- illustration by Brian Jenkins
When you tell your folks you’re going to grad school, they say, “My son, my son.” When you tell them it’s for poetry, you see them sulk. When you say in Amherst, your parents spark again—they know there must be something going on in that town, it’s worked for other poets.
Last year I entered the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at UMass Amherst. And not just because of the prized faculty or its vast net of successful alumni having blazed ahead of me (the program soon to celebrate its 50th anniversary has graduated over 600 MFAs); the town itself was a draw.
What’s that pull for a young poet? What’s that allure to literary junkies? Find out on a tour of the most significant literary landmarks in town.
Amherst Center
While only 11 of her writings were published in her lifetime, Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 at her Amherst home—the Homestead at the Emily Dickinson Museum. “What the museum has done to preserve both Dickinson’s own contributions and the family’s role in town,” says Margaret Freeman ’70G,’72PhD, “is extremely important in showing locals, students, and visitors what it was like for Dickinson to live in 19th century Amherst.” Freeman is the founding president of the Emily Dickinson International Society. Her work on Dickinson belongs to cognitive poetics, an emerging field of study that borrows approaches to understanding poetry from literary criticism and cognitive sciences. “In my mind,” she says, “once you’ve been introduced to Dickinson’s poetry, she never lets you go.”
This seems equally true of her hold on the town’s collective psyche. “I recently overheard some local teens talking about going to hang out on the porch of Em Dick’s house,” writes Zach Savich ’11G, a fellow grad student in the MFA program, relating a way to understand the lasting importance of the poet’s birthplace. “This kind