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<\/a>Plutzik as a professor at the University of Rochester, around 1950. This photo was taken by one of his students.<\/p><\/div><\/a>The conclusion of Hyam Plutzik\u2019s 1962 poem, Horatio<\/em>, provide an apt commentary on Plutzik\u2019s own unobtrusive presence in the world of American letters:<\/p>\n \nA great stag came out of the woods, The seismic shifts in American culture since 1960 have made footing precarious indeed for those broad-antlered poets who wrote in a hieratic and philosophic diction. Eschewing the more vernacular excursions of the Beats or the confessional poets of the 1970s, Plutzik published three full collections of poems, the last, Horatio<\/em>, an eighty-nine-page dramatic poem in which Hamlet\u2019s friend grapples with the charge to \u201creport me and my cause aright.\u201d <\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n \n \nWe will never know what Plutzik might have yet written had he lived longer, but those who know his work agree that a significant literary voice was prematurely silenced. When Plutzik\u2019s Collected Poems<\/em><\/a> was published in 1987, Ted Hughes wrote of how Plutzik had \u201cengag[ed] the modern world as a stripped soul\u2014with a point-blank, wholehearted simplicity of voice. His visions are authentic and piercing, and the song in them is strange\u2014dense and harrowing, with unforgettable tones. The best of his work seems to me marvelously achieved, a sacred book.\u201d<\/p>\n \nHyam Plutzik was born in Brooklyn to recent immigrants from Belarus who soon moved to a farm near Bristol, Connecticut, and for much of his childhood spoke only Yiddish, Russian, and Hebrew at home. Plutzik attended Trinity College in Hartford, where his mentor, Odell Shepard, had himself won a Pulitzer in 1938 for his biography of Bronson Alcott, finishing his studies at Yale University. Plutzik twice won Yale\u2019s highest award for poetry (then called the Cooke Prize), the only person to have done so: first in 1933 for \u201cThe Three\u201d and next in 1941 for \u201cDeath at the Purple Rim.\u201d Hyam Plutzik as a student at Trinity College around 1930.<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n \nThe long narrative poem \u201cDeath at the Purple Rim\u201d was penned during a year-long \u201cThoreauvian existence\u201d in the Connecticut countryside in 1937. The poem took form when Plutzik identified an intruder on his paradisiacal turf: an aggravating woodchuck that came to be his nemesis. As Plutzik wrote to Odell Shepard in 1941, \u201cThere was a sort of agony in his desire, and I suppose I was not being too sententious when I saw in this brutish creature the kin and symbol of mankind, bestial in form but aspiring to heaven \u2026 Yet it was inevitable that I should kill this beast, and so it happened.\u201d <\/p>\n \nThough he was then still in his twenties, Plutzik was already displaying one of the attributes that would characterize his oeuvre, a sense of life at the quick: \u201cthe tension of Being in all things\u201d (from his poem \u201cEntropy\u201d) or \u201cthe long lank shadow pacing under the meadow\u201d (from \u201cAbner Bellow\u201d). Anthony Hecht saw \u201cPurple Rim\u201d as \u201ca rather wonderful tour de force, deliberately cast in a high, nineteenth-century diction, and a lush, expansive blank verse such as Tennyson was the master of.\u201d<\/p>\n \nUnlike some other poets of the postwar years, Plutzik chose the life of a suburban family man far from the raucous haunts of Greenwich Village or San Francisco. As one of the first Jewish faculty members in a major American university, he was acutely aware of the currents eddying through American academe during the cold-war era. To Plutzik, issues of cultural identity and intellectual authenticity were paramount, even if his poetry rarely commented on current events\u2014exceptions being \u201cHiroshima\u201d and \u201cFor T.S.E. Only,\u201d in which he invited dialogue with T. S. Eliot over the latter\u2019s blatant anti-Semitism (\u201ccome, Thomas, let us weep together for our exile\u201d). Writing against the backdrop of the cold-war era, Plutzik emerged, in the words of Edward Brunner, as a poet \u201cfighting to be heard, keeping alive the concept of high public communication in poetry.\u201d <\/p>\n \nWriting in 2002<\/a>, critic Eric Ormsby describes the cultural factors that led to the poet\u2019s \u201cre-entering the dark\u201d after the publication of Horatio. \u201cTake the case of the late Hyam Plutzik,\u201d he wrote, \u201ca marvelous poet whom Ted Hughes and others championed. He tried to recreate a credible Shakespearean voice in American verse but his success doomed his verse to obscurity.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2011 and 2012, Plutzik is reemerging onto the field. Last July would have been Plutzik\u2019s one hundredth birthday, and 2012 is the fiftieth year of the Plutzik Reading Series<\/a> established in his memory at the University of Rochester. Wesleyan\u2019s new edition of Apples from Shinar<\/em> is one of a series of projects aimed at celebrating these occasions and bringing Plutzik\u2019s work to new readers, in venues as varied as the University of Rochester and The Betsy Hotel <\/a>in Miami Beach, now a literary destination whose programs feature prominent contemporary poets and scholars which, since 2010, has hosted the annual symposium of the Society for Jewish American and Holocaust Literature. <\/p>\n Not only an accomplished poet, Plutzik was revered among students as a teacher at Rochester. One of his students, Arnulf Zweig (Class of 1952), wrote, \u201cHis honest, accurate criticism taught me more, as a future teacher and scholar, than any applause would have done.