THE WAY IT GETS ITS ROOTS INTO YOU: A 50TH ANNIVERSARY KEYNOTE
by Rob Casper
For a half century, people like you and me have moved down the road or across the country to Amherst, to give a few years of their life over to writing poems or stories or even a novel. When the Masters of Fine Arts Program for Poets and Writers launched, in 1964, there weren’t many other options. By the time I applied the number of possible MFA programs numbered in the hundreds. Agha Shahid Ali, who I met at an AWP Conference, encouraged me to apply here—and anyone who knew him remembers how charmingly persuasive he could be.
It wasn’t the easiest transition. I ill-advisedly moved to Belchertown, where it took multiple bus-rides just to get groceries. And the first time I was workshopped at UMass, in a class filled with second-years, only the professor spoke—he said my poem was full of “throwaway lines,” a comment as true as it was damning. He followed up with me after class, to chat and find out who I’d studied with, and even met with me outside his office hours—he told me I worried too much, which I’ve been trying to overcome ever since. He also told me to read all of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, which—of course—I did.
In a larger sense, I arrived here knowing only the various devices and gestures that poems employed. During my MFA I learned that a poem could and should say what I didn’t already know, that negative capability—Keats’ “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts”—could be wildly generative. I learned to reverse the lines of a poem, to cut up a bunch of poems and rearrange them on the floor, into a new one. And a seminar called “Form and Theory in Contemporary Poetry” changed everything. We read all of Sylvia Plath and Theodore Roethke and James Wright, as well as John Clare and a few contemporary poets. Our central text—which we returned to throughout the semester—was not poetry, but The Adventures of Lewis and Clark. The professor never gave us any explanation about this; in fact, my classmates and I quickly realized any sort of explanation would be reductive. That class included three future founding editors of the magazine I published, jubilat—its name taken from “The Jubilate Agno” by Christopher Smart, which we also read.
With “Form and Theory” the editors and I had a blueprint to follow. Each issue of jubilat combines contemporary poetry with reprints, interviews, and found pieces—some of my favorites include a diary of a penguin scientist in Antarctica, an index of wrestling moves, a conversation with a rouge perfumist, and a list of Walt Whitman’s alternate titles for “Leaves of Grass.” There are no “special sections”—no separating poetry from prose, present from past. It argues for literature’s implicit connecting quality—it does not exist in a vacuum, but rather permeates everything around us. I have continued with that mindset ever since—it even connects to the project I’m working on now: the PBS NewsHour series “Where Poetry Lives,” by our current Poet Laureate (and UMass MFA grad) Natasha Trethewey.
Looking at the graduates of the MFA program, one can see books and awards aplenty—and even a great album or two. But it’s also striking to see how many literary magazines and presses launched from here. There is a kind of DIY spirit to Amherst and the “Happy Valley”—just far enough outside the literary hothouses of Boston and New York, just small and large enough for good culture and friendly exchange, and luckily chock full of bookstores. Walking in Wooten’s Bookstore for the first time I felt a different vibe. It was both more homey and more serious, a store in which to apprentice oneself as a writer, and it smartly combined new books and first editions—valuing the past while championing the present.
I also think that, for poets in the program, the spirit of Emily Dickinson held sway. Compared to the rest of the country, we had proximity: the fact that we lived among her home and grave, that we inhabited the future outside her window, seemed to push us towards serious play and a homegrown inventiveness. In places I’ve lived since there were other influences to contend with, but none with Emily’s slant New England sensibility.
As a student here, I didn’t feel the pressure to do anything but write as well as I could and help my classmates do the same. We felt competitive in the best sense—we had a sense of working far enough from the pressures of publishing and tenure-track positions. We got to know each other at the coffee shops and bars of Amherst and Northampton—especially the World War II Club, where we threw a few dance parties (and that’s how I met jubilat editor Christian Hawkey—in the course of some crazy dancing he ended up with my wallet, and called me the next day to return it!). We crowded Memorial Hall for big readings and read for each other at “Live Lit” at Wooten’s and later Amherst Bookstore. And we talked, talked, talked about literature—the writers we read in our classes, the other writers in our workshops, the writers we’d long held dear to us. We even debated the list of recommended and required contemporary American poets you could get, like a secret report, from the program secretary.
It’s been three years since I handed jubilat off to current publisher Emily Pettit—three years since I stopped coming back regularly to our little office at the end Bartlett Hall’s fourth floor. But this will always be where I grew up, as important as the rural Wisconsin town I’m from. That, I think, is the strongest appeal of this program: the way it gets its roots in you. Before participating in my oral exam, I heard an apocryphal story about a professor who apparently tried to say something in that final conversation that would stay with his students forever. Well, I can tell you: so much of what I experienced here has shaped my life. In my work at the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, the Poetry Society of America, the Brooklyn Book Festival, and now the Library of Congress, I have acted as I learned to act here. Like my first professor—he of the “throwaway lines” critique—I am demanding, and as forthright as I can be, about literature. But I am also more than willing to have my mind changed; in fact, there’s nothing so rewarding as having my sense of the art expanded. I try to be always generous towards the writers and editors and teachers and nonprofit staffers who have, like me, devoted themselves to literature. For this, and for all the great friendships I have developed with my former classmates and my professors, and for my continually deepening sense of what poems and stories offer us, I cannot thank this place enough.
