Hyam Plutzik

Hyam Plutzik (July 13, 1911– January 8, 1962), a Pulitzer prize finalist, was a poet and Professor of English at the University of Rochester.

Hyam Plutzik (July 13, 1911- January 8, 1962), a Pulitzer prize finalist, was a poet and Professor of English at the University of Rochester.

Contents [hide] 1 Early life 2 Career 3 Legacy 4 Books 5 Poems In Periodicals 6 Awards 7 References 8 External links Early life Plutzik was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Jewish emigrants from Belarus who arrived in the United States in 1905. During his early childhood years, Plutzik's family bought a farm in Southbury, Connecticut, where Plutzik attended school in a one-room schoolhouse. In Plutzik's home, Yiddish, Russian, and Hebrew were spoken. Plutzik himself did not learn English until he began grammar school at the age of seven.

At age twelve, Plutzik moved with his family to Bristol, Connecticut, where his father headed a Jewish community school. There, he had greater access to libraries and became an avid reader. Upon completion of high school in 1928, he won a Holland Scholarship from Trinity College. He majored in English and studied closely with Professor Odell Shepard, who later in 1938 received a Pulitzer for his biography, The Life of Bronson Alcott. In his senior year at Trinity, Plutzik was associate editor of the college's literary magazine, The Trinity Tablet, which printed his short story, "The Golus," and a group of poems, titled "Three Paintings."

Career Plutzik graduated from Trinity College, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1932. He continued his study of literature and poetry with a two-year fellowship from Trinity to Yale University Graduate School. The first significant recognition of his talent in writing poetry came in 1933 when he won the Yale Poetry Award for "The Three." The poet Stephen Vincent Benét, a previous recipient of the award, sat on the judging committee. Benét and Plutzik continued to correspond with each other through the 1940s.

Ambitious intellectually, but uncomfortable with the pro forma discipline of academic life, and perhaps uncertain about it as a context for his writing ambitions, Plutzik left Yale at the end of his two-year fellowship, his degree unfinished. For the next six years, he worked at various jobs, taking one year off to explore his writing abilities. He first moved to Brooklyn, where his parents then lived, and worked as a feature writer and secretary to the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

During this period, 1934-1935, he wrote the poem, "Seventh Avenue Express," which used the New York City subway system as a setting. The following year he briefly served as an editorial writer for the Newark Ledger in New Jersey. In 1936-1937,inspired by his mentor Odell Shepard, he returned to the Connecticut countryside, aiming to find his direction by living a “Thoreauvian” lifestyle. He tried his hand at a satirical novel on a timely subject for the 1930s—dictatorship. The lyric poem "My Sister" was written the following year when Plutzik was twenty-six years old; it expressed his loss at the death of a sister fifteen years earlier. At some other point during this period, 1937-1938, Plutzik composed "Death at The Purple Rim," a long narrative poem dealing with a momentous confrontation between an animal and a human in the Connecticut countryside.

Both "My Sister" and "Death at The Purple Rim" were eventually published in Plutzik’s first collection of poems, Aspects of Proteus (Harper and Brothers,1949)[1]. Upon its publication, prominent critic Mark Van Doren wrote to Plutzik that he found the poem “strangely and clearly powerful,” and that “I have read nothing better in a long while, and nothing I am likelier to remember.”

During the following two years Plutzik worked as a proofreader for the New Haven Journal-Courier and as research assistant to the director of a settlement house in Brooklyn. In 1940 he returned to Yale to complete his masters degree and submitted "Seventh Avenue Express" to the Yale Poetry Award committee. Although his attempt was unsuccessful, one of the committee members, the poet Arthur Davison Ficke, praised his second choice submission, "Death at the Purple Rim."

The following year Plutzik resubmitted this poem as his first choice and won the Yale Poetry Award a second time. The award included a private printing of the poem, which Plutzik to other poets and writers. Favorable letters of response came from Van Wyck Brooks, Howard Mumford Jones, Theodore Spencer, Henry S. Canby of the Saturday Review, Thomas Mann, and others. Arthur Davison Ficke and Plutzik also corresponded about another poem, "Mythos," which Plutzik had written during this period.

Plutzik enlisted in the US Army in 1942 shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He was first a drill sergeant, then a 1st lieutenant stationed at various bases throughout the American South, an experience that brought him into direct contact with racial segregation and that inspired his poem “To Abraham Lincoln, That He Walk By Day.” During the war, he married Tanya Roth, whom he had met while working in Brooklyn. In 1944, Plutzik became an ordinance and army education officer for the Army Air Corps, Norfolk, England, participating in the support activities for the D-Day invasion. Several poems inspired by his military experience in England include “On the Airfield at Shipdham,” “The Airman Who Flew Over Shakespeare’s England,” and “The Old War.”

