- Vocation: Poet
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- By Ann E. Shanahan '59
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- A Notable Roster of Poets
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- Over the years, a long and distinguished procession
of poets has made its way to Smith. As early as 1883, Matthew Arnold read
his poems in the chapel. W.B. Yeats came in 1903 and within the next few
years was followed by Lady Gregory, Alfred Noyes and John Masefield. Robert
Frost made his first visit in 1961 and returned frequently, telling students
that he had written "The Road Not Taken" at Smith while a guest
of President William Allan Neilson.
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- In the 1930s, there were visits from Archibald MacLeish,
T.S. Eliot, and A.E. (George W. Russell). And later, the image of Smith
as a place where poetry matters was burnished by the presence of such writers
as Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Stephen Spender, Margaret Atwood
and John Ashbery, among others. W.H. Auden first visited Smith in 1940,
and in 1953 he held a semester's Neilson professorship, inspiring the young
Sylvia Plath with his "burlap-textured voice and crackling brilliant
utterances." (In a lighter vein, that year Auden also participated
in the faculty show, rising from a rocking chair to sing, climactically,
"Books may seem quite nice, but they are full of vice.") Perhaps
the longest-serving poet-in-residence--1977 to 1986--was Richard Wilbur,
who still retains the title of poet emeritus.
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- In recent years the Grace Hazard Conkling Fund has
underwritten the annual presence at Smith of a nationally known poet. Amy
Clampitt, Gjertrud Schnackenberg and Karl Kirchwey have been at the college
under the auspices of this program.
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- During 1997-98, the poet-in-residence program and
Smith's traditional propensity for hosting readings by noted poets will
intersect. Elizabeth Alexander, this year's poet-in-residence, will work
with Ann Boutelle and others in the English department to develop a Smith
poetry reading series that will bring a number of poets--both prominent
and budding--to the campus.
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- Alexander herself is the author of two books of poems,
The Venus Hottentot in 1990 and the just-released Body of Life.
She has written powerfully about growing up, family life and African-American
history. She teaches African-American literature and creative writing at
the University of Chicago and will teach the poetry writing courses at
Smith during her residency.-AS
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- When Elizabeth Biller Chapman visited Smith last April, she could have
come as an alumna ('65) or the daughter of an alumna (Sylvia Kamerman Burack
'38); as a professor of renaissance literature or a psychotherapist, both
of which she has been; as a former Smith faculty member; or even as the
old friend of a present Smith faculty member, Ann E. Boutelle of the English
department. But she had been invited to Smith as a poet, her present and
likely permanent calling. (Her business card announces her as "Elizabeth
Biller Chapman, Poet"; her car's license plate reads "4POETRY.")
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- Student poets at Elizabeth Biller Chapman's workshop
were impressed with her knack for encouraging new talent.
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- It is difficult to believe that Chapman has not always been a poet,
but she was in fact a late bloomer in this particular garden. She started
writing poetry in 1987 and is now well settled in what she describes as
a vocation. "I didn't choose to be a poet; it chose me," Chapman
says, adding that despite previous careers as a teacher and a psychotherapist
she has had "only two real vocations, mother and poet." Interestingly,
those two vocations come together in the imagery she uses to describe her
work. "I carry my most recent [poem] around with me like a papoose,"
she said during her reading. Later she described receiving the first published
copy of her chapbook Creekwalker: "It's like having your baby handed
to you."
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- During her day at Smith, Chapman conducted an afternoon workshop for
student poets and in the evening read from her own work. In both sessions
she invited her audience into the poetry, deftly revealing subtleties in
the student poems that had sometimes gone unrecognized even by their authors,
and placing her own poems within the context of her life.
- Perhaps it is her training as a psychotherapist, her experience in
critiquing poetry, or her extraordinary natural instinct for encouraging
budding talent that makes Chapman such a successful workshop leader. Whatever
it is, it works: "I learned more in one afternoon than I could have
expected to learn in a whole course," remarked one student.
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- On the afternoon in question, about 25 young women, most of whom had
not previously known one another, gathered comfortably around a large table
in the Mortimer Rare Book Room in Neilson Library. After being introduced
by her friend Boutelle, Chapman laid out her expectations: each woman was
to read one her poems, after which, Chapman has learned from past experience,
there would probably be a few moments of respectful silence. Recognizing
the vulnerability of both the poet and the work-in-progress in such a setting,
Chapman decreed that any comments that followed a reading should initially
deal with what worked in the poem rather than what did not.
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- After each poet had read, her fellow students made their comments:
"I love the iris in the olive jar; it's very tangible, very there,"
or "The similes remind me of wording that Barbara Kingsolver would
use, which is the highest compliment I can give." When satisfied that
everyone else who wanted to respond had done so, Chapman would offer some
praise: "The use of repetition was very powerful; so concrete";
"Really honest; I can see what you mean-like a secret that shouldn't
be told." Any suggestions she then made for changes-and she made good
ones-began with "I wonder if you'd consider" or "You might
try" All of the students showed real gratitude for Chapman's sensitivity
to their intentions and for the tact and power of her suggestions. Chapman's
counsel was all the more impressive in that she had not read the poems
in advance, preferring as she does to hear the work from the poet herself.
"A poem is a different entity altogether when you hear it in the poet's
voice," she says.
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- During Chapman's evening reading her audience heard the poet's voice
and saw "the courage with which she 'probes closer to the water's
edge' than most of us dare to do," as Ann Boutelle, quoting a Chapman
poem, said in introducing her. Chapman chose works that traced the seasons
and touched on some of her favorite themes-family, water, horseback riding,
nature-using, in Boutelle's words, "language that works overtime to
create meanings and associations."
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- Among those at the reading were several of Chapman's English literature
teachers at Smith: Elizabeth von Klemperer, Frank Murphy, William Van Voris,
Robert Petersson. An unseen presence was the late Richard Young, who in
teaching her Shakespeare made a lasting impact on her life. Also in the
audience was Chapman's mother, Sylvia Burack, a Smith College Medal recipient
who for more than 50 years has been deeply involved with The Writer
magazine, at first as co-editor alongside her husband, Abraham Burack,
and, since his death, as publisher and editor-in-chief. Although The
Writer has always focused on fiction, Chapman notes that "there
was an enormous tradition in my family of nurturing and respect for poetry."
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- Chapman sustains that tradition by nurturing other poets. A member
of the Foothill College Poetry Workshop, which she credits with "enabling
me to be a poet," Chapman regularly hosts poetry-writing workshops
at her home in Palo Alto, California. Such sessions are important, she
says, because while you may get 90 percent of a poem right all by yourself,
"the last 10 percent is the part your peers or mentor can help you
with, if you're lucky."
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- Chapman's works have appeared in many publications, including Poet
Lore, Prairie Schooner and Yankee, and in her first chapbook, Creekwalker.
(Her second, Backbone of Night, will be published this fall.) And it seems
likely that the poems will keep coming. "They're not in my conscious
control," says Chapman. "They come from the depths."
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