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Editor’s Preface
- Wesleyan University Press
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Editor’s Preface A ConneCtiCut trADition in poetry Many anthologies beg the question of how their contents have been selected. This book, organized around the state of Connecticut, draws on the work of poets born in the state as well as transplants whose work has become identified with the state. When introducing what might have been the state’s first anthology of poetry, The Poets of Connecticut (1844), Reverend Charles W. Everest noted that he admitted “the names of none upon our lists who were not born in the commonwealth.” Such a method of selection (or exclusion) may have been useful in the midnineteenth century, but it cannot prove very useful today. We are—and have been for quite some time—a population ever in flux and on the move. The poets included in this book have different points of view on their “Connecticut-ness.” Some, like Susan Howe, feel the impact of literary forebears. Howe has stated that “as an American poet writing in the early twenty-first century I owe these authors [philosopher-theologian Jonathan Edwards, born in Windsor, Connecticut, and Wallace Stevens] an incalculable debt [. . .] their writing locates, rescues, and delivers what is secret, wild, double, and various in the near at hand.” Other writers see frequent rupture due to immigration, industrialization, urbanization , and suburbanization, yet feel the force of the state’s culture or climate exerting an influence on their work. The contemporary poet Lewis Turco told me, “It used to bother me a lot that so few poets were actually born in Connecticut. I could never understand how, given the law of averages, that could come to pass. And it bothered me exceedingly that I myself wasn’t born there.” Turco, born in Buffalo, New York, grew up in Meriden, Connecticut, and attended the University of Connecticut. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, on the other hand, was born here, in Hartford, but resided in California most of her life. Both James Laughlin and Wallace Stevens arrived here from Pennsylvania as transplants and, like the vines intertwined on the state seal and flag, thrived in Connecticut and, in turn, greatly enriched the state. Wallace Stevens, indisputably the state’s greatest poet, was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and lived a little less than half his life outside of Connecticut. But his nearly forty years’ residence and the completion of all his mature work while living in West Hartford and Hartford qualifies him as a Connecticut poet, our quintessential one: “It was evening all afternoon. / It was snowing / And it was going to snow. / The black bird sat / In the cedar-limbs.” The more one reads Stevens’s poetry, the more one is overwhelmed by its beauty and the intellect of the mind xii eDitor’s prefACe that made it, a mind deeply rooted in Connecticut: its topography, its seasons, its weather. In the final year of his life Wallace Stevens composed a brief essay about Connecticut for the Voice of America. In it he describes a train ride through the state. “Everything seemed gray, bleached and derelict and the word derelict kept repeating itself as part of the activity of the train. But this was a precious ride through the character of the state. The soil everywhere seemed thin and difficult.” The trip through his state leads not to despair but to the conclusion that “we live in the tradition which is the true mythology of the region and we breathe in with every breath the joy of having ourselves been created by what has been endured and mastered in the past.” So it is for many Connecticut poets. James Abraham Hillhouse said of his poem “Sachem’s Wood” that it is “a testimony of renewed pleasure and pride in my native state.” In his mid-nineteenth-century gathering of poets, Rev. Everest made the claim that “New England has been the nursery of America’s literature ,” and then he added “let the present work determine whether Connecticut has not been its very cradle.” Whether or not Connecticut serves as cradle for American poetry seems less important to poets in the early twenty-first century than to poets of prior times who strove to make claims of origin and primacy. We call our age post-modern and post-ethnic and appreciate how the world is in Connecticut and how Connecticut is in the world. An anthology such as Garnet Poems: An Anthology of Connecticut Poetry Since 1776 provides opportunity to celebrate the art of the present aware of the...