The work of a fondly remembered faculty member is revived in an edition that foregrounds issues of immigration and exile.
Poet Hyam Plutzik joined the English department at the University of Rochester as an instructor following his discharge from the Army after World War II. He remained at the University for the rest of his too-brief life, organizing poetry workshops, giving readings on campus, and in 1961, accepting the title of Deane Professor of Rhetoric and Poetry, just one year before his death.
A three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry—for Aspects of Proteus (1949), Apples from Shinar (1959), and Horatio (1961)—Plutzik is finding new readers almost 60 years after his death with a new bilingual edition of his work. 32 Poems/32 Poemas (Suburbano Ediciones, 2021) offers a selection of his work in Spanish and the original English.
Fourteen translators have provided the translations, and the volume is edited by George Henson, an assistant professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. Richard Blanco, the inaugural poet for President Barack Obama’s first inauguration, provides the foreword.
Writes Blanco: “Plutzik and I meet at the junction of this irony and our respective obsessions: he finds home in his longing to transcend, whereas I find transcendence in my longing for home. Through the timeless grace and art of poetry, my 1968 Miami merges with Plutzik’s 1911 Brooklyn, our parents become immigrants from the same country, and our languages blend as one, ‘in the one, shadowed sea where all things melt’.”
Plutzik’s legacy also lives on at Rochester, most notably in the Plutzik Reading Series, which was established in 1962.
Guest readers have included James Baldwin, Rita Dove, Allen Ginsberg, and Adrienne Rich, as well as Rochester’s own Jennifer Grotz, Anthony Hecht, and James Longenbach. University Libraries are home to the Plutzik Library for Contemporary Writing, opened in 2000, and his collected papers are held in the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation.
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Thoughts on Hyam Plutzik, Letter from a Young PoetIn the posthumously published memoir Letter from a Young Poet, University poet Hyam Plutzik, describes early aspects of his efforts to become a poet.
Poet James Longenbach explores the ever-current ‘now’ of lyric poetryWriters and musicians from Marianne Moore to Patti Smith are the subject of Longenbach’s book The Lyric Now.
Jennifer Grotz receives Guggenheim fellowship for poetryThe author of four volumes of poetry, Grotz joins 20 other current Rochester faculty who have received Guggenheim Fellowships, which are among the most coveted academic awards.
