{"id":2227,"date":"2020-03-17T17:22:29","date_gmt":"2020-03-17T21:22:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/spire\/?p=2227"},"modified":"2020-04-18T13:57:41","modified_gmt":"2020-04-18T17:57:41","slug":"harper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/spire\/2020\/03\/17\/harper\/","title":{"rendered":"No Taproot: Amy Clampitt at 100"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ryan Harper<\/strong><\/p>\n

Faculty Fellow, Department of Religious Studies, Colby College<\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Evening has arrived. I am attending a poetry reading sponsored by the English Department at Colby College. Per departmental tradition, a creative writing undergraduate student introduces our guest poet. The tradition is designed to give developing writers the opportunity to exercise accountable attention\u2014to read closely and speak responsibly in public about a set of poems, in the presence of their author, to an audience eager to extend charity toward the podium.<\/p>\n

It is a lovely ritual, but on this night, my charity hits a snag. The student, a young woman, introduces the poet\u2014a woman I knew to be my age, in her early 40s. With an awed smile and dramatic pause, the student punctuates her take on our guest with a simple compliment:<\/p>\n

\u00a0 Her words are so\u2026young<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I am not miffed at the student. Finding salutary words for wordsmiths is difficult, and she is giving a far better introduction than I would have at her age. But it troubles me that her cultural thesaurus lists young<\/em> as a synonym of good<\/em>\u2014one too obvious to warrant qualification. As is often the case at public arts events on campus, the median age of the room is no lower than 40, and it is that low only due to the introducer herself and some creative writing students sprinkled sparsely among the gray and graying hairs. I wonder how young<\/em> falls on other ears; the student\u2019s cultural thesaurus is ours, too, to some extent, so perhaps my concern is unique. Perhaps the student believes she is reversing the sometimes-patronizing references to youthfulness (for example, the first sentence of this paragraph). But it dogs me. I keep revising the line in my head, wondering over the historic guilt of associations presumed innocent: her words are so…old\u2026new\u2026dignified\u2026fat\u2026current\u2026feminine\u2026masculine\u2026white<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Night rides over the day in Maine\u2014state of extreme tides, whose population is the oldest of any in the union. State of compromise. State of first light: the Dawnland. I return to my old house that evening. I read:<\/p>\n

The meshes of a life<\/em>
\nat close attention<\/em>
\nwent dense; the heaved<\/em>
\nlimbs upended slowly,<\/em>
\nthe white scut half-<\/em>
\nlifted in a lopsided<\/em>
\nwigwag, as though<\/em>
\neven the wildest of<\/em>
\nsurmises need be<\/em>
\nin no great hurry.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 It is the final stanza of Amy Clampitt\u2019s \u201cSlow Motion,\u201d in which the narrator observes a deer. The poem is not Clampitt\u2019s best-known, but it bears her many signatures: attention, paid and paid back; line breaks, studied but unconventional; diction, a mixture of the idiomatic and scientific; adjectives, packed and plentiful; verbs, alternatingly simple and complex. It is like Maine\u2019s tides: pressing, ardent, unrushed.<\/p>\n

Are these young<\/em> words? Amy Clampitt first published them, in book form, in The Kingfisher<\/em>, in 1983. It was her first full-length poetry collection. She was 63 years old. She died ten years later, having won a MacArthur Fellowship just two years earlier. On June 15, 2020, she would have turned 100, though according to Mary Jo Salter, her friend and perhaps her best reader, no one likely would have known, as Clampitt kept her birthday a secret. Over the past few years, as my feet have followed hers, Clampitt has gently and surely insisted her way into my consciousness.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 In 2018, I began splitting my time between Maine and New York City. I was non-tenure-track faculty at Colby, filling one of those long-term visiting positions that are becoming more rule than exception in the 21st<\/sup> century academy. My spouse works as the Minister of Older Adults at New York\u2019s Riverside Church. In the contemporary job climate, we can claim with a straight face that ministry is the more stable of our two gigs, so she keeps our home base in Manhattan while I live in Waterville, Maine. About every other weekend during the school year, I commute through New England, passing back and forth across the Piscataqua River, the sidelong salutations of Maine\u2019s border signs escorting me into and out of the state: Maine. Welcome Home. Vacationland. Worth a Visit. Worth a Lifetime. <\/em><\/p>\n

