Timely for evoking autumn colors, and timeless for its existential wit, a reading by Rob Farnsworth, senior lecturer in English, of his poem “Toward Hallowe’en,” illustrated by ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ photography.

Toward Hallowe’en

I woke in painted stillness and stepped
out on the porch. The silted altitudes were
motionless, and although it hadn’t rained,
the light was melancholy, damp, made
for still black boughs and brilliant leaves.
One of those days that deserves its very
own name: Latin for air-without-motive,
autumn-holding-steady. I stared into
the trees, as a child looks into a picture
said to contain a tiger’s smile, a five-
pointed star, a domino, a hand — when with
a sound like distant applause (fainter
than the softball crowds who had rejoiced
all summer beyond the trees), one whole
maple’s wild red leaves poured down
across the street. No wind, no bird, no
squirrel, just a steady shower of leaves
from a stolid tree, so sudden and unanimous
it seemed deliberate. Standing there,
my arms embossed with bedding wrinkles,
I was pierced with recognition acute
and inexplicable as the sweet, focused
ache a finger held inches from my forehead
provokes. I didn’t know why â€” but that
was joy â€” release from having to stitch
effect to cause, from having to name each
five-fingered leaf or separate day. They
would fall away in good time, from places
in a picture of the past, into a hushed,
mysterious storm of bright red leaves.

“Toward Hallowe’en” first appeared in Robert Farnsworth’s book Honest Water, published by Wesleyan University Press in 1989. Farnsworth is a senior lecturer in English at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝.

Taking place Oct. 25-29, this year’s Translations international poetry festival celebrates cross-cultural communication with visiting poets from the Americas, Europe and Japan. The festival begins at 4:15 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 25, with a welcome, readings and a reception in Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave.

For more information, please contact 207-786-8293 or gdumais@bates.edu.

Meet the Translations poets of 2011:

Polina Barskova was recognized early on as a prodigy and is considered one of the most gifted Russian poets under age 40. Her work has been translated into four languages, including recent English editions of This Lamentable City (trans. by Ilya Kaminsky, Tupelo Press, 2010) and Zoo in Winter (trans. by David Stromberg and Boris Draliuk; Melville House, 2011). Since releasing her first collection at 15, Barskova has published five additional books. She is an assistant professor of Russian literature and film at Hampshire College.

Born in Waterville, Maine, Rhea CĂ´tĂ©’s work contemplates what it means to be Franco-American and female in the United States. Her published work includes Wednesday’s Child (Rheta Press, 1999), winner of the 1997 Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance Chapbook Award; and I am Franco-American and Proud of It: Franco-American Women’s Anthology, which she co-edited and designed. CĂ´tĂ© teaches courses in Franco-American women’s experiences and creative nonfiction at the University of Maine.

A senior lecturer in English at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, Robert Farnsworth began writing poetry in his teens, and makes work that strives to reconcile opposites — distance and detail, the habitual and the exotic. His pieces have appeared in multiple magazines, two poetry collections from Wesleyan University Press, and the 2010 book Rumored Islands (Harbor Mountain Press).

Francisca LĂłpez, professor of Spanish at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, has published numerous scholarly articles and has written or co-edited two books. As a creative writer, she has published poetry in a variety of journals, and she and Aburto Guzmán co-authored a collection of short stories, La sĂ©ptima mujer (Ediciones Nuevo Espacio, 2004), and the novel Posdata (same publisher, 2004).

Naomi Otsubo has pursued her passion for language throughout her life as a writer and translator. Born and raised in Tokyo, she will release her first book of Japanese poetry later this year. A Maine resident, Otsubo has quietly rebelled against social constraints by simply living on her own terms.

Danny Plourde comes from Quebec. Since his first book, Vers quelque (Hexagone, 2004), he has published several poetry collections and a novel. The role of the poem in the public square and literary engagement are important issues of his creative approach. Joseph Morneau: La pinte est en spécial (Vlb, 2011), a novel dealing with media bars in Montreal, is his latest book. Plourde has also performed with a garage band called Les Fidel Castrol.

Carmen Elisabeth Puchianu has published several books of short stories and poetry. She researches modern and post-modern German literature, Romanian-German literature and creative writing, and is head of the foreign languages and literatures department at Transylvania University in Brasov. Puchianu is an advocate for the use of role-playing in teaching foreign languages and literatures.

Miguel Angel Zapata is a prolific poet who received the Premio Latino de Literatura (Latino Award for Literature) in 2003. Poet Anthony Seidman states, “He is able to both light up and embrace this world, and that is no small feat. Zapata is without a doubt one of the most innovative poets in Latin America today.” Zapata is a professor of Hispanic literature at Hofstra University, where he also directs the Hofstra Hispanic Review.

Most students who study creative writing with Robert Farnsworth find themselves in a relationship measured in years, not semesters.

