“I feel like poetry gets mislabeled as a high art that’s exclusionary in some way,” says Gabriel Fried ’96, a poet, teacher, and poetry editor. “Rob made things intimate, but he was never exclusionary. If you wanted in, you got admitted in.”

“Rob” is Rob Farnsworth, retiring after this academic year as senior lecturer in English. Author of three poetry collections, poetry editor for seven years of the quarterly American Scholar, and founder of the creative writing program and the Literary Arts Live reading series at �ֲ���ý, he was a mentor to Fried — and to many others who have studied poetry, both the reading and the writing of it, with Farnsworth during his 26 years here.

On Feb. 12, Literary Arts Live presented Fried and two other alumni poets at the Muskie Archives for a reading and a tribute to that longtime champion of creative writing at �ֲ���ý. Farnsworth himself had offered an LAL reading three weeks earlier.

Rob Farnsworth reads his poem “Vagrancy” during the Literary Arts Live session on Jan. 25 in Muskie Archives. An homage to W.B. Yeats, whose poem “The Wild Swans at Coole” Farnsworth references, the poem is about the “specific, anonymous, reorienting pleasures of solitary travel.”

Joining Fried were Christian Barter ’90 and Craig Morgan Teicher ’01. Barter didn’t study with Farnsworth, but they are friends who met when Farnsworth published Barter in The American Scholar. is Bye-bye Land, which received the Isabella Gardner Prize. A trail crew supervisor at Acadia National Park, he served as the park’s poet laureate during its centennial year, 2016.

Teicher is director of special editorial projects at Publishers Weekly, teaches creative writing at New York University, is a literature and music critic, and has . Brenda Is in the Room was awarded the Colorado Prize for Poetry.

And Fried is poetry editor for Persea Books and an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri, and has . His Making the New Lamb Take was named a Best Book of 2007 by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

During their �ֲ���ý visit, the trio talked with us about cold weather at �ֲ���ý, reasons for making poetry — and, of course, Rob Farnsworth.

Christian Barter ’90, at center, makes a point while fellow poets Gabe Fried ’96, at left, and Craig Morgan Teicher ’01 listen. Visiting �ֲ���ý for an evening poetry reading on Feb. 12, they met with students in the Muskie Archives during the afternoon. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Christian, you barely overlapped with Rob when you were here. How did you get to know him?

Barter: A teacher I had in graduate school, poet Sydney Lea, told me that Rob was the poetry editor at The American Scholar — “I think he’d like your work, maybe you should send him some poems.” So Rob took a couple poems of mine. A few years after that, when my first book came out, he asked me if I’d like to read at �ֲ���ý. And then I got to meet him in person, and of course immediately liked him.

Craig and Gabe, what are some early impressions from studying with Rob?

Teicher: For me, very clearly, it was Rob’s way of teaching, which was to ask us questions very articulately, and then to hold us to a high standard as to how we answered them. It deeply matched the reason I got into poetry in the first place, which was the need to put things into my own words all the time — just to try to get something said that I didn’t think anybody was listening to.

I was amazed to realize there was a man who taught that way and that I could take classes with him. I was like, “Oh, if this is what poetry is for, then I want to do it.” Then I just took every class I could with Rob, and we’ve stayed friends since.

Fried: I don’t know if I have ever met a more perfect teacher of undergraduates. He would recognize something in an incipient writer that they wouldn’t even know themselves was impressive, and he’d focus on that rather than on all the things that could be fixed or changed.

Shown gesturing for emphasis during the Feb. 12 poets’ gathering with students, faculty, and staff, Craig Morgan Teicher ’01 has published four books of poetry and prose. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Is Rob present in your teaching?

Teicher: Exclusively and always. I had a marvelous 10th-grade English teacher who also taught by summoning articulate responses, and Rob showed me a more mature version of that. And that’s the only way that I know how to teach — basically I sit down in a room with a book and start asking questions.

Fried: To really listen to how students are responding, to help them know what questions to ask of a poem, but then to let them do the asking and to underscore the ways in which they have made important observations about a poem — that all comes from Rob.

How have your reasons for writing poetry evolved over the years?

Barter: At first, I was writing very much day-to-day poems of observation. For better or worse, I’m now writing more with a world view in mind and more consciously trying to tackle larger issues in my work, though always grounded by real-life things. I’ve become very interested in writing topical poems about climate change and the political atmosphere in which we live, and that kind of thing.