At 40, I found myself living alone for the first time, a native Midwesterner at the far lip of the lower 48. The consequent yawning of time and space compelled me to linger at the edges of the edge; I spent my open days exploring the interior and the Downeast coast. As I had done each of my prior moves, I sought out the works of artists who had lived in my new home before me. Since knowing Vacationland, and my place in it, involved untangling its knotty, manifold terms of belonging, I was especially interested in how the seasonal residents had been set up. Nativity is off the table if you are not born in Maine, and gold-star citizenship is unlikely if you don\u2019t live there all year. But Mainers confer degrees of residency, and as long as you keep a place in state, and your attendance is regular, your unbelonging is of a higher order than that of a mere tourist. Unlike all of those dainty summer people, I wintered<\/em> in Maine, so I hoped to earn more than seasonal credit. But I was down to explore all options. It actually felt like grace, for someone who has never felt like I really belonged anywhere, to know certain types of belonging were impossible for me to earn. It opened up space for a more intimate, authentically two-way embrace between the state and me. You can\u2019t embrace an other if there is no other. Maybe that is why Maine draws people drawn to permanent elsewheres. I sought the crossers and dwellers alike.<\/p>\n

“As I had done each of my prior moves, I sought out the works of artists who had lived in my new home before me. Since knowing Vacationland, and my place in it, involved untangling its knotty, manifold terms of belonging…”<\/h3>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s so hard for a Midwesterner to find out who he or she is,\u201d Amy Clampitt wrote a friend in 1980. A self-described \u201cpoet of place\u201d who later changed the moniker to \u201cpoet of displacement,\u201d she was born in New Providence, Iowa, a tiny town in the center of the state, founded by Quakers in 1855. Like many poets who came of age in a Quaker orbit\u2014most famously, the one who published his first edition of Leaves of Grass<\/em> the year of New Providence\u2019s founding\u2014Clampitt was friendly with some of the Friends\u2019 sensibilities: patience, deep attention, and a commitment to social justice. But Iowa was the Midwest; those cold, grey winters dim even the most luminous inner lights. When she turned to theology in letters to her brother Philip, Clampitt\u2019s sense of sin and the need for transformation, both individual and structural, were as acute as that of any New England Calvinist. Her poem \u201cThe Dahlia Gardens,\u201d whose occasion is the 1965 self-immolation of Quaker Norman Morrison outside the Pentagon, synthesizes with chilling clarity her theological acumen, and her awareness of the stakes of cultivating a well-wrought social spirituality. Never quite at home in any particular religious sect\u2014she left the Episcopal Church after a brief but headfirst sojourn, citing the ostensibly progressive denomination\u2019s sluggish response to the American war machine\u2014she was conversant with a number of them.<\/p>\n

Shortly after graduating from Grinnell College in 1941, Clampitt moved to New York City. Greenwich and West Village would function as much as home as anywhere for the rest of her life. After some brief, disappointing study at Columbia University, she worked for years at the Oxford University Press and the Audubon Society. Although her satisfaction at both positions ebbed and flowed, the Press gave her polymathic instincts a venue, and the Society gave her an outlet for her specific interest in birds (and in the eccentric people who claimed to be their best observers). All the while, she wrote and tirelessly reworked two novels, neither of which would ever find a publisher. It is heartrending to track her relationship with those works across the decades, through her letters, given the outcome. But Clampitt\u2019s persistent re-visioning of her craft\u2014and, necessarily, of herself\u2014would produce Clampitt the late poet. The letters evince the vocational woodshedding essential to any serious cultivation of artistry. The fruit is unpredictable in substance, but not in essence.<\/p>\n

In the late 1960s, Clampitt met Columbia law professor Harold Korn. Amy and \u201cHal\u201d did not marry until the final months of Clampitt\u2019s life, but they were lifelong companions, and by all accounts had a mutually-fulfilling partnership from the outset. In the mid-1970s, the two began spending their summers in Corea, Maine, a village on the Schoodic Peninsula, east of Mount Desert Island. For two decades, Corea would be her home for the warm months.<\/p>\n

