–By Donald Mace Williams
In early June I went to the West Chester Poetry Conference for the first time. It was probably the last time, too, but that's not the fault of the conference. The problem is that most of the readers and speakers underplayed their points in the academic fashion, dropping their voices at punchlines rather than raising them like night-show hosts. I got tired of saying, "Of his what?" or, "The whale said what?" to whatever younger person was sitting next to me at a reading and laughing heartily at what had been said, along with everyone else in the audience except me.
The person next to me always was a younger one, and that may be an encouraging sign for the future of traditional poetry. True, the person could hardly help being younger. At seventy-eight, I was, I imagine, the second oldest participant in the conference, not including Richard Wilbur, who gave the keynote address, and I didn't happen to sit next to my one likely senior, a tall, somewhat stooped man with hat, coat, tie, and sculptured beard whom I kept seeing in the halls. But when I looked around the audience I didn't notice the domination of gray that I see in the congregation when I go to church at home. Though this isn't saying a lot, formal poetry may have a brighter future than formal religion.
This gathering, held for four days at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, does attract mainly writers, readers, and critics of formal poetry, meaning poetry that has meter and sometimes rhyme. It tends to attract them powerfully. The conference has been going on since 1995, and on the van that shuttled some of us between the Holiday Inn and the campus I talked with a young Tennessee poet, Wilmer Mills, who attended the first one and has missed only a couple since then. One of this year's faculty members, Catherine Tufariello, told me she had attended the last ten conferences, generally as a student. It was she who, after I had written her a fan letter about her poems a few months ago, suggested that I go to the conference. I hadn't known it existed, and I tried to prepare myself for it by imagining the qualities that could have kept attracting her, one of America's finest poets, year after year as a mere student.
From what I saw, the main quality, aside from the emphasis on traditional poetic forms, is the crackle of knowledge, ability, and, surprisingly, enthusiasm that fills the rooms and halls. These people, and I mean the students as well as the faculty members, are the kind who catch passing references to Auden's "Musée des beaux arts" or Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush"; who can give you the name for a kind of sonnet that has a six-line extension; who talk casually about dactyls, feminine endings, and caesuras; and who yet, at a reading of Ogden Nash's popular verse, laugh so hard they practically slap their thighs. I think most of the students and faculty members were academics, but only because they couldn't make a living as poets. (I also met, though, an investor in property, a retired actuary, and two public relations people.) So the tone, thank God, was enthusiastic first, analytical second.
This conference was to poetry as a convention of Libertarians is to politics. It gave members of a largely disregarded minority the chance to assert their convictions, with confidence and a hint of defiance, to a sympathetic audience. Much of what the poets at the conference write is not only formal but intelligible, and, in fact, the subject of this year's conference was "Exploring Form and Narrative." How many serious poems published in literary magazines these days exhibit form or tell a clear story? "We try to avoid rhyme altogether," says one editor's entry in Poet's Market. "No rhyming, pornography, violent language, 'Hallmark' verse, political poems, or overtly religious poetry," says another. Pity the Shakespeare or Donne or, hell, the Yeats trying to get published today. But rejections breed solidarity, even though I heard no outright bitterness on that subject at the conference.
The first agenda item after I arrived was one that, it seemed to me, influenced everything that happened afterward. Richard Wilbur, eighty-seven and still turning out exemplary poems for The New Yorker, gave the keynote address after being introduced by Dana Gioia, co-founder of these conferences, as the greatest living American poet, a poet of joy, love, hope, and reconciliation. I had never seen Wilbur, and when he walked onstage, I thought for a moment that this man must be a second introducer. His face was big and composed, like that of a small-town family doctor of seventy, and his hair was still brown. He dressed, stood, and talked as if he did not know he was the dean of American poets. He was wearing an orange sweater that negotiated the fairly sharp outthrust of his middle with fabric to spare and also had room for the considerable width of his shoulders. He moved a little stiffly, but nothing else suggested his age.
