N.H. laureates converge in Concord

As the evening sky goes azure, a few sparse snowflakes swirl down and a late January cold settles over the Capitol City. This evening, Jan. 22, more than 450 people file into the Concord Auditorium to share the evening with poets Charles Simic, Donald Hall and Maxine Kumin. In New Hampshire, we are blessed with three living U.S. poets laureate. Simic, Hall and Kumin offer a collective 220 years of wisdom, poetry and tutelage. They have authored shelves of books between them, full of extraordinary language, deft metaphors, crystalline images and humor that is dark, innocent and ironical. Hundreds of thousands of readers in multiple languages have sighed, sulked, swooned and maybe even snoozed their way through all those pages of poetry.

Tonight we’re celebrating the fact that New Hampshire has sent these three poets to serve the Library of Congress. The three file in and take the stage, obviously fond of each other, passing around water, getting each other settled, sharing a whispered word or two. They share much in common besides their lifelong apprenticeship to wordsmithing. They’ve collectively won a string of awards: Pulitzers, a MacArthur genius grant, a National Book Critics Circle Award and countless others. The all live rurally and are transplanted Granite-Staters. And, all have survived against remarkable odds.

The evening was conceived by Mike Pride, editor of the Concord Monitor, and Barbara Yoder, outgoing director of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project. When Yoder called Pride to ask about collaborative possibilities, he suggested, instead, that NHWP be the beneficiary of the evening’s proceeds—not a hard sell for Yoder. Pride shared with the audience that he wasn’t sure who would turn up for the reading, but his “fear of empty seats was at least as intense as the fear of an empty page.” His comment is both poetic and a bit cagey, since his publication had dedicated a special section to the poets’ work in the issue of the preceding Thursday, complete with selected readings from all three. The Monitor also sponsored a similar Concord Reads Donald Hall event in 2004.

Our three poets have each served the research branch of the United States government, embodied in the world’s largest library. The Library of Congress has collected poetry in a concerted way since 1937. The national position was originally created as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress and was renamed Poet Laureate in 1986. Only New York City has New Hampshire beat for sending poets to the post. We began in 1958 with Robert Frost, New Hampshire’s favorite son (though others claim him). Dartmouth’s Richard Eberhart followed close at Frost’s heels from 1959 to 1961. Maxine Kumin carried the torch 20 years later, in 1981. Donald Hall took the mantle in 2006 and Charles Simic follows this year, setting up another back-to-back transfer of New Hampshire poetic power.

New Hampshire is a small state, so the words and deeds of these three living laureates have a broad reach. Mike Pride introduced the evening by marveling that we have such riches within 30 miles of the very seats we’d taken, and he remarked with a tone of Yankee satisfaction that all three had come to “read for free!” Simic has probably touched the most young New Hampshire poets, with a teaching career of 34 years at the University of New Hampshire. He’d barely retired before the LOC came calling. Kumin taught for years at Tufts University, with guest stints at Columbia, Princeton, Brandeis and MIT. She recently returned to teaching in New Hampshire, in New England College’s low-residency graduate poetry seminar. Hall ended his academic career proper in 1975, when he moved, with poet wife Jane Kenyon, to his grandfather’s Eagle Pond Farm in Wilmot. However, his textbooks, readings, collected essays and last year’s laureateship have continued his prolonged contact with students. Hall endowed the yearly Eagle Pond Poetry series at Plymouth State University, a forum within which Kumin and Simic have been included with regularity. Most of Hall’s papers reside in UNH’s Milne Special Collections in Dimond Library. Simic has made a similar donation.

Kumin leads off this evening. Her voice is strong, her presence equally so. She wears a powder-blue silk Nehru jacket and looks regal, despite—or perhaps because of—her 82 years. Her bearing is upright, the result of surgeries and time in a borrowed exoskeleton she wore for almost a year. The poet was almost killed 10 years ago when she became entangled in the tack of a spooked horse and was dragged. Her survival was not just metaphoric. She chronicles her healing in an amazing memoir called “Inside the Halo and Beyond,” the halo being the stainless steel contraption that kept her head stationary as her spine healed. She was sustained by her love of the world, her horses and her husband, Vincent. Her poem “January 25,” with its extreme temperature drop, is evening-perfect, intoning:

“My love, we live at such extremes
that when, in the leftover spite of the
     storm,
we touch and grow warm
I can believe I saw
the ground release
that brown and orange commonplace
sign of thaw.

