Poetry of the highest order

Poetry of the highest order: 'Star Dust,' by Wellesley professor Frank Bidart, nominated for National Book
By Chris Bergeron / Daily News Staff
Sunday, November 6, 2005

As his poetry students took their seats, professor Frank Bidart twisted open a bottle of Sprite joking, "Every time I do this there's been an explosion."

     He then guided the class at Wellesley College through two hours of quiet detonations that revealed poetry's power to express emotion with honest exactitude.

     Part anatomist, part alchemist, Bidart helped students dissect their poems. Then he showed them how to breathe life into them.

     Together they carved them open to probe the viscera of rhythm and imagery.

He mediated a brief debate on the difference between "toward" and "towards." He praised the "impressive authority" of one student's language and asked another to consider cutting her first stanza.

     For more than 30 years, Bidart has transformed words, pauses, punctuation and the unspoken into revelatory poetry that's earned him a national reputation and his students' respect.

     "A poem is a place where experience of the outside world and inner life can find embodiment and expression," he said recently. "A poem can be a puzzle, a verbal construction. If it's good, a poem is animated by an emotion or thought that matters."

     Bidart's sixth and newest volume of poems, "Star Dust," has been nominated for a National Book Award, once more placing him among the nation's most influential poets. The other finalists for the prestigious award, which will be announced Nov. 18 and carries a $10,000 prize, are John Ashbery, Brendan Galvin, W.S. Merwin and Vern Rutsala.

     Nominating Bidart, the judges wrote: ''Star Dust' conveys us into the art and hell of creative imagination...The poems are fearlessly elegant and dark, -- violence, longing, will and sweetness their province. They tell us our secrets, and they could not be more brilliantly made."

     After the announcement, Bidart carefully called "Star Dust" "the fullest exploration of a subject I've managed."

     "Personally, I have to say I think it's my best book, not to repudiate my earlier works. I think the central concern of the book is 'making.' We all have the impulse to make things. You can't make things without unmaking," he said. "I hope my poems pursue that very human concern in ways that are alive and not pious by seeing a relationship between making and destruction. I hope it pursues it in ways that are not predictable."

In earlier works like "In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90" and "Desire," Bidart solidified his reputation for crafting a unique voice and vision. "Desire" was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1997. In 2003 Bidart coedited Robert Lowell's "Collected Poems" with David Gewanter.

     Bidart has earned numerous literary awards including the Wallace Stevens Award, the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Foundation Writers Award, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America. David Daniels, poetry editor of Ploughshares magazine, described Bidart as an inspiring innovator, "unique in his exploration of American culture."

     "His work is something wholly new. He's basically taken the confessional form of Robert Lowell another step to take on the larger aspects of our culture. He has brilliance and depth and writes of difficult things in ways that are accessible," he said.

     Poet and teacher H.L. Hix called Bidart "clearly a major figure" among American poets.

     "Frank Bidart's poetry has a gravity and serious ambition that makes it simultaneously accessible to a broad audience and very challenging," said Hix, who directs the creative writing program at the University of Wyoming. "His poetry enters into the lives and experiences of other people."

     He believes Bidart's precise language and courageous honesty have carried his art beyond earlier exemplars of "confessional" poetry like Lowell and Sylvia Plath.

     "It's as if his pain threshold and honesty lead to an intensity of language that fulfills the poetic ideal of making every word count," he said. "The thing I'd emphasize is his willingness to look at things unflinchingly."



Bidart's students welcome the chance to study with a rigorous craftsman who creates a supportive atmosphere for young poets.

     Senior Lindsey Boylan said Bidart "makes it clear the heart of a poem is the emotion you're trying to express."

     "Professor Bidart becomes another student in the class, not just a living presence," said the political science major from Fairfax, Va. "I was surprised you could take poetry apart and in the end feel energized and not afraid to read it."





     During a recent class, Bidart led 14 students through close readings of student Diane Slutzky's wry elliptical poems about travel, courtship and "Peeing in the Bushes." Together, they compared revisions that incorporated subtle changes in the poem's cadence or structure.

     In a poem initially titled "Traveling," two tourists in an uncertain relationship observe "a Blonde, pale/ Australian" with a mixture of longing and erotic tension.

     Bidart stressed the importance of making every word count as the poem's "images and dynamics" accrued an internal tension that carried readers along. "I like the center of the poem, the tension between the 'I' and 'you,'" he said.

     Bidart elicited students' thoughts and never shoehorned a poem into a singular interpretation. Yet he made his preferences clear telling Slutzky he liked her revised titled "Border Crossing" because it captured the changing relationship at the heart of the poem.

     Senior Jennifer Rowell said Bidart "creates a comfortable environment" that encourages respectful criticism.

     "Sitting in a circle is conducive for the process. Everyone is going to have their poem read. Everyone is getting feedback," said the English and Spanish major from Medford. "If you're honest, hopefully you'll have the same honesty given back when you read your work."

     Rowell said Bidart never pressures students to mold their poems into one style but encourages them to discover their own voices.

     "I think (Bidart) is very open to different styles and has the ability to steer his students in the right direction," she said. "We all come from different places. He's taught us to search a voice we can recognize as very distinct."

As a poet and teacher, Frank Bidart has devoted much of his life to finding that voice.

     Growing up in Bakersfield, Calif., he listed to his mother read Omar Khayyam's "The Rubaiyat" and was drawn to "the magical combination of image and rhythm and very eloquent sound."

     After writing "terrible" poetry in his early teens, Bidart went on to study English and poetry at the University of California at Riverside.

     Looking back, he said he began studying poetry in the midst of a "great revolution" wrought by modernist poets who forged new ways of making a poem.





     Since the turn of the 20th century, innovators like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot had swept aside traditional notions of rhyme and meter to show "any kind of speech can be a poem," he said.

     Bidart immersed himself in writers like William Carlos Williams and Robert Lowell who utterly changed the shape and substance of modern poetry.

     "A poem was a place the most serious and disparate elements could come together," Bidart said. "They offered the idea that rather than just lyricism, a poem could bring together slang and philosophical language."

     After graduation, he came to Wellesley in 1972 to teach English, including composition, literature and poetry.

     As his national reputation grew, Bidart concentrated on teaching poetry and the art of writing poetry.

     He cited Lowell, Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop and Allen Ginsberg as influences. Asked for contemporary favorites, he named Louise Gluck, Robert Pinsky, Henri Cole and Wellesley College colleague Dan Chiasson.

     Even teaching familiar poets, Bidart said, leads to fresh discoveries to share with students.

     "I love teaching. Every time I teach a poem I think I know as a teacher, I'm constantly thinking how poems are made. It feeds into the classroom," he said.

     A Cambridge resident, Bidart said his poems often begin when a phrase or the germ of an idea piques his mind. After scribbling a note to himself, he realizes, "There's a moment when you think the rest of a poem is in there."

"I often find a phrase that tells me something about how this poem has to move. Each poem has to have a pulse of its own," he said.

     Bidart can spend months, even years, shaping and revising a poem until he's satisfied.

     He compared the spare, exacting language of his current poems to a "container" that gives form to thoughts and feelings springing from the core of his being. "You take whatever you've written and try to focus it, improve it, burn away things that are not right and reveal its spine," Bidart said.

     After three decades teaching and writing, Bidart hopes to share with students his deeply felt conviction "poems should be associated with pleasure."

     "For too many people, poetry is associated with the anxiety of writing about a poet. A poem can be thrilling if read aloud," he said. "Not only do we read a poem, a poem reads us."

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