laughs from us all with candid remarks such as recalling his son asking him, “Hey pop, so how many poems do you have out there working for you?”

His speech, however, seemed a foil when compared with his poetry. What was candid in conversation became simple truths and meaningful observations; what was humorous was spread out into a range of human experience: visceral pleasures, misery and being subject to grinding work. Levine’s work is historical, capturing and reviving fragments of American history through studies of the millions that helped build this country.

It is this unblushing free verse and an early life filled with labor in Motor City that earned Levine the title of “working class poet.” He admitted however he is not completely comfortable with the epithet, saying “I stopped doing heavy work when I was twenty-seven,” though playfully adding “I feel comfortable with the middle class, especially when they grab the bill.” Levine’s discomfort may arise from the fact that while his poetry is indelibly stamped with the effects of an industrial world, he has other facets: music, rural contemplation, and as one of his favorite poets, Federico García Lorca, said, “the constant baptism of newly created things” all run though his work.

Before reading “Gospel” he quipped, “I had a cat that was more spiritual than me, had more character than me too.” But regardless of intent or the source of the poem, its isolation and meditative quality speak to another side of Levine’s work.

Here is a world of sound and memory. This experience speaks to no one group, but as a sensory experience is open to all.

Finally, one of Levine’s poem’s that struck me most was his “Soloing:”

What a world indeed… The perilous beauty of the Tejon Pass choked with fumes, smog stained roses. What today is commonplace pollution was transformed for me, transfixed by his words.

These images left me in a bleak mood, but also flooded me with memories from hearing of this phenomenon before: Snowboarding in Park City, Utah my friends Chris, Amanda and I were stranded in a yurt while a frozen ski lift forced hundreds to pool into a isolated valley basin. There we met a well-weathered, hard-working couple of Jack Mormons, sipping on Budweiser. After brief introductions, after we shocked them merely by dint of atheism and after complimenting our speech and openness, the husband told us of the unglamorous side of the very resort we were enjoying. Being a child of nearby Pleasant Grove, he was a testament to the birth and growth of the oil sea above his small mountain town. Like the rose in Levine’s poem, he recalled how cars driving through the exhaust clouds would emerge layered in a membrane of soot, how bikers diving through would hold their breath but could not avoid being coated.

Levine revived this memory, not only acting as a confirmation of a phenomenon I have only heard of, but managed to have it grip me through its great and terrible imagery. The poem seems to say, “Look, pay attention.” Levine shows this world is wrought with unending problems, but the love we bear allows us to drive hours through miasma to share in the dreams of others.

David Krinick also reviewed a reading by Eavan Boland last November.

I thank you for the opportunity to tell you about being Mr. Plutzik’s student and hearing him read Horatio. I can hear him now:

I roared with laughter. He didn’t stop but before he went on I think his eyes caught mine nodding approvingly. Or at least that is what I like to think. I can’t be sure because it was a long time ago; the fall term 1960. He was teaching Modern Poetry. I now realize that I was probably in the last or second last course he would ever teach.

Horatio hadn’t yet been published; he was reading it from his manuscript. I had never heard a poet read his poetry before. It was unforgettable and I was utterly blown away. As I write I can still literally see him as he read from “The Ostler.” He had repeatedly said, and rightly so, poetry was a form of music and only truly appreciated when read out loud.

I was 21. After a break I had returned to the U of R to get my undergraduate degree after several years of Army service. I had gotten out of the Army one heartbeat before the Vietnam War began in full. My fellow officers who had remained in the service were being sent there as “advisors.” I knew because there were so few of them that during this same fall semester when they fell, their deaths would be reported in the New York Times. Had I stayed in…

I had wondered why I had left the U of R, why I had come back, and what life was all about. Looking back, although I didn’t realize it then, and wouldn’t do so for many years, Horatio was more than the tale of a friend trying to set his late friend’s reputation straight and tell the world who he really was. Horatio was about the essence of living life, positively. As I listened it seemed that Mr. Plutzik was saying that the point wasn’t whether Horatio would ever be able to persuade anyone that they were wrong about Hamlet, but that Hamlet had been his friend and he would keep trying. Life was about friendship, commitment, learning to keep an open mind, having ideals and speaking out for what is right. Writing poetry is about civilization and art and not about war.

What a marvelous lesson for a 21 year old kid. I have never forgotten him.

Bard Nigel Maister is to be thanked. I am extremely grateful that he sang for us. As I told him after his reading, he worked magic freeing Horatio from the pages of the book, bringing him into the Welles-Brown Room.

Al Kremer

We welcome memories of Plutzik or commentaries on his work, which can be submitted by email. Please note that pieces may be edited before posting.–P.W.