It’s funny how a quiet person can slip through the cracks. Take poet Philip Booth.
Booth studied writing under Robert Frost at Dartmouth College, and went on to have a long friendship with him. Co-founder of the graduate writing program at Syracuse University (1961) and winner of awards from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations and the National Endowment of the Arts, Booth began publishing poems in the 1950s and ’60s along with Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Maxine Kumin and Allen Ginsburg.
Booth’s first book of poems, “Letters from a Distant Land” (1957), was the 1956 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets judged by Louise Bogan, John Holmes, Rolfe Humphries, May Sarton and Richard Wilbur “for the discovery and encouragement of new poetic genius.”
Summers at the Booth family home in Castine, Maine became lively and informal literary salons that included the poets already mentioned as well as writers Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick and rising talents from among his students such as eventual Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Dunn. In the mid-sixties, Senator Ted Kennedy quite literally sailed into town, and poets and politicians gathered over cocktails in Booth’s living room to discuss the Vietnam War.
Yet when Sunderland writer Jeanne Braham set out to write a “literary portrait” of Booth, she found not a single biography had been written.
Braham has long loved poetry, and made a career of publishing, teaching and writing about it. She is the author of five books, including her most recent volume, “Available Light: Philip Booth and the Gift of Place,” recently released by Bauhan Publishing of Petersborough, N.H.
Braham will read from that book on Monday, March 7, 6:30 p.m. at Thayer Memorial Library in Lancaster. Amherst poet Deborah Gorlin, winner of the 2014 May Sarton Poetry Prize, will also be reading.
Braham, who has taught literature and creative writing locally at Smith and Hampshire colleges and at Clark University in Worcester, sees the task of writing a literary portrait as “sinking a vertical shaft” into the life of a writer, as opposed to the more horizontal breadth of a “full-fledged biography.” At the invitation of one of Booth’s daughters, Carol Booth, Braham visited the family’s summer home in Castine, which has been in the family for four generations, pored through photo albums and interviewed Booth’s wife and colleagues to gain a sense of him as a man and a poet.
The picture that came together was of a man who was passionate, yet reserved; a meticulous writer who revised as many as 20 or 30 times; a warm and generous friend and teacher who was extremely anxious about appearing in public.
Maxine Kumin urged Booth to play more of a role in “Po-Biz,” as she called it, so that his work would receive more attention, going so far as to give specific advice to help him relax during readings. (Read something short and light-hearted first, so the audience will laugh, Kumin suggested: still great advice.)
At a time when many of the poets around him were publishing confessional poetry, Booth chose not to reveal himself as openly.
“He had been in Freudian analysis five times a week for three years,” Braham says. “His mother died in an insane asylum. It wouldn’t have been a huge step to work some of those experiences into his poetry.”
Instead, Booth’s poems are often grounded in quiet landscapes that open to reveal an emotional discovery that is darker or more passionate than might be seen at first glance. Braham describes Booth’s approach as, “Deeper, not wider.”
“With Philip Booth’s poems you always have — and I think it’s the influence of Frost — a setting that is both an attitude and a real setting,” Braham says. “You’ll see that over and over again.”
She adds that a Booth poem is, “Never a symbol-filled puzzle. You can approach it on a very concrete level and then hopefully your imagination can take off.”
“Building Her,” a poem written mid-career, is a good example. The poem begins very closely focused on the wood used to build a boat, and is wonderfully dense with boatbuilding’s specific jargon.
“Oh, I think he just absolutely loved that stuff,” Braham said of the language of boat building. “He was so happy to have an excuse to use it. I think he was probably a word hoarder. And then when he created a poem in which those words could naturally appear, I think he was tickled to death.”
Scarfing, rabbeting, sternpost, keelson: these are words worth hoarding. And they ground the poem in an authentic place: a boatyard like the one Booth frequented in Castine.
The rhythms of boatbuilding, which requires many repeated tasks, are present in the poem, too. The simple yet important words “grain” and “wood” repeat often, like hammer-strikes. And the recurring punctuation of semi-colons and colons nail the lines down. As you read, your attention is held tight to the task at hand — boatbuilding — but also to the task of paying attention.
As Braham describes it, “He holds you pretty tightly in.”
But, wow, how the poem opens out!
“Available Light: Philip Booth and the Gift of Place” by Jeanne Braham is available locally at Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley; Broadside Bookshop in Northampton or online at bauhanpublishing.com/available-light
Trish Crapo is a writer and photographer who lives in Leyden. Crapo is seeking published poets for her column. She’s interested in books written by a Franklin County poet and/or published by a Franklin County press. She can be reached at: tcrapo@me.com