Now daylight the color of buttermilk
tunnels through the coated glass.
Lie still; lie close.
Watch the sun pick
splinters from the window flowers.”

The audience is silent as frost paints the window and Kumin paints the sunlight that picks the flowers. Common in the presence of a well-read poem, there’s a collective sigh in the audience at this chance to hold the cold bouquet she’s thrown us.

Donald Hall, as he ages, looks more elfish—eyes more twinkly, wrinkles deepening, scraggly beard wagging. He’ll turn 80 in September. As Hall reads, he remains seated at a too-small table with a too-thin tablecloth. Hall shares, “I have poems after two and a half years of silence. Sixty years of daily writing failed me, and you can imagine the depression that came with that.” He’s upbeat and feeling fortunate that last year’s laureateship broke his silent spell. He’s been reading poems, writing and traveling in Russia, and tonight he reads an evolving draft of a poem filled with repetition about St. Petersburg. This raw reading is novel for Hall, who used to joke (semi-seriously) that he’d redraft a poem 30 times before he’d even share it with his wife at the breakfast table.

Hall, too, is a survivor, miraculously dodging a brush with colon cancer that metastasized onto his liver. He was given scant chances to make it another five years in the early 1990s, but he regained his strength and writing chops, only to then loose his wife to leukemia. Sustained by his writing, he published the acclaimed “Without” three years after Jane Kenyon’s death.

Hall reads another handful of poems, mostly new ones, none really identified with his signature pastoral or his more confessional “Without” voices. It’s remarkable that a poet of eight decades can call forth a new creative voice and open a new chapter. Earlier, Hall had remarked offhandedly that when he started writing again, “it was fitting and delicious to lose everything.” Although this comment is specific to the writing, it could envelop his last few decades. Tempered by experience, has our old Yankee become part bodhisattva?

Charlie Simic takes the podium in a pumpkin pie-colored sweater and his signature round glasses. He’s got a mischievous look, and says to Hall, “As I was sitting here listening I tried to think back and remembered I first heard you read in 1958. That was 50 years ago!” The audience applauds. Simic continues, “You had a suit and tie. You looked spiffy. You and Louis Simpsom … Robert Bly, suits and ties, too. They looked spiffy.” Simic pauses like the perfect linebreak. “Look at us now,” he says with a modest shrug, a big grin and a soft-sell voice. “Here we are … not so spiffy.” The audience chuckles along with the poets. Simic has historically quipped that what poetry and comedy have in common … is timing.

Pride said earlier that Simic “wages a lifelong campaign against the stupidity of war” in his work. The poet was war-chased across his native Yugoslavia, fled to France and left there for New York City and Chicago. The experience instilled in Simic an amazing faculty for languages and their nuances. He abhors euphemism and has a precise bullshit detector, an inability to suffer fools willingly and a love of metaphors.

Simic survived the WWII bombing of Belgrade as a young child. His memoirs and poems are filled with tales of playing in the wreckage. He has been tucked under coattails to be protected from witnessing atrocities. He was stashed in dark basements. He and friends caught lice from a soldier’s helmet they found and tried on for size. One night he was blown from his bed in an explosion. His friend could imitate an air raid siren, which sent neighborhood adults running and kids into fits of laughter. His 1998 collection of essays and memoirs—titled with a phrase his mother used to describe the war—is called “Orphan Factory.”

In 1999, Simic heard NATO bombs rain upon that very same neighborhood as he spoke with loved ones on the phone. Tonight he leaves all that aside. He reads to us about leaves and libraries, shadows and insomnia, an ever-present Miss Jones and a canned starshow in a two-bit planetarium. He resents—quite humorously—his universe being made too small.