A widely published poet and member of the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ faculty since 1990, Farnsworth sees that relationship as a two- or three-year conversation conducted through “office-hour meetings, workshop discussions, scribbling on manuscripts that students give me,” he explains.

“I try to pay close attention to what they initially feel they want to do, and what challenges can be put in front of them to widen the possibilities for their writing, to give them some opportunity to see themselves into territories that they did not know existed for them.”

Farnsworth is the right teacher for young writers still seeking their voices, says Gabe Fried ’96, winner of the 2007 Kathryn A. Morton Prize for his debut collection of poems, Making the New Lamb Take.

“Great teachers — of anything — recognize the strengths of the students in front of them,” says Fried. “Rob allowed us to explore our strengths and ambitions while making sure we could live with our shortcomings.”

This mentoring approach, aspirational and challenging, has elicited enduring appreciation from the ranks of Farnsworth proteges. In fact, support from students resulted in Farnworth’s receiving the 2008 Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching, an honor determined through the votes of past and present students.

The award joined a list of credentials that includes a PEN New England Discovery Award, a 2006 summer residency at the Frost Place in Franconia, N.H., and the role of featured speaker at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝’ 2006 Convocation — again through a student vote, this time that of the departing Class of 2006.

Robert Farnsworth, a poet and writer-in-residence at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, has received the 2008 Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching. A member of the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ faculty since 1990, Farnsworth teaches workshop courses in fiction and poetry writing as well as literature courses.

In his forthcoming Kroepsch address, “Psst!: Poems Teach Themselves,” Farnsworth will discuss the reciprocal process of reading and writing as an apprenticeship.

Craig Teicher ’01 and Gabe Fried ’96, both of whom won first-book prizes in 2007 for their poetry collections, trace their current achievements to Farnsworth’s influence.

Teicher, recipient of the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry for Brenda is in the Room and Other Poems, praised Farnsworth’s “extraordinary” ability to guide a classroom conversation so that the “literature becomes both personal and exciting.” Farnsworth’s collaborative teaching style, says Teicher, “is the best way for someone to learn, by making the student figure out what they think by telling you.”

Fellow poet Gabe Fried ’96, winner of the 2007 Kathryn A. Morton Prize for his debut collection of poems, Making the New Lamb Take, credits Farnsworth for being the right teacher for young writers who’ve not yet found their voices. “Great teachers — of anything — recognize the strengths of the students in front of them,” says Fried. “Rob allowed us to explore our strengths and ambitions while making sure we could live with our shortcomings.”

At ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, Farnsworth is teaching “Modern Irish Poetry” and “Poetry and Place” this semester; he also teaches a course on 20-century American women poets and one focusing on Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams.

In 2006 Farnsworth held a summer residency at the Frost Place in Franconia, N.H., and that September delivered the College’s annual Convocation address. His poetry has been widely published in magazines in the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom and in two collections from Wesleyan University Press, Three or Four Hills and a Cloud and Honest Water.

He received the PEN New England Discovery Award (2005) and held a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry (1989–1990). He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Brown University and an M.F.A. from Columbia.

Farnsworth is highly regarded in Maine for his many appearances as a poet, scholar and facilitator for literary gatherings in small towns and cities, especially under the aegis of the Maine Humanities Council, and for his writing workshops sponsored by Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance.

Farnsworth once fretted about the muses who inspired his teaching. “I started teaching college when I was 26, and in my 30s I realized that I sounded just like my teachers,” he says. “The words pouring out of my mouth were the words that were poured into my ear.”

The realization caused some anxiety of influence in Farnsworth. Yet he came to believe, more strongly as the years passed, in what he’d heard at Brown and Columbia: that discipline is important — “you have to really dedicate yourself to singing school.”

He’s not suggesting an ascetic self-discipline, but rather the vigilance required of any educated person in order to create bright new ideas from disparate and pieces of knowledge. The power to create metaphor, “to make comparisons that contain within them dissimilarities that are just as interesting as the similarities, is the big engine of thought,” says Farnsworth.

“Writers should be ambitious” in this sense, he adds. “They should do something that deserves to be read and that rewards reading. They should carry that seriousness of purpose, which Michael Harper made clear to me in one way and writers like Edwin Honig in other ways.”

The more years that Farnsworth teaches, “the more I feel I owe it to my teachers to carry on what they did for me.”

The late Robert H. Kroepsch ’33, LL.D ’71, established in 1985 the Ruth M. and Robert H. Kroepsch Endowed Fund for an award to a member of the faculty, “in recognition of outstanding performance as a teacher during the previous 12-month period.” The honor, which carries a $5,000 award, recognizes a faculty member’s ability to stimulate student interest in the subject, foster desire for further learning, help students understand subject matter in a broad context and encourage a high level of student performance, among other criteria.