Amherst Reads About the Author

Born in Burlington, Vermont, 1971. 

Current home:
Wellesley, MA.  

I chose to come to Amherst because of the intervention of a great high school teacher, Robert Brown '71, who introduced our class to difficult, ambitious, thrilling Modern poetry. He steered me towards his alma mater.

 

Most  memorable or most influential class at Amherst:
Too many to name. A junior seminar on literary criticism with Bill Pritchard; a special topics course with Nicola Courtright on modern architecture; Beginning Greek with Rick Griffiths.

 

I was also part of a small lunch group that visited Henry Steele Commager at his majestic pillared house every week, where his cook made astonishing lunches like boulliabaise. Not a "class" but amazing nonetheless.

 

I am the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

 

Favorite Book:
Fascicle 34 by Emily Dickinson or The Education of Henry Adams.

 

Jamaica Kincaid or Lydia Davis

 

Learn to cook for yourself, or, if necessary, for others.

 

I got a taste for American poetry from a PBS series, Voices and Visions, which was broadcast on my local PBS channel in the eighties. Each episode profiled a different poet: T.S. Eliot was the first I saw. I rifled through our TV Guide to find when the next episode would air, then reserve our TV from my grandparents, who liked to watch shows like Across the Fence, a local Burlington show on WCAX which was about canning and sugaring and things of that nature, a kind of televised almanac; or, often, Lawrence Welk.

 

I was a sophomore in high school. I would walk from our house to the Bailey-Howe Library at the University of Vermont and sit in the stacks reading more deeply in the author whose episode I'd just taken in. Most of my exposure to poetry came from the stacks at Bailey-Howe, or from my wonderful high school teacher, Mr. Brown.

 

Soon enough the language of poetry was one I wanted to speak; I'd been addressed in it for so long, I felt I knew it, and had something to add.