Although the war experience made it difficult for Plutzik to write poetry during those years, he did create an outline for and composed the first twenty lines of the long narrative poem, "Horatio," that was finally published in 1961. This work is a narrative of the life of Hamlet's friend, Horatio, charged by the former to “report my cause aright,” Plutzik took up the poem again in the early 1950s and completed it in 1955. This 2,000- line work was published in 1961 by Atheneum to great acclaim and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize that year. Writing in the Yale Review, British poet Thom Gunn described the imagery in “Horatio” as “both astonishing and appropriate,” adding, “It is unusual to read such a good, long poem such as this nowadays.”

Upon discharge from the Army, Plutzik became an instructor in the English Department at the University of Rochester. That same year, 1945-1946, he submitted House of Gorya and Other Poems to Scribner's, which turned down the manuscript. Plutzik composed an additional fifty-two poems within the next several years. These were included in his first published collection, Aspects of Proteus(Harper and Brothers, 1949). [2]His second collection, Apples from Shinar (Wesleyan University Press, 1959) [3] contained thirty-two lyric poems, and "The Shepherd," a section of "Horatio." To mark the centennial of Plutzik’s birth in 2011, Wesleyan published a new edition of Apples from Shinar with an afterword by David Scott Kastan, a Shakespeare scholar at Yale University. The new edition also contained a previously unpublished preface by Hyam Plutzik.

Throughout his career, Plutzik published poems in journals and magazines such as Poetry, Yale Review, Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, Accent, and The Nation. In 1950, he received for Aspects of Proteus one of six awards given by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1951, he shared the California Borestone Mountain Poetry Award with Rolfe Humphries, and in 1959, received the University of Rochester's Lillian P. Fairchild Award for Apples from Shinar. In 1954, Plutzik received a Ford Foundation Faculty Fellowship to explore the relationship between poetry, science, and philosophy.

Important themes throughout Plutzik's writings include poetry and science as modes of expression, the paradoxes of historical time and eternity, and questions of Jewish identity. He also translated and wrote prayers used in Jewish liturgies. Plutzik also wrote short stories, science fiction, fantasy, and children's literature. Ideas for his children's literature came from stories created in play with his four children. He was unable to find a publisher for his children's stories. Of his science fiction, "Outcasts of Venus" was published in 1952 under the pseudonym, Anaximander Powell.

A "Plan for Work." written in October, 1960, outlined what Plutzik hoped to bring to fruition in the coming years. These were a long poem on the Holocaust and a play in verse on the fall of Athens in the Peloponnesian war. In the poem on the Holocaust, he planned to include a section on Anne Frank, and another on Lapichi, the Russian town in the Czarist province of Minsk (now in Belarus), where his family had originated.

Hyam Plutzik died in 1962 in Rochester, New York. He was survived by his wife, Tanya Roth Plutzik, and their four children, Roberta, Alan, Deborah, and Jonathan.

Legacy Nearly half a century after his death, Plutzik’s work continues to earn the admiration of critics and scholars. British poets Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn included some of his poems in their 1963 anthology Five American Poets. Hughes wrote that “Hyam Plutzik’s poems have haunted me for twenty-five years” with their “point-blank, wholehearted simplicity of voice. … The best of his work seems to me marvelously achieved, a sacred book.” In his 2001 book Cold War Poetry: The Social Text in the Fifties Poem, Edward Brunner declared that “Plutzik’s achievement is stunning” and that some of his poems “go unmatched by any other postwar poetry except that of Langston Hughes or Gwendolyn Brooks.”[6] Earlier, in his Foreword to the 1987 Collected Poems[7], Anthony Hecht wrote that Plutzik’s poems “deserve to be far more widely known and admired than at present they are,” calling him “a poet of such remarkable achievement.” Eric Ormsby, an American scholar and critic now living in London, described Plutzik as :a marvelous poet whom Ted Hughes and others championed. He tried to recreate a credible Shakespearean voice in American verse but his success doomed his verse to obscurity.”