The natural variety of the Schoodic was certain to attract a person so roundly attentive as Clampitt, and her love of the place is on full display in both her poems and letters. I wish, though, I had access to her very first impressions. To witness people like Clampitt making their first landings is like being present for a star\u2019s birth: the colliding of energies transfers epiphany to all bystanders, verges on fatal.<\/p>\n

I wonder if she, like me, sought precedents. Marsden Hartley, who had Midwestern and New York connections, lived in Corea late in life, using the tower of the town\u2019s Baptist church as his painting studio. Louise Dickinson Rich was Clampitt\u2019s closest literary predecessor in the area. More self-consciously regionalist than Clampitt, Rich lived in Corea for a while and wrote extensively and lovingly about the Schoodic Peninsula. She receives one of the two dedicatory epigraphs to Clampitt\u2019s famous long poem, \u201cWhat the Light Was Like,\u201d and may have been the reason Clampitt became apprised of Corea. It is easy for me to imagine Clampitt\u2014the Iowan-New Yorker-Mainer, the rejected novelist, the poet keeping watch over nature at the cracking fringe of the Anthropocene before many of her literary contemporaries would realize the radical import of \u201cmere\u201d nature poetry\u2014enthusiastically scribbling down lines from Rich\u2019s 1958 The Peninsula<\/em>: \u201cWe are overcome by a sense of being alien, of not belonging in the world in which we find ourselves, of being out of step with the times and out of sympathy with the attitudes that we encounter.\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Situated east of the most frequented portion of Acadia National Park, the Schoodic Peninsula remains relatively quiet all year. It has its summer people\u2014more than when either Rich or Clampitt lived there\u2014but Mount Desert Island constitutes the littoral terminus for most vacationers. Like all of Maine\u2019s lobster villages, Corea is experiencing the effects of a warming ocean, of partially-committed money from the lower latitudes, of the disappearance of a generation who knew the place before either phenomenon became discernible. But the traps are still stacked by the hundreds along the roads, the lobster boats pack the harbor, and residents will tell you the place has stood resilient against some of the most regressive iterations of progress.<\/p>\n

In early December 2019, I drove to Corea after having spent a weekend on Mount Desert. It was not my first trip to the village, but it was my first in the snowy season. Winter is my favorite time to visit the region, when the snow streaks the rocky coasts, the spruces bridge the year\u2019s bluest skies and waters, and the place abounds with the silence of ordinary time.<\/p>\n

“Winter is my favorite time to visit the region, when the snow streaks the rocky coasts, the spruces bridge the year\u2019s bluest skies and waters, and the place abounds with the silence of ordinary time…”<\/h3>\n

I turned off U.S. Highway 1, onto the undulating road that led into the peninsula, blown toward the land\u2019s bow by the bluster of New England sports radio. I typically avoided such programming (why break the silence?), but I had chanced upon a segment discussing Dwight Evans, the Red Sox outfielder who recently had barely missed election to the Hall of Fame. One of my favorite baseball rants concerns the underappreciation of Evans due to his late career bloom. Evans became a better player in his 30s\u2014upper-middle age, by professional baseball standards\u2014and the national pastime, like the ageist national culture, does not know what to do with late bloomers. It was gratifying to listen to Evans\u2019s nonrhotic defenders (\u201che had more ah-B-I\u2019s than Cahlton Fisk!\u201d), on my way to the summer home of the woman whom Willard Spiegelman called \u201cAmerica\u2019s oldest young poet.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was headed for Gouldsboro, the Peninsula\u2019s major population center, at 1,700 people, to visit the town\u2019s library. I hoped they might possess some region-specific materials on Clampitt, or even better, that some of the staff may have known Amy and Hal. It was called the Dorcas Library: a good omen. According to the New Testament, Dorcas was a prominent older woman in the early church\u2014an artist of great charity, who fashioned clothing for the widows of her community.<\/p>\n

