Poem: Frank Bidart

This week the university is holding its annual Writers' Festival, which this year commemorates the 30th anniversary of the undergraduate writing major program. As part of the festival, three major figures in their respective fields--poet Frank Bidart, fiction writer George Saunders, and creative nonfiction writer Jo Ann Beard--are in residence, holding master classes, conferences with senior undergraduate writers, and giving readings. The weeklong celebration will conclude with a reading by program alumni, including highly regarded writers Dan Chaon, Joshua Weiner, and Cristina Henríquez.

This morning Bidart (1939-) led a master class in which he read his famous poem "Ellen West," from The Book of the Body (1980), and spoke about his process of coming to understand how to write a longer work in verse. My first introduction to Bidart was during my college years when I read "The War of Vaslav Nijinsky" in The Paris Review, sparked in part by curiousness and by the general trend, among some of my friends, of seeking out what the various journals were publishing, as I too was on the board of one of the college literary journals, and I was struck dumb. I had never seen a poem like this. It seemed so new, so strange, with its alternating voices, one of which was clearly Nijinsky's, another his wife's, another impersonal diary entries concerning his hospitalization and commitment, its prose sections, its intensity of feeling, signified by the capitalizations and punctuation, its abruptions--; it looked and read like little else I'd seen at the time. On the basis of this poem alone I became an enthusiast. Some years later I found a copy of his second book, The Book of the Body (FSG, 1977), at the Avenue Victor Hugo bookstore, and what I had suspected, that this was a poet of great significance. Bidart has gone on to publish a handful more of his slender volumes, including In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965-1990 (1990), which gathered  the volumes up to that point, as well as newer work, Desire (1997), Star Dust (2005), and Watching the Spring Festival (2008). One of Robert Lowell's former students, Bidart co-edited with David Gewanter The Collected Poems of Robert Lowell (Faber, London, 2002).