Perspectives

Artist Highlight: Stanley Plumly (1939 - 2019)

Fifth and 94 ^th

 

People are standing, as if out of the rain,

holding on. For the last two blocks

the woman across the aisle has wept

quietly into her hands, the whole

of her upper body nodding, keeping time .

The bus is slow enough you can hear,

inside your head, the traffic within

traffic, like another talk.

 

Someone is leaning down, someone has touched

her shoulder. By now she has tucked

her legs up under her, grief given over.

She will not life her face.

Across the park the winter sun is perfect

behind the grillwork of the trees,

as here it is brilliant against buildings.

Above her body the thousand windows blur.



(S.P.)

Stanley Plumly was the author of numerous collections of poetry, including  In the Outer Dark  (1970), winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, and  Out-of-the-Body Travel  (1978), nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other works include  Giraffe  (1973),  Summer Celestial  (1983),  Boy on the Step  (1989),  The Marriage in the Trees  (1997), and  Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me: New and Selected Poems 1970-2000  (2000), and  Against Sunset  (2017). His collection  Old Heart  (2009) won the  Los Angeles Times  Book Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His collection,  Orphan Hours  (2013), about his own cancer diagnosis. 

Plumly was devoted to the British Romantic poets; and made Keats come alive for his students and readers. His book  Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography  (2008), was a finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Distinguished Biography, and his book  The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb  (2014) described a dinner hosted by painter Benjamin Haydon for three writers who were all to become legendary. Plumly’s other non-fiction works included  Elegy Landscapes: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime  (2018) and Argument and Song: Sources and Silences in Poetry  (2003).

Among other edited works, Plumly, with former Maryland Poet Laureate, Michael Collier, edited  The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. Plumly’s honors and awards included fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He taught at the University of Iowa and at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and was professor of English at the University of Maryland. He served as Maryland’s Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2019. He will be greatly missed.

Stanley Plumly (1939–2019) Ninth Poet Laureate of Maryland died of multiple myeloma. He lived in Fredericksburg Maryland, and is survived by his wife, Margaret Forian and two stepdaughters. He’s remembered with love by hundreds of former students and friends, some sent personal remarks:

"A great American poet left us, April 11, after a brave time confronting his illness. Stanley Plumly was among the most beloved teachers and mentors in America, leaving books with unforgettable emotional exposure, showing journeys of change, reinforcing the best in us. From a turbulent childhood, he emerged with strong passionate recollections that he turned to song. Storytelling was central to his work, elevating the art with language so lyrical that it repaired life’s damages. Searching and finding our humanity was in every line; the music-making was natural. Everyone who knew Stanley Plumly is in mourning; grateful for the books he left us with clear life experiences and fierce insight said in beautiful precise ways. This was a big voice in America literature that will stay with us."

--Grace Cavalieri, Maryland Poet Laureate

"I first met Stan in ’81 or ’82 when I was living in NYC and running the Academy of American Poets before I married and moved to DC. Over the years, wherever I landed—The Academy, the Folger, the NEA, Politics&Prose—I followed his work, invited him to give readings and to serve on panels, read his books, and taught his poetry. Stan could cut to the heart of the matter without being abrupt or harsh. He had a magnificent laugh, with that accompanying toss of his head. He thought deeply, and his inevitable sufferings along the way were leavened by love and by friends. This poem of his, which I first read in  The New Yorker  before I met him, introduced me to his insights about memory and poetry and helped me to navigate living in NYC. He left us too soon."

--Gigi Bradford

"I became friends with Stan years ago at the Bread Loaf writers Conference. In the evenings, when I was clearly homesick, he would always give me an affectionate hug goodnight which really helped. 

As for his work, there are certain lines of poetry that seem to speak to my life. One of these is Stan’s “Out of the body travel…” which I have always taken as an imperative."

--Linda Pastan, Former Maryland Poet Laureate

"Stanley Plumly's death has hit me hard. He was one of my teachers in the Iowa Writers Workshop -- and the most influential one, who shepherded my first attempts at poetic sequence past the nay sayers and nose wrinklers and into the light, opening me to a world of possibilities. He brought Keats out of the textbooks and embedded him in our cohort; his own poems were kind and ferocious and funny and sad. He was a spirit guide and that deep kind of friend you can see after a long time and pick up where you left off. I will miss his thoughtful observations as well as the low chuckle that acknowledged foolishness and forgave its perpetrators."

--Rita Dove

"I was part of a group of students who worked independently with Stanley Plumly for over 10 years. The rumors of his formidable presence are true, as are those of his extraordinary gift for teaching. We still hear his advice when we write. Even though we grew bold enough to disagree, to take our own paths, his aesthetic advice was unerringly consistent and provided a touchstone that made us better each in our own way. When I last saw him, in mid-December, he initially appeared unnervingly frail. As he read, talked, taught, criticized, quipped, it was as if he was filled with some fierce and beautiful spirit, his true self, a thing that I don’t think death can erase."

--Pamela Murray Winters

"Like so many others, I am devastated by this loss. Stanley Plumly was not only one of our greatest contemporary poets, but a master teacher. My MFA advisor and mentor forever after, he set a standard I always try to meet, both in my writing life and in my teaching.

 I can count the number of people I allow to call me "Rosie" on the fingers of one hand. He had one of those fingers, and I can feel him tugging at it, pulling us all forward, the grieving and grateful ones, remembering what he taught us, that the commitment to the art itself is the most important thing."  

--Rose Solari

"As an undergraduate in 1985, I read  Out-of-the-Body Travel  and  Summer Celestial.  Fragments and feelings from these still roam around in me. I met Stan on the phone when he called to accept me into the MFA program at UMD, and he was a sometimes gruff, sometimes gentle, presence for that time, and always honest. His feedback on the work could be cryptic, in a way that hit you out of the blue several years later. As a 22-year-old woman, I was trying to write like him, a 50-something man in cowboy boots and tweed coat, and he was so generous and open to other aesthetics and experiences that he showed me the possibility of some other way to be, while being fully himself.  Language is a darkness pulled out of us, sometimes by a great teacher, which Stan was--through his person and his poems--and I miss him."

--Cathy Eisenhower

"I’ve always felt that, like one of the great painters, Stan invented a new kind of beauty. Through his phrasing, syntax, pacing, the way he experienced time, and his whole sensibility, he created a unique voice and style that can’t be imitated. (There’s only one El Greco, only one Modigliani, one Turner.) What he said about Constable’s paintings in some ways applies to his own poems—not just their pastoral nature but the way they embody the past and present at once: “…the cloud world… will be taken from the moment, while the land world will be remembered.”

--Jeffrey Harrison

"I had the immense privilege of being one of the poets Stan mentored in the MFA program at the University of Maryland, College Park, and of staffing Stan during his tenure as Maryland Poet Laureate .  At every gathering he was wise and funny, encouraging and challenging. He especially enjoyed meeting with students and they really connected with him. As a person and a poet, Stan was heart and vulnerability and integrity. He also taught people to be fierce and truthful in their writing. He was completely and beautifully human and there is no way to put into words what he means to you if you knew and loved him. It runs too deep."

--Christine Stewart

MSAC Funding Deadlines