“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)

From his third-floor office in Hathorn Hall, Robert Farnsworth, poet and senior lecturer in English, has a beautiful view of the Historic Quad.

The poet is being viewed, too. Atop a bookshelf sits a bust of Robert Frost, “presiding over everything that gets said in here,” notes Farnsworth. “He’s a sobering presence.”

The Robert Frost bust (upper right) is “a kind of presiding genius” in Rob Farnsworth’s office. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Farnsworth received the bust from a colleague who, some 20-odd years ago, was trying to clear out an office. (It’s a rite of passage for retiring faculty: Give away all that you can’t bear to trash.)

Before Farnsworth brought the head to his office, it sat in his garage just long enough for his young sons to start clowning around with it. You know what happened next. “One of them came running up the stairs saying, ‘Dad! Dad! Robert Frost’s head has fallen off!’ which I thought was an extraordinary thing.”

Farnsworth glued everything back together. Taking a bit of poetic license, he disguised the glue mark with a tiny cloth bird he found walking home one day. “He’s nestled in his collar there,” Farnsworth says.

A tiny cloth bird sits nestled in the collar of the Robert Frost bust in Rob Farnsworth’s office. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

At �ֲ���ý, Farnsworth teaches Frost in a course that also loops in Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams — “three American modernists who stayed home, rather than going to Paris or London,” he says.

Still, when Farnsworth was younger, Frost was not one of his favorites. That changed in grad school at Columbia University when he studied Frost with Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Also contributing to his veneration of the poet was the summer that Farnsworth spent, in 2006, living and writing in Frost’s home in Franconia, N.H.

Farnsworth now finds the poet “indispensable.” He’s come to “revere him, not just enjoy him.”

What impresses Farnsworth most is Frost’s “canniness, his slant way of getting at big truths without rhetorical flourish in a very immediate and ordinary sort of way.”

Frost had a great ear, Farnsworth says, “one of the best ears of any English poet for speech, for how people actually talk, and for the metres of prosody in English and in American English. And he put those things to work in extraordinary ways.”

Frost has a “slant way of getting at big truths without rhetorical flourish in a very immediate and ordinary sort of way,” says Rob Farnsworth. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

However figurative, the bust plays an active role in the office, says Farnsworth.

“He’s a kind of presiding genius, a little tiki, you know, a Polynesian saint. He keeps an eye on me, but then these guys do too,” Farnsworth hastens to add, pointing to depictions of W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, and Robert Hayden that hang on his walls.

“I try to keep these good vibrations filling up the room,” he says. “I hope that this has an influence on the students who come to study poetry.”

Convocation is about the new, and novelty abounded at the 2006 �ֲ���ý College convocation. Of course, the ceremony always opens a new academic year — this is the 152nd — and welcomes new students, some 500 of them this time around.

Yet this year’s convocation, held Sept. 6, also included the public debut of the College’s new chaplain, Rev. William Blaine-Wallace, and marked the start of an important tradition. Where �ֲ���ý for years has invited outside speakers to give the convocation address, that honor this time went to a faculty member, the poet and English professor Rob Farnsworth.

• A Convocation address from Robert Farnsworth (video and audio)

Asking a faculty member to give the convocation address, explained Dean of the Faculty Jill Reich, re-emphasizes the primacy of the faculty-student relationship at �ֲ���ý. But it also honors an elemental bond sometimes overlooked: the one between arriving first-years and their forerunners who graduated last May.

Chosen by last spring’s seniors to represent the quality of �ֲ���ý teaching, Reich explained, was the “symbolic gift from the departing class of 2006 to those who take their place as members of the class of 2010.”

Farnsworth returned to campus after spending July and August as poet-in-residence at The Frost Place, a museum housed in poet Robert Frost’s former homestead in New Hampshire. Titled Three Lower-Case Virtues, his talk considered the importance of passion, discipline and generosity to the college experience.

The best kind of human passion arises when we “make and comprehend metaphor,” Farnsworth said. More than a poetic device, metaphor is potentially a way of thinking, even of being — “the central passion of the human creature.” Metaphor, learning and life, he explained, are all about making connections. And that’s a process best done “by hand, on foot, by means of your senses, by listening, by your strict, passionate attention to what happens.”

He discussed discipline as pertaining to thought, urging his listeners to be “susceptible, but not sentimental; suspicious, but not cynical; rigorous, but not rigid.” But it may have been his treatment of generosity that rang most resoundingly across the Quad. “The world would be a more interesting and livable place were we all to strive to be not fulfilled, but fulfilling, people,” he said.

President Hansen devoted most of her talk to the skills of listening and questioning. “Like the best and hardest listening,” she said, “good questions reflect careful observation of what’s difficult, what’s confusing, what’s strange, what’s startling. They entail self-questioning, self-doubt, and, like listening to yourself, they can produce self-awareness.”

“Institutions need to listen and ask questions, too,” Hansen added, noting that �ֲ���ý itself is in a time of profound asking and listening as it revamps its general-education requirements, undertakes new substantial new construction and explores what kind of campus climate exists for members of underserved minorities.

Blaine-Wallace, an Episcopal priest who joined the �ֲ���ý community in August as multifaith chaplain, closed the ceremony with a benediction. “Open us to the gift, and strengthen us for the task, of creating together the next chapter of �ֲ���ý’ great tradition of imaginative and enlightened care for a fragile Earth, and respectful attention to a hurting world,” he said.

Bill Jack ’08, president of the student government, opened the speeches with a brief welcome whose high energy belied his advice to the new students: “Just relax.” No one was relaxing as the ceremony began, thanks to an ominous drizzle, but by the end a warm sun was cutting through the clouds and vignetting the Coram Library stage.

Related Stories

Sep.7:

�ֲ���ý College begins its 152nd academic year with a convocation address by Robert Farnsworth, a member of the English faculty and a nationally known poet, at 4:10 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 6, on the college’s Historic Quadrangle.