As a teacher, Plutzik created a solid place for poetry in the English Department at the University of Rochester and in Upstate New York, where he remained all his professional life. He taught poetry workshops and gave weekly poetry readings, composing poems for special occasions. Not surprisingly, in 1961 he was appointed to the newly created position, Deane Professor of Rhetoric and Poetry. In 1962, the University of Rochester established the Plutzik Poetry Series, which in its history has welcomed upwards of 250 readers, including many major award winners.[1] A full list of the Plutzik Poetry Series readers can be found at http://www.hyamplutzikpoetry.com/series_readers.html. In 1999, the Plutzik Library for Contemporary Writing was dedicated, and in 2004, Plutzik was recognized in a campus publication as one of the most outstanding teachers in the University's history. Since his death, his poems have been included in many anthologies, such as Five American Poets (1963), The Voice That Is Great Within Us (1970), Beginnings in Poetry (1973), Voices within the Ark: the Modern Jewish Poets (1980), and others. In 1987, Hyam Plutzik: The Collected Poems was published by BOA Editions[4]. A documentary film about his life and work, Hyam Plutzik: American Poet [5] was released in 2007. It was directed by Oscar nominee Christine Choy and Ku-Ling Siegel, and featured appearances by prominent American poets such as Hayden Carruth, Donald Hall, Galway Kinnell, Stanley Kunitz, and Grace Schulman. The film was featured at the Jewish Film Festival in Jerusalem in 2007 and at the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin in 2008.

The centennial of the poet’s birth, and the 50th anniversary of the Plutzik Reading Series at the University of Rochester, were commemorated during 2011 and 2012, when a centennial edition of Apples from Shinar was published by Wesleyan University Press, and the University of Rochester’s Rush Rhees Library mounted two exhibitions. Reviewing the edition for Jewish Review of Books, Margot Lurie wrote: “…[Plutzik’s] blank-verse epic 'Horatio,' which chronicled Hamlet's friend's failed attempts to redeem the prince's ‘hurt honor and name,’ was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His poems were deep-drawn, gnomic things, and his tone was deaconish, if not outright godlike…The poems in Apples from Shinar are defiantly lovely, limpid and ambiguous both. On every page, there are ripe images and rich sound-play and a shuttling among registers of insight. This is a golden book.” In April 2013, Nigel Meister of the University of Rochester performed Horatio as a dramatic monologue at the Helen Mills Theater in New York City. In May, a retrospective exhibit of Plutzik’s life and work was mounted at the Watkinson Library at Trinity College, his alma mater.[2]

Books The Three (Yale University Prize Poem, 1933). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1933. (Pamphlet) Death at the Purple Rim (Yale University Prize Poem, 1941). Brooklyn: The Artisan Press, 1941. 37pp Aspects of Proteus, a book of poems. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949. 94pp. Apples from Shinar, a book of poems. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959. 59pp. Reissued in 2011 with previously unpublished introduction by the author and new afterword by David Scott Kastan. Horatio. New York: Atheneum, 1961. 89pp. Hyam Plutzik: The Collected Poems, with a foreword by Anthony Hecht. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 1987. 313pp. Poems In Periodicals Plutzik also published poems in The New York Times Book Review, Sewanee Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry-New York, Hopkins Review, Epoch, Furioso, Prairie Schooner, Yale Review, American Scholar, Antioch Review, New World Writing, The Nation, Saturday Review, Voices, Transatlantic Review, The Christian Science Monitor, and Kenyon Review.

Awards Yale University: Prize Poem (J.S. Cook Prize for “The Three”), 1933 Yale University: Prize Poem (J.S. Cook Prize for “The Purple Rim”), 1941 National Institute of Arts and Letters: Award for accomplishment in lyric and narrative poetry. 1950 Poetry Awards Prize: for a Book of Verse (subsequently known as the Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards). Shared award with Rolfe Humphries. 1951 University of Rochester Summer Faculty Fellowship for Creative Writing. 1954 Ford Foundation Faculty Fellowship for study of science as background to modern poetry 1954-1955. University of Rochester Summer Faculty Fellowship for Creative Writing. 1954 University of Rochester Summer Faculty Fellowship for Creative Writing. 1958 Lillian Fairchild Award (Rochester) for Best Work of Imagination. 1959 Horatio selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize 1961 The city of Rochester declares May 11, 2002, Hyam Plutzik Day in recognition of his contributions to the community. “Sprig of Lilac” is noted as the official poem of the Lilac Festival. References All information cited in this article was derived from research in the official Hyam Plutzik Archive at the University of Rochester's Rush Rhees Library. This archive is considered the definitive repository about the life and work of Hyam Plutzik.

Jump up ^ http://www.rochester.edu/college/eng/plutzik/about.php Jump up ^ http://www.betsywritersroom.com/2013/04/11/778/ External links Hyam Plutzik Official Website

Books

Poems In periodicals

Pluzak also published poems in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Sewanee Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry-New York, Hopkins Review, Epoch, Furioso, Prairie Schooner, Yale Review, American Scholar, Antioch Review, New World Writing, The Nation ”, Saturday Review, Voices, Transatlantic Review, the Christian Science Monitor, and Kenyon Review.

Awards

References

    External links

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