In a strong but quiet baritone, sounding final r's as if he lived in Iowa instead of Massachusetts, Wilbur told about Robert Frost's complimenting him on his poem "The Puritans." When Wilbur, in reply, started to say something about the meaning of the poem, Frost told him, "If you're going to explain it, I won't like it as well." Wilbur read (but did not explain) that poem to the West Chester audience, and he also read several of his translations of Latin riddles—read each of them twice, in fact, giving the answer after the first time through and then reading the riddle again. He read "A Measuring Worm," published recently in The New Yorker, in which he sees the worm's humps as omegas that warn us of the ends of things. The poem observes that the worm gets into that shape because he doesn't have real legs. That's something Wilbur said he checked out.
"I do think," he said, "that when we write poems we ought to get the science right."
About another poem he read, he said the original title was just "Blackberries," with the words "For Amelia"—his granddaughter—inserted below the title. But somebody at The New Yorker called him and said sorry, the magazine didn't use dedications. Wilbur had the solution to that problem: just move the dedication up into the title. That was how the poem came to be known as "Blackberries for Amelia."
When, in his readings, Wilbur botched a word or two, he always went back to the beginning rather than bulling ahead, and I noticed later that other poets on the various programs did the same thing—whether emulating the master or just displaying a similar zeal for formal integrity, I don't know.
It didn't seem like age but only like a poet's absentmindedness when, sometimes, Wilbur lost his place in the stack of papers he was reading from. Once, after much shuffling of pages failed to produce what he wanted, he opened his book and said, "I'm going to be stubborn and look it up in the index." He couldn't find it there, either. "Damnation," he said, and read something else instead. He talked and read for about an hour to an audience of probably 350, a nearly full house, in the Swope Music Building. The public was admitted to the reading, and I saw a fair number of chests not identified with the name tags that the 280 participants in the conference were given.
To a question, Wilbur said he avoids getting personal in his translations. "I feel that I have failed if there is too much of a presence of me," he said. To another question, about his position among poets of his time, he said it wasn't for him to say. But he said he would give a high position to the late Elizabeth Bishop.
After his reading, Lori Laitman, a composer-pianist, and Randall Scarlata, a baritone, performed the premiere of Laitman's song "A Wild Sostenuto," a setting of Wilbur's poem "For C." The ideas in this poem are not the simplest Wilbur ever expressed, and though the singer pronounced the words clearly, I doubt that anyone unfamiliar with the poem could have followed it by ear alone, much less understood its subtleties. But at the end, when Wilbur was sitting in the audience and the singer bowed in his direction, Wilbur raised a hand in appreciation of what he had heard.
I supposed that Wilbur, like any other famous guest speaker his age, would fly home the morning after his reading. No; he stayed the whole four days, attending readings and sitting unobtrusively at a lunch table of friends and strangers in the dining hall where the conference provided chicken wraps and pasta salad. I happened to sit a few rows behind him at the last night of readings, and I watched his responses. He applauded four of the five poetry readings, but not the one that included poems with the words "sh*#," "di&%," and "f&*#%@%." At each occurrence of those words, about half the audience laughed, female voices predominating. That was one of the few times I was disappointed in the people attending the conference—not, I think, because I'm a prude but because the words were pretty clearly used for shock value alone. Maybe the laughter was the nervous kind. Wilbur did not laugh, though, and at the end of that poet's reading his big hands stayed on his knees for the only time that evening.
The conference filled our days from 8:15 in the morning till 10 at night with panels, workshops, and readings. When we had a few minutes between events, some of us browsed through the poetry collections that speakers and students had on display in the campus bookstore. I was glad to find a mini-chapbook of Rhina P. Espaillat's wonderfully warm poems to add to the book of hers I had at home, and I got her to sign it for me. Though she didn't read poems at this conference, her perceptive remarks in a panel on Wilbur were for me one of the high points of the conference.
At a panel on "Ekfrasis," which to poets these days means not just any formal description but specifically a work of art in one medium commenting on or imitating a work in another medium—and which, I would have liked to tell the panelists, is usually spelled ecphrasis and is accented on the first syllable rather than the second—Meredith Bergmann illustrated the specialized definition by showing slides of her sculpture of the poet Countee Cullen. She also showed, to laughter but maybe not as an example of ecphrasis, a sculpture she had done for this conference: a wastebasket with hands crumpling poems into it.
Humor did keep cropping up. A panel on doggerel included remarks on Ogden Nash by Marilyn Taylor, who read samples of his verse and said she had a name for the rambling form of his poems: "shaggy doggerel." Remarking that it was his prosody that made Nash distinctive, she said his poems therefore "deserve to be analyzed."