Teicher: Getting married and having kids really changed what I thought poetry was for. My son has pretty severe cerebral palsy, and so most of my latest book, The Trembling Answers, comes out of a period five or six years ago when he was severely medicalized. It was a period of having a lot of experiences that only my wife and I could share. Again, it’s that thing of having to say something that you need to have understood, so you need to find a way of explaining it such that people might be able to understand it.

Poet Rob Farnsworth was among the listeners in the Muskie Archives as three alumni poets, including two of his former students, talked with students, staff, and faculty on Feb. 12. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Fried: Writing poems made sense to me, because I loved to play with words, shift them around and make noises with them. But my impetus for writing poems has always been to try to figure out nostalgia, feelings of memory and longing, and trying to parse how much of that is self-generated and how much of it comes out of the initial experiences that we’re nostalgic for.

Anything you’d like to add about your �ֲ���ý education overall, or your feelings about visiting?

Barter: I needed to grow up more than many when I got here. I started here at 17 and my first year was pretty rough. But then I found my people, which is where so much of it begins for all of us. And that was just a wonderful blessing and that’s the wonderful thing about �ֲ���ý — you can find your people here.

As far as me becoming an artist, it was a process of learning how to be disciplined and learning how to be effective. That happened largely through learning to compose music, and Bill Matthews was a big part of that for me as my mentor. He taught me a lot, not just about writing music, but about being an artist and what it takes to actually make something as an artist, and not just dream.

Teicher: I was looking around today and realizing that there’s nowhere that I can look here that doesn’t give me a strong memory of something that happened. And to me, the students look really similar to my peers. And that may be just because they’re just as cold as we were and therefore bundled up in similar clothing.

Poet Gabe Fried ’96 answers a question from the audience as Christian Barter ’90 and Craig Morgan Teicher ’01 look on. Fried’s classmate and Lecturer in English Jess Anthony, at left, and Senior Lecturer in English Rob Farnsworth, in white shirt, presented the three poets at �ֲ���ý on Feb. 12. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

As part of a two-day residency at �ֲ���ý College, folk-pop singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega performs two concert sets, at 7 and 9:30 p.m., on Saturday, Jan. 23, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Tickets are $15 for general admission and $5 for seniors and students per set and are available at www.batestickets.com. For more information, contact 207-786-6135 or this olinarts@bates.edu. The concert is presented by the �ֲ���ý Concerts Committee.

Vega’s residency includes two workshops on Friday, Jan. 22, in the Olin Arts Center. She offers a creative writing session at 2:45 p.m. in a room to be announced, and a workshop on the business of the arts at 4:30 p.m. in the Olin Concert Hall. They are open to the public at no cost. Preregistration for the creative writing workshop is required via e-mail at this olinarts@bates.edu.

Vega is one of the most influential figures in the modern folk movement. Her performances have been described as “intensely reflective” by the Portland Press Herald and “nearly perfect” by The Boston Globe. Her songs include “Luka,” which reached No. 3 in the Billboard Hot 100 in 1987 and was one of the first popular songs to address child abuse and domestic violence.

Born in California, Vega grew up in New York City’s Spanish Harlem and Upper West Side. She picked up the guitar at age 11 and was writing songs as a teenager. She studied dance at the High School for the Performing Arts and later majored in English literature at Barnard College.

In 1979, influenced by a concert by singer-songwriter Lou Reed of Velvet Underground fame, Vega began to develop her own distinctive style of contemporary folk. Soon she was playing iconic venues like the Bottom Line and Folk City.

Her self-titled debut album was released in 1985, co-produced by Steve Addabbo and Lenny Kaye, former guitarist for Patti Smith. 1987’s follow up, Solitude Standing, elevated her to star status. The album, hitting No. 2 in the UK and No. 11 in the United States, was nominated for three Grammys, including Record of the Year, and went platinum.

Vega’s neo-folk style ushered in a new folk-pop singer-songwriter idiom that would ultimately include the likes of Tracy Chapman, Shawn Colvin and the Indigo Girls. In 1997, Vega joined Sarah McLachlan on her Lilith Fair tour, which celebrated the female voice in rock and pop, and became one of the few artists invited back every year.

Vega also hosted the public radio series “American Mavericks,” 13 hourlong programs featuring the histories and music of the iconoclastic composers who revolutionized contemporary art music. The show won the Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcasting.