In this late American moment, it is easy to despair of the American project. A caring, cared-for public library works like a vitamin shot to the body\u2019s hope centers. When I entered the little building, I was struck by the liveliness. While few people were present, everywhere were signs of activities: a poetry writing group, a Shakespeare reading group, a youth gaming group, a program for delivering books to the homebound. Looking out onto Prospect Harbor on that snow-fringed, sunny winter day, the library\u2019s main reading room rivaled any space in which I have worked in its spare beauty. To be sure, money was tight, as evidenced by the signage soliciting donations. Dorcas was like everything out here, like every jut of democratic earth: hearty and fragile.<\/p>\n

“In this late American moment, it is easy to despair of the American project. A caring, cared-for public library works like a vitamin shot to the body\u2019s hope centers…”<\/h3>\n

Dorcas was curated mostly by older women. Faith, the library director, possessed the concise, staid helpfulness I had come to love from Mainers; it resembled the southern Missouri where I grew up, only it was not seared with mock Confederate cheeriness. Faith plucked several Clampitt volumes off the Dorcas shelves for me\u2014a surprising highlight being a signed copy of The Kingfisher<\/em>\u2014and welcomed me to work in the reading room. I found out later that silver-haired Faith and her husband were planning to hike the Appalachian Trail in 2020 to raise money for the library. Of course, I did not learn this from Faith.<\/p>\n

People trickled in and out, and before I knew it, my project had become communal. Martha, a volunteer who was old enough to have some vague memory of Clampitt in Corea, thumbed through phone books and her own memory, brainstorming with Faith the names of area people who might be willing and able to speak to me about those days. Martha was the first of many residents whose eyes lit up when she spoke of \u201cWhat the Light Was Like.\u201d She knew the poem before I mentioned it. She also knew the family of Ernest Woodward, the second of the poem\u2019s dedications. Woodward was a Corea fisherman and Clampitt\u2019s neighbor, and his death just off the coast was the occasion of \u201cWhat the Light Was Like.\u201d The verses exhibit Clampitt\u2019s capacity to bear \u201celegaic witness,\u201d to borrow a phrase from Susan Snively\u2014chronicling the region\u2019s tricky luminosity; the aids to navigation, natural and human-made; and the full-bodied particularity of a man who, like Clampitt, kept faithful watch. Woodward and Clampitt possessed their own special vision, but it seemed to me that every dweller on the Peninsula exercised integrating vigilance. Martha knew much. I left Dorcas with more resources.<\/p>\n

Not all older women are the unacknowledged ministers of the world, but I am increasingly certain the world\u2019s unacknowledged ministers are older women. Thanks to Martha, I later met Donna and Peg. Donna was another Midwesterner who had found her way to Maine. Born in Kansas, she had spent years as a licensed nurse practitioner, providing health care to marginal and compromised populations\u2014some in the remote regions of eastern Kentucky. Her partner Peg was a gregarious West Coast academic whom I realized incidentally over conversation was one of the reasons the contemporary American academy has robust women\u2019s and gender studies programs. Donna had moved to the Peninsula in 1977, just a short time after Amy and Hal began summering there (\u201cbut I don\u2019t count as a native\u201d). Peg arrived many years later.<\/p>\n

“Not all older women are the unacknowledged ministers of the world, but I am increasingly certain the world\u2019s unacknowledged ministers are older women…”<\/h3>\n

When Donna talked of Corea, the light in her blue eyes was like the Downeast winter sky: widely reflective, generously radiant. She spoke of the trees, the animals, the people, as neighbors. Donna and Peg had a formidable collection of books on Maine history and culture, but I was more drawn to the breadth of genre and subject matter represented on their many shelves. They were wholly inquisitive about their whole world\u2014the sort of women for whom disciplinary parameters were but useful organizational tools in their sizable archive. Entering their orbit fortified every precinct of my person.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d describe her as a coiled spring,\u201d Donna told me, half-chuckling, remembering her encounters with Clampitt. Amy and Hal lived on Corea\u2019s Youngs Point, a peninsula on the Peninsula. There was one route into the village center, where the post office was located. Donna lived on that route. Walking to retrieve one\u2019s mail has functioned as a daily social rite in Corea for a long time, which meant Clampitt\u2014who sent and received much correspondence, especially as her poetry career blossomed\u2014regularly walked past Donna\u2019s house, and they saw each other frequently. They did not talk much, but they were both Midwesterners, so they were adept at passing pleasantries. They also were kindred in their sensitivities to the life and motion of the place. Donna fondly remembers Amy inquiring about the flowers in her yard, noting new appearances and bloomings. And, of course, there was the wild, diurnal dance of atmosphere and ocean to discuss. Mainers are the only people I have met who could talk Midwesterners under the table concerning the weather. Midwesterners in Maine, the crash site of the continent\u2019s every passing system, become walking almanacs.<\/p>\n