"Will that spoil the fun?" she asked. "Sure. But that's what literary scholarship is all about." That brought the loudest burst of applause and laughter I heard during the conference.
Another laugh, decidedly sympathetic, came at a morning session of notable readings by five women poets, sponsored by the online journal "Mezzo Cammin," when Jehanne Dubrow looked around at the other readers and remarked how characteristic it was that all five, not being men, had their watches out on the table, making sure they didn't cut into another reader's time. At a session in which he introduced Lewis Turco, winner of the Robert Fitzgerald Award for books on prosody, Thomas Cable mentioned an unusual form—a sonnet followed by a line of trimeter, a heroic couplet, a second trimeter rhyming with the first, and another heroic couplet. Anybody know what it's called? he asked in the tone of one hoping to impart a secret . "A caudate sonnet," a voice from the back of the auditorium replied. "Damn!" said Cable (The answerer was R. S. Gwynn.)
Each night, five faculty members read from their own work. These were businesslike sessions. Michael Peich, the conference director, would barely more than name the first reader in his overall introduction. The first reader would stride onstage as Peich strode off, and at the end of each fifteen-minute segment the reader would say "And our next reader is So- and-So" and, striding offstage, would meet that reader striding on. The emphasis was on what the poets read, not on who they were.
The poets read in a variety of styles. Dick Allen barked into the microphone, making the speakers—and my hearing aids—reverberate. Dana Gioia gave an old-time oratorical performance, gesturing, changing tempo, dropping and raising his voice. Catherine Tufariello smiled a little as she quietly read some of the most moving poems of the conference. Robert Shaw looked down at his text the whole time he was reading. A.E. Stallings, doing a not unfriendly send-up of Edna St. Vincent Millay, got in character by wrapping what looked to me like a fox fur around her neck and, at the end, giving an exaggeratedly cute curtsy to the audience.
There were so many highlights to the conference that I, never having attended even a creative-writing course, much less one in which most of the "students" were accomplished poets, continually felt awed, humbled, or even intimidated. But the most warming and informative event of all, for me, was the continuing master class I took under Dick Davis, a Yorkshireman who heads the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University. His translations of medieval Persian poems, when he read from them during the last reading of the conference, drew probably the loudest and most sustained applause of that session. (Wilbur was among the hearty applauders, I noticed.) In the master class, which was like a graduate seminar in that the seven students sat at a table while the "professor" held forth at the head, Davis passed out photocopied selections from six centuries of poems in English, all of them designed to show the twists and turns of "Meter and Rhythm," "Shapes and Meanings," or "Discourse and Diction." His insights, tossed off in a modest mumble that I didn't always understand (though the other, much younger students did), amounted to an intensive three-day education in sensibility, but to me, the most delightful and valuable product of the sessions was Davis's enthusiasm. Here was a man in his sixties, a revered poet, translator, and scholar, who kept saying about this poem or that poet, from Elizabethan times to Frost and beyond, "It is such a fantastic poem," "He's a terrific poet," "He's one of my, I think, top five [about Edwin Muir]," "A marvelous poet," "Beautiful poems." I never heard that kind of editorializing in graduate school, and I think many of my professors would have looked askance at it, but to me, it is what literary scholarship is all about: conveying love of literature and showing what it is about a work that makes it deserving of love.
At the end of the conference, I sought out Catherine Tufariello so I could thank her for having recommended it to me. "This was the literary experience of a lifetime," I told her, and I don't think, looking back, that I was gushing or speaking merely from the wide-eyed perspective of one who until then had been insulated from such electric events. After all, look at all the others who go back year after year for a metrical recharge. I'd like to go back, too, if only the West Chester people would start using closed captions.
Like most of those at West Chester, I write poetry sometimes, and I think that the conference, whether or not it will prove to have made me a better writer, has made me a more relaxed one. I get probably forty or fifty rejection slips for every acceptance. They frustrate me and make me bitter at editors who turn down what I have sweated over. But the poems my fellow students read during Davis's workshop were so fine that I look upon rejection in a better spirit. A hundred or more other students from the conference may be writing poems of the same quality as those I heard. I almost feel sorry for editors, having to choose.