In 2007, Vega released Beauty & Crime (Blue Note Records), a deeply personal reflection of her native New York City in the wake of the loss of her brother Tim and the tragedy of Sept. 11.

Vega has dedicated much of her time and energy to charitable causes, notably Amnesty International, Casa Alianza and the Save Darfur Coalition.

Rob Farnsworth smiles during a poetry reading and discussion convened by chaplain Bill Blaine-Wallace, part of a series exploring the role of passion and engagement. Chloe Viner ’09 of Rowley, Mass., is at left. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

The cliché is effective, acknowledging his concern for process. But after the recuperative postponement, I have to ask Farnsworth if a student of his could effectively use such a cliché, straightforward and without irony, in a piece of fiction or poetry.

No, he says, but then offers how a grad school professor at Columbia did once talk about rescuing clichés “by following them back to their literal roots. In some cases they can be excavated and played with. But that demands a willingness to play around in the sandpit that is the cliché.”

I smile; Farnsworth has reintroduced “sand” in a way that’s both sly and, importantly, instructive: the craft of writing isn’t sandbox stuff.

When I arrive in his Pettigrew office, the slightly flushed-with-fever Farnsworth is staring at his bookshelf as if trying to find a star in a suddenly jumbled sky. “I’m looking for a book,” he says to the wall. “I know what its spine looks like…but I long ago stopped trying to keep my books in alphabetical order.”

Now, most every professor has a well-used bookshelf, but you can easily imagine books leaving Farnsworth’s shelves like blocks at the beginning of a Jenga game, for reading is the cornerstone habit that Farnsworth demands from his writing students. The apprentice writer must read “omnivorously,” he says, because the motivation to write seriously should “come from wanting to participate in the spellcasting that reading makes you aware of. It should make you say, ‘I want to add my voice to that. I want to sing along with that, descant with that.’”

Craig Teicher ’01 is one of two young-alum spellcasters and former Farnsworth protégés who won first-book prizes in 2007. He received the Colorado Prize for Poetry for Brenda is in the Room and Other Poems, while Gabe Fried ’96 won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Making the New Lamb Take.

Both express an appreciation for Farnsworth that borders on wonderment. “My life as it is wouldn’t exist except for Rob,” says Fried, an editor at Persea Books in New York City.

Teicher, also an editor in New York City (at Publishers Weekly, where he’d just interviewed novelist Elizabeth Strout ’77 about her new book, Olive Kitteridge), arrived at �ֲ���ý trailing a belief in the communal and communional power of poetry. “My family bottomed out a bit in high school,” he recalls. “In poetry I found companionship and something to identify with.” Farnsworth, right from his first meeting with Teicher, noticed how “earnest” his student was about “what poetry could do. He came with that inkling.” Farnsworth says that he and others were merely “operating the bellows” to fan Teicher’s creative flames.

I share the bellows quote with Teicher, who e-mails me back: “Rob’s being modest. He was my gatekeeper to the ways one could actually participate in literature.” Later, on the phone, he explains. “Here was a guy who, if I said something intelligent in class, was going to come back with something more intelligent that pushed the conversation further with other students, making it bigger and bigger.

“All of a sudden, literature was personal and exciting.”

Farnsworth, who majored in English at Brown and earned an M.F.A. at Columbia, teaches workshop courses in writing at �ֲ���ý in addition to literature courses, including one on modern Irish poetry this past winter. “Rob isn’t a Ph.D. scholar kind of guy,” says Teicher. “He’s a practicing reader and writer, and you’re not going to find a guy who has, for example, an earthier, more intimate knowledge of 20th-century Irish poetry. He knows what’s in the bones of it.”

Widely published, Farnsworth is highly regarded in Maine for his many appearances as a poet, scholar, and facilitator for literary gatherings in small towns and cities.

But there’s more. Teicher and Fried especially praise the restraint in Farnsworth’s mentorship. “He was really good about being cautious and making me aware how hard it is to have a successful career as a poet,” Teicher says. “Rob understood that my college wish to be a poet was very much about my fantasy life, and he didn’t want to be a creature in my fantasy life. Once I was older, and was an adult, he was excited about treating me like one.”

Says Fried, “Rob allowed us to explore our ambitions while making sure we could live with our shortcomings.”

Farnsworth reads and discusses his poetry www.fishousepoems.org

By H. Jay Burns