It was a crisp, sunny January day, just above freezing, and we walked out to Amy\u2019s old place. The last portion of the road was a stew of ice and mud. The house was square and stout\u2014the standard Maine frame for dwellings and dwellers\u2014not one hundred feet from the water. You can see several islands at high tide. At low tide, tidepools abound on the rocks, and the congregation of islands nearly becomes a single piece of land\u2014another peninsula, in fact, since you can walk to the nearest across a sand bar. The near island is Outer Bar, the site of Clampitt\u2019s poem of the same name. The first two stanzas:<\/p>\n

When through some lacuna, chink, or interstice<\/em>
\nin the unlicensed free-for-all that goes<\/em>
\non without a halt out there all day, all night,<\/em>
\nall through the winter,<\/em><\/p>\n

one morning at low tide you walk dry-shod across<\/em>
\na shadow isthmus to the outer bar,<\/em>
\nyou find yourself, once over, sinking at every step<\/em>
\ninto a luscious mess\u2014<\/em><\/p>\n

Too wild and scruffy with sea matter to be \u201ccalm,\u201d Clampitt\u2019s corner of Maine was somehow still a place of peace, provided you accepted the sloppy terms of welcome. Amy did. Donna seemed to as well; as we wandered on the rocks, she wistfully noted the sonic interplay of waves and wind. Could anything rattle a woman born in tornado country?<\/p>\n

“Could anything rattle a woman born in tornado country?”<\/h3>\n

I imagined Amy keeping watch out here, as her access points appeared and vanished by the hour. I imagine her waiting, then bounding to the bar, so as not to sink all the way. Like a coiled spring.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Donna\u2019s memories of Amy square with other testimonies, and with the impression I gleaned from her writing\u2014always moving, but possessed of a soul stillness that gathers then translates the witness of the trees and the hills. It is a prophetic synthesis\u2014the wait, the watch, the silence poised to pass into proclamation. Did Amy\u2019s various homes grant her this disposition, or was she already this way?<\/p>\n

As with all New Yorkers who make their way to remote New England during the summer, it is tempting to say that Maine provided Clampitt a solitude and a connection with nature that New York could not, and the city provided opportunities and intercourse with a diverse multitude\u2014”culture,\u201d in a word. That is true as far as it goes; no one of Clampitt\u2019s means keeps two properties out of love of redundancy. But her writing testifies to a woman attendant to the full ecologies of both places. While her Maine poems demonstrate her fascination with meteorology, botany, and ornithology, they include quite a number of humans. Letters from and about Corea catalogue the activity of tides and people alike, and they are saturated with solicitation for visitors. She knew New York was flush with nature and<\/em> culture, and she marked it all, from surprising urban tumbleweed to barely-perceptible water seepages in Times Square stairwells. In her letters about city life, she is as likely to wax Thoreauvian about the flora, the fauna, the crackle of ice on the Central Park Reservoir, as she is to describe a Broadway show or social gathering. Her description to Philip of the mystic experience she had in the mid-1950s, at the Cloisters in upper Manhattan, places her in the visionary company of Hart Crane, Alfred Corn, and Walt Whitman\u2014poets of the New York ecstasy, private and populous. As with all seers, her vision fell unbroken on what was barely there.<\/p>\n

