PUTNEY — Next Stage Arts Project will present two of America's finest contemporary poets, Victoria Redel and Sydney Lea, Poet Laureate of Vermont, on Saturday, Nov. 10, at 7:30 p.m.
Following their readings, there will be a question-and-answer period, and both artists will be available to meet and sign copies of their work.
Born in New York, Redel is a first generation American of Belgian, Rumanian, Egyptian, and Russian descent. She is the author of three books of poetry and three books of fiction. Her most recent book of poetry, Woman Without Umbrella, has just been released.
Her novel, Loverboy, was awarded the 2001 S. Mariella Gable Novel Award and the 2002 Forward Silver Literary Fiction Prize and was chosen in 2001 as a Los Angeles Times Best Book. It was also adapted into a feature film directed by Kevin Bacon. Redel is on the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College and taught in the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia University.
Lea lives in Newbury, and is active both in literacy efforts and in conservation. Lea founded New England Review in 1977, which he edited until 1989. He has published 10 volumes of poetry, and his most recent collection of poems is Six Sundays Toward a Seventh: Selected Spiritual Poems.
Later this year, the University of Michigan Press will issue A Hundred Himalayas, a sampling from his critical work over four decades.
Of his nine previous poetry collections, Pursuit of a Wound was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The preceding volume, To the Bone: New and Selected Poems, was co-winner of the 1998 Poets' Prize.
Lea has received fellowships from the Rockefeller, Fulbright, and Guggenheim Foundations. He has taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Wesleyan, Vermont and Middlebury Colleges, as well as at Franklin College in Switzerland and the National Hungarian University in Budapest.
“Syd was my creative writing teacher at Dartmouth many years ago,” Redel said. Through the years they have kept in touch, and a teacher/student relationship has developed into a real friendship.
If Lea was Redel's first creative writing teacher, she was also one of his students in his first creative writing class.
“I was not a published writer when I taught Victoria,” he said. “My first book of poetry was not published until I was 40.”
Teaching and writing
He had put aside his early ventures in poetry to pursue his academic career because he worried about finding a future in verse. He says that his writing course with Redel became his entry back into his main love, poetry. In those days, Dartmouth had a more casual attitude towards teaching creative writing, and he was assigned creative writing even though he had no credentials because then it was considered “not a real course.”
“That course rekindled my interest in writing poetry,” he said, “after which I steadily and diligently pursued my own writing.” He said he still writes long hours every day adding, “Writing is a habit I can't cure.”
Lea suspected his decision to focus on poetry would make his future at the Ivy League college somewhat dicey. “A book of poetry was not good for tenure at Dartmouth in those days,” he said. Indeed, he did not get tenure. Nonetheless, he trusted his new path in life, believing that something would turn up.
It shortly did, when he got an appointment to teach writing at Middlebury College in Vermont.
He said he has found the teaching of writing to be a fulfilling companion vocation to writing itself. Coincidentally, years after teaching Redel, he found himself teaching her daughter, whom he said he finds “very talented.”
“But talk about making one feeling that he is aging,” he added with a laugh.
Redel, too, has found teaching enjoyable, although she, like all serious writers, complains how it keeps her from her own work. “I like to watch my students change and grow and do something,” she said. “My goal is to make writers into good readers, and readers into good writers.”
In her own writing her goal is to make something commonplace interesting or try to say something new. “I want to try out the out-of-place,” she said. “I like to surprise. I want to feel as if what I write has jeopardy, will even challenge my own assumptions, in hopes to reveal something surprising and truthful.”
Vermont writer Grace Paley was one her inspirations. “She was a writer who made a strong stab at living in the world. She made it seem possible all the things that I do.”
“Like Paley I write about daily ordinary things but in a new way,” she added. “Recently, I have been writing about what it is like to be middle aged: how to manage things like marriage, divorce, family, and death. I don't want to make this sound as if everything I consider is negative. I also write about what is hopeful and for what we can aspire.”
Right now, one thing to which Lea aspires is to take his role as Poet Laureate of Vermont quite seriously.
“I plan to visit all the community libraries in Vermont,” he said. In the year since he became Poet Laureate, he has already visited more than 50 Vermont libraries. Although there are no definite duties for this position - “You can do nothing at all,” he said - Lea is using his appointment as a chance to get to know a different sort of audience after 45 years working in a college environment.
He finds his new audience to be literate and bright. He said, “They may not have the the trained vocabulary of the academy, but I find that refreshing.”
Redel and Lea both write prose as well as poetry, which is a relatively rare phenomenon these days. Both have written novels, and Redel has collections of short stories and Lea volumes of his essays.
“It is unusual for today's poets to write write fiction or fiction writers poetry,” said Redel. “In the past it was quite common. Writers as diverse as Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, and Joyce wrote volumes both of verse and fiction.”
Although at the reading this Saturday Redel and Lea will be reading solely from their poetry, each refuses to limit his or her expression to one genre. In fact, sometimes their work morphs from one to another.
“I send in short stories to journals,” said Redel, “and the editors think I am submitting a poem.”
“The format chooses me,” said Lea, “In my book, North Country Life, some of the essays could be called poems that would not behave.”