\u201d And students there today are encountering his work in interesting ways. The University of Rochester\u2019s Rush Rhees Library Department of Special Collections houses the archive of Hyam Plutzik\u2019s papers, which were showcased last October in a pair of exhibitions titled \u201cHyam Plutzik: Poet\u201d and \u201cRochester Students Read Plutzik,\u201d engaging students in critical conversations around the poet\u2019s manuscripts and finished works. <\/p>\n While teaching at UR, Plutzik organized frequent readings for students and community members, creating a tradition which is continued to this day in the Plutzik Reading Series. Currently in its 50th year, the Plutzik Series is the longest-running of its kind in the U.S.<\/p><\/div>In homage to what the University of Rochester is calling the 50\/100 (recognizing milestones for both the poetry series and the poet), Nigel Maister, artistic director of the UR International Theatre Program, presented a dramatic reading of Horatio<\/em> on March 26. The rapt audience included Al Kremer, seventy-five, who recalled his experience of listening to Plutzik read from Horatio<\/em> in that very same room, in 1960. \u201cHoratio<\/em> hadn\u2019t yet been published; he was reading it from his manuscript,\u201d Kremer writes. \u201cIt was unforgettable \u2026 He had repeatedly said, and rightly so, poetry was a form of music and only truly appreciated when read out loud.\u201d <\/p>\n \nPlutzik\u2019s belief in the power and necessity of oral poetry inspired the regular readings on campus that are continued to this day in the Plutzik Reading Series, which, at fifty years, is the longest-running collegiate reading series in the country. Its roster of nearly three hundred past readers includes four Nobel laureates, thirty-six winners of the Pulitzer prizes for poetry and fiction, and twenty-two former U.S. Poets Laureates. This centennial year has seen a superb schedule of readers, including U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine. Plutzik\u2019s work is also increasingly available to a twenty-first-century readership on the Web. The newly renovated Web site hyamplutzikpoetry.com<\/a> includes all of Plutzik\u2019s published works and a schedule of events for the Hyam Plutzik Centennial, which continues until December 31, 2012. <\/p>\n\n
\nBroad-antlered, approaching slowly on the moonlit field,
\nAnd looked about him like a king and re-entered the dark. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/a>Louis Untermeyer and Stanley Kunitz served as the jurors for the 1962 Pulitzer, which went to Alan Dugan. In their report, Untermeyer wrote of Horatio <\/em>as a \u201cfascinating puzzle\u201d and a \u201cbook not to be disposed of lightly,\u201d one that is \u201cprimarily a tour de force.\u201d With the 2009 publication, in Germany, of Heinz-Dietrich Fischer\u2019s Chronicle of the Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry<\/em>, we have now learned that Plutzik\u2019s earlier collections had also been shortlisted for the prestigious award. In 1950, though the Pulitzer went to Gwendolyn Brooks, Henry Seidel Canby wrote in his confidential report on behalf of that year\u2019s nominating committee (which consisted of himself, Untermeyer, and Alfred Kreymborg) that Plutzik’s Aspects of Proteus<\/em><\/a> was among seven runners-up, \u201call of them of high competence, and all deserving great praise.\u201d Ten years later, Kreymborg wrote in his report for the 1960 prize (awarded to W. D. Snodgrass) that \u201cwe have another original in Hyam Plutzik[\u2019s] Apples from Shinar.<\/em><\/a>\u201d Kreymbourg added, \u201cWhile he is not a musical poet like most of his contemporaries he more than compensates by the strength and depth of his writing and the power of his visions and personality.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a>Thus, Plutzik seems to have been on his way to a firmer place on \u201cthe moonlit field\u201d of American poetry when he died at the age of fifty, on January 8, 1962. Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn included him in their anthology Five American Poets<\/em><\/a>, introducing him to British readers alongside Howard Nemerov, Edgar Bowers, Louis Simpson, and William Stafford. More recently, he is praised in interviews given by Grace Schulman, Galway Kinnell, Hayden Carruth, Donald Hall, and Stanley Kunitz in the 2007 documentary Hyam Plutzik: American Poet<\/em><\/a>. Though the two never met in person, Hall came to know and admire Plutzik\u2019s work in his role as poetry editor of The Paris Review<\/em> and as a member of the editorial board of Wesleyan University Press. Wesleyan published Plutzik\u2019s Apples from Shinar<\/em><\/a> as one of the first titles in its acclaimed Poetry Series in 1959 and reissued the book in a centenary edition in October 2011. In a new afterword, Shakespeare scholar David Scott Kastan declares, \u201cIn the 1950s Plutzik was clearly recognized as among the generation of poets claiming the mantle of Frost and Jeffers, Stevens and MacLeish.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>