New Books by Campus Poets Published

Two Skidmore alums who share a professional interest in literature as editors of Salmagundi will mark this April’s celebration of National Poetry Month with the publication of their first books of poetry.

Peg Boyers, a 1975 graduate who is executive editor of Salmagundi, has written Hard Bread (University of Chicago Press, April 2002), a collection of poems “spoken” in the imagined voice of the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991). Much of the book is based on Ginzburg’s life — her upbringing in Turin, her brief marriage to the resistance activist Leone Ginzburg, her experience of Fascism and war, her work as a novelist, playwright, editor, and newspaper columnist — and much of the book is invented.

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky praised Boyers’s originality and wrote, “within a few pages it’s clear that this is true poetry, giving voice with unforgettable specificity to the woe, comedy, and heroism of a 20th-century life.”

Although poetry is a relatively new pursuit for Boyers, Ginzburg has been a long-standing interest. “I had gone to school in Italy and had studied Italian while attending Skidmore. Ginzburg is a standard in the curriculum of Italian readers. I read her essays, fiction, and plays, and translated a few of them for publication in Salmagundi,” she explained.

She interviewed Ginzburg for a special issue of Salmagundi and wrote a long essay on her for the magazine. Says Boyers, “She wrote everything but poems -- and I wrote the poems for her.”

Over a period of about four years, the poems “dictated themselves” to Boyers. “I had a sense of what in her life I wanted to address. The last poem — the one about my interview with her — is the only poem in the book in my own voice. When that was completed, I knew I was done.”

Boyers studied aspects of Ginzburg’s life to give resonance to the poetry, as in the case of “Ode to Ernest,” one of the entries in her book. Ginzburg was Ernest Hemmingway’s editor in Italy, according to Boyers, who concludes that the American writer was an important person in Ginzburg’s life. “She must have had something to say to him,” she asserts. To realistically depict that relationship, Boyers researched Hemmingway’s time in Italy and then imagined what the relationship between author and editor must have been. The result is “Ode to Ernest.”

In Boyers’s view, Ginzburg provided literary “tough love,” a theme echoed in the title of her poetry collection. “I wanted a strong image for the title,” Boyers explained, “something that was nourishing,” but not easily absorbed.

Boyers has worked on her poetry over the years as a student of Frank Bidart in the New York State Summer Writers Institute. “I am a complete addict of his master class and can’t imagine giving it up,” she says. Over time, a group of women has returned each year to the class, where they draw on the knowledge of their teacher and provide support to each other. “They’re a group of really smart, honest readers,” explains Boyers -- not unlike Natalia Ginzburg herself.

Woodworth’s Collection

Arcade is the title of a poetry collection by associate Salmagundi editor Marc Woodworth, a 1984 Skidmore graduate who is an English Department lecturer. Published by Grove Press, the premier publisher of poetry in the U.S., the book is available this month.

The debut collection contains writing that is both narrative and lyric, love poem and elegy. The opening sequence, titled “The City,” is set in an unnamed and compellingly imagined continental metropolis between the world wars. Early poems in the sequence were featured in The Paris Review’s new-writers issue. In other poems, Woodworth enters the grieving mind of Sophia Tolstoy as she mourns at her husband’s grave and depicts the mythical German filmmaker Herr Soma’s strangely generative breakdown before the making of his best film.

In his “Foreword,” Summer Writers Institute faculty member Richard Howard cited Woodworth’s eloquence, noting, “For him...the significance of an event is not to be found within it, as within a nutshell, but without, enveloping the language which has generated it, as a light generates a vapor.”

Poetry, Woodworth points out, meets his need for compatibility in the sound and the texture of his language. His inspiration comes from artists and writers to whom he feels a connection. “The City” is based on some woodcuts of Berlin and Paris created by Frans Magereel between the world wars. Says Woodworth, “After visiting Berlin I gained a greater understanding of the place and realized how evocative the images were.”

He, too, writes poems in the voices of other people, primarily artists. “One way of finding my way into being a writer is looking at the world through accomplished writing. It’s as if I’m linking to a literary continuum,” explained Woodworth. The ability to communicate through another artist’s voice is evident in Woodworth’s first book, Solo: Women Singer-Songwriters in Their Own Words (Dell, 1998). Woodworth and Emma Dodge Hanson ’93 collaborated on the volume, which featured his essays and her photographs. In that book, “I was trying to write their stories in their own voices. That book was not about me,” he says.

Woodworth feels fortunate to have benefited from the wisdom of teachers like Richard Howard, the award-winning poet who has long been a member of the Summer Writers Institute faculty. As editor of The Paris Review, Howard was the first to publish some of the poems from Arcade. Woodworth acknowledges, “Richard really helped me. He is such a champion for young writers — and so generous. His encouragement was very important to me. When someone with the literary intelligence of Richard Howard thinks your work is OK, it’s very empowering.”

Woodworth’s first poetry teacher was Skidmore Professor Barry Goldensohn. “I learned a lot from him,” says Woodworth. “Whenever I read a poem that I first learned in his class, I still hear his voice. He becomes the sound of the poem for me.”

Area poetry fans will soon have two opportunities to hear Woodworth talk about his writing. He has taped an interview with Paul Elisha of WAMC-FM, scheduled to air soon during the station’s Roundtable program. And on March 20, Woodworth will share his poetry in a public reading beginning at 8 p.m. in the Surrey. For Woodworth, the former student who now teaches, the reading is rite of passage. “It will be a big event for me, having my former teachers in the audience along with my current students,” he reflected. “You always think of yourself as a student, always learning.”

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