Tribute: James Longenbach

CLOSE READING: Professor, poet, and critic James Longenbach “has left an extraordinary body of work that rewards close and repeated reading,” says poet and faculty colleague Jennifer Grotz. (Photograph: J. Adam Fenster)

James Longenbach, the Joseph H. Gilmore Professor of English, is being remembered by colleagues and former students as a master poet and critic and a dedicated teacher and mentor.

“In his brilliance and generosity of mind, his breadth of understanding, and in the vital beauty of his writing, he intensified the conversations between poets, critics, and ordinary readers of poetry in America in a way that was hard to match,” says Kenneth Gross, the Alan F. Hilfiker Distinguished Professor of English.

A Guggenheim Fellow whose work earned recognition from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and other literary and academic organizations, Longenbach died in July at the age of 62.

He published six collections of poetry and an equal number of works of literary and scholarly criticism. His fifth book of poems, Earthling (2017), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poetry appeared in publications such as the Atlantic, the Nation, the New Republic, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Slate, and the Yale Review.

At Rochester, Longenbach taught courses in modern and contemporary American poetry, British and American modernism, James Joyce, Shakespeare, and creative writing.

Longenbach was married to Joanna Scott, a celebrated novelist and the Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of English at Rochester.

The pair met while studying abroad in Rome in 1981, eventually marrying and raising their two daughters in Rochester.

In addition to teaching at Rochester, Longenbach was on the faculty of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. At Bread Loaf in 1995, English professor Jennifer Grotz first met Longenbach. She came to work regularly with him after joining Rochester’s faculty in 2009.

“There was no better person to correspond with about poems,” she says. “His editing suggestions were always in service of making the poem sound more like you—or like itself—than sound like him. Not only was he one of the most legendary workshop leaders in American letters, he had made himself so without ever having been a student in a workshop himself.

“He has left an extraordinary body of work that rewards close and repeated reading,” notes Grotz. “I will be reading and teaching his work—poems and prose—for the rest of my life.”

—Sofia Tokar ’20W (MS)

Tokar wrote about Longenbach’s class on Joyce’s novel Ulysses for the Spring-Summer issue. This essay is adapted from an online story in the University’s News Center.