“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)

One of Maine’s most respected poets, Wesley McNair visits �ֲ���ý at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 28.

His appearance, part of the Language Arts Live series of literary readings at �ֲ���ý, takes place in Skelton Lounge, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave., and is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-786-6326 or 207-786-6256.

Language Arts Live brings highly regarded writers to �ֲ���ý to read from and discuss their work. The series is sponsored by the English department, the Learning Associates Program, the �ֲ���ý Humanities Fund, the programs in African American studies and American cultural studies, and the John Tagliabue Poetry fund.

One of Maine’s most effective advocates of the art of poetry, poems have won praise from readers, reviewers and fellow poets alike for more than 40 years. Intended to be “both accessible and complex,” as a reviewer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune wrote, his lines find truth in the small, often overlooked events of our common existence.

His most recent book is Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems (David R. Godine, 2010), which showcases some of his best poetry from six previous volumes and a sampling of new work. He has authored or edited 18 books, including poetry, nonfiction and anthologies.

In 2006, McNair was selected for a prestigious United States Artists Fellowship, awarded annually to America’s finest living artists. He has held grants from the Fulbright and Guggenheim foundations, two Rockefeller Fellowships, an NEH Fellowship in literature and two NEA fellowships.

McNair served four times on the nominating committee for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and in 2010 served as guest editor in poetry for the Pushcart Prize anthology. His poetry has appeared in two editions of The Best American Poetry and in more than 50 anthologies, and has been featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition and 14 episodes of The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor.

McNair, of Mercer, served as a professor at the University of Maine at Farmington from 1987 until his retirement in 2004; founded and directed the Creative Writing program there; and is now UMF’s Writer in Residence.

He was a visiting professor at Colby College from 1999 to 2004. Colby acquired his personal papers in 2006 and has created an interactive McNair archive and teaching site on the Web.

�ֲ���ý has a long tradition of welcoming poets and fiction writers to read from their work. During a 1932 U.S. tour, William Butler Yeats read his poetry to a large audience in the �ֲ���ý Chapel. For 30 years, the inimitable �ֲ���ý professor and poet John Tagliabue brought many distinguished writers to campus, including Allen Ginsberg and Gwendolyn Brooks.

Since 1991, when it formally instituted a concentration in creative writing within the major, the English department has hosted public readings, class visits and residencies by more than 75 acclaimed poets and writers, among them Nobel Prize laureates Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott; Pulitzer Prize winners Paul Muldoon, Donald Justice, �ֲ���ý alumna Elizabeth Strout, Yusef Komunyakaa and Richard Ford; Carolyn Forché, Grace Paley, Galway Kinnell, Marge Piercy, Robert Pinsky and Sarah Manguso.

Recent �ֲ���ý alums who have authored prize-winning first books have also returned to read: Jessica Anthony (class of 1996), Christian Barter (1990), Gabriel Fried (1996), Christina Chiu (1991) and Craig Teicher (2001).