A poet of the world\u2019s motions must master stillness. This means not simply knowing how to be at rest, but also knowing when to vault out of one\u2019s mark\u2014when to be coiled, and when to spring. Maine and Manhattan are both regions of relative, wildly-converging velocities: profound tidal shifts, shifty corporations of clouds, multitudes containing specimens whose pacing constitutes, but is only partly explained by, the tempo of the whole. To get the full sense of both requires sometimes stopping to let it all whiz by, sometimes running with a pacing partner, tracking a watermark, sometimes skipping across the city blocks and the tidepools, each a universe with its own velocities. It requires competence enough to navigate the everyday uncanniness of these places; only true artists can chart <\/em>them.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The self-described poet of displacement was herself a displaced poet, through a combination of circumstance and choice. By most metrics, Clampitt did not have the luxury of a single, \u201ctrue\u201d home. But given her homelessness, she had made prudent arrangements. Maine and New York City are places of, by, and for the displaced. That is not all they are, nor are they destined to remain that way. Paradoxically, the quality of their hospitality, and of those they welcome, is in direct proportion to the piety paid to their older populations. Lose the latter, lose it all. It is a precarious situation; Americans have a bad record of honoring elders and natives.<\/p>\n

It is 2020. I revisit the student\u2019s introduction, trying on another synonym:<\/p>\n

\u00a0 Her words are so\u2026urgent.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0I could go with that one. Given the quantity and quality of the problems we face one hundred years after Clampitt\u2019s birth, this feels like a time when we need urgency expressed in art. I also understand the urgency of the artistic vocation itself. In the mad scramble of social media branding and influencer culture, the spoils seem to go to the person with the best hustle. Get while the getting is good: think, write, and publish (are they the same?) at the frenetic, character-per-second tempo of a live feed\u2014the tempo, we are told, of the young. Otherwise, someone else will say it better, louder, faster. It is the old irony of the American ethic of scarcity: during those epochs when the technocrats claim to have liberated us from the limitations of time and space, we operate as if there is no time, no space\u2014no outlet, not a moment to spare, no sanctuary.<\/p>\n

“Given the quantity and quality of the problems we face one hundred years after Clampitt\u2019s birth, this feels like a time when we need urgency expressed in art…”<\/h3>\n

It is tremendously difficult to keep these forms of urgency separate, but their entanglement causes us major problems. Patience is not always a virtue, but ultimately patience may be all we have to navigate these waters, for the simple fact that time is not ours. All we have is the watch, the charting of every migratory pattern, including our own. When Clampitt describes Ernest Woodward\u2019s vigilance for the hummingbird in \u201cWhat the Light Was Like,\u201d she is both the lobsterman and the seasonal bird, the crosser and the dweller: \u201cHe kept an eye out \/\/ for it, we learned one evening, as for everything that flapped \/ or hopped or hovered \/ crepuscular under the firs [\u2026]: \u201d<\/p>\n

I am looking at a picture of Amy Clampitt. It is 1942. She would have been fresh out of Grinnell, about the age of the undergraduate at the poetry reading. She is seated in Riverside Park in New York\u2014judging by the buildings behind her, just a few blocks from my city apartment. In most of her photos she has a gleeful, wide-eyed grin, but this young Clampitt\u2014seated, arms across her knees\u2014looks a little troubled as she gazes down a grassy hill. She is looking away from Columbia, toward the Hudson, back toward Iowa. This young woman has gone east. As she ages will proceed eastward, slowly, against the American current, with the motions of the clouds, toward the dawnland.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Ryan Harper is a faculty fellow in Colby College\u2019s Department of Religious Studies, where he teaches courses on American spirituality, the arts, and the environment.\u00a0 He is the author of The Gaithers and Southern Gospel: Homecoming in the Twenty First Century (University Press of Mississippi, 2017) and My Beloved Had a Vineyard, winner of the 2017 Prize Americana in poetry (Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2018).\u00a0 Some of his recent poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review, LETTERS, Jelly Bucket, La Presa, Cimarron Review, Chattahoochee Review, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere.<\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ryan Harper Faculty Fellow, Department of Religious Studies, Colby College   \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Evening has arrived. I am attending a poetry reading sponsored by the English Department at Colby College. Per departmental tradition, a creative writing undergraduate student introduces our guest poet. 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