HUCK GUTMAN’S PLEA FOR POETRY
Burlington to Washington, English prof pushes verse via listserv
by Jeffrey Wakefield
It is difficult to get the news from poems,” the American poet Williams Carlos Williams wrote, “yet men die miserably every day from lack of what is found there.”
The urgency of those words has driven UVM English professor Huck Gutman to help undergraduates wrest meaning from knotty quatrains and unyielding stanzas by Wordsworth and Whitman, Dickinson and Byron for close to forty years.
Since taking a leave of absence from UVM to work in Washington, D.C., the bestial belly of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, as chief of staff for his longtime friend and political associate Sen. Bernie Sanders, it’s perhaps no surprise that Gutman has become more dedicated to Williams’s words than ever.
Last spring, between meetings with Congressional committees and Cabinet secretaries, Gutman found time to launch a kind of e-mail poem-of-the month club, selecting a poem for close reading and accompanying it with explanatory text that is plain-spoken, absorbing, and packed with insight.
Gutman began the poetry listserv because, as much as he’s thriving in the intense world of Washington politics, “I realize time and again that I miss teaching poetry very much,” as he put it in an e-mail introducing the listserv.
He also thinks many of us are missing something, perhaps even miserably so, which he hopes his electronic missives can help address.
Despite “e-mails and blogs and Twitters and cell phones,” he says, “I don’t think we communicate with each other all that well or all that much. Poets talk about things that really matter…the things we are embarrassed to talk with each other about, or hesitant.”
If that sounds like standard patter from an English professor, just read one of Gutman’s e-mails.
Take the one on Robert Frost’s “The Oven Bird.” The poem’s subject is a diminutive warbler that sings in mid-summer, when the early promise of spring has faded.
Gutman’s commentary is unfailingly helpful, explaining why, for instance, tree trunks in the poem “sound again” (the bird sings in July and August when other birds have stopped).
It also cuts to the quick. “The poem is about time,” Gutman writes, “and about how time is not redemptive: it is all decline after the exuberance of early days, whether of the year or of one’s own life.” But there’s also provisional hope hidden in the poem’s last two lines, which Gutman unearths masterfully.
If Gutman’s commentaries seem fresh, unpretentious, and genuine, that’s partly by contrast with the memories of high school English class many of us harbor.
Too many high school English teachers “make poetry seem like it’s a crossword puzzle for the really smart students and everyone else feels dumb,” Gutman says. As he sees it, teaching poetry is about empowering people to learn how to read and understand poems themselves.
There’s no doubt Gutman has a few smart people on his mailing list, though. Among his 950 subscribers are six college presidents, a New York Times columnist, assorted former students, and a growing number of Washington elites, included highly placed staff in the White House, in Congress, and in several federal agencies.
“I’ll see people on elevators, and they’ll say, ‘I liked getting that poem,’” he says with obvious delight.
Gutman stops well short of thinking his e-mails are building better policy-makers. His friends in high places, Gutman suggests, are like everyone else, hungry for an intimacy that is increasingly rare.
Hungry, in short, for the sort of thing Walt Whitman might confide when he wrote, in a favorite line of Gutman’s, “This hour I tell things in confidence, I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.”
To subscribe to Professor Gutman’s listserv: Address an e-mail to LISTSERV@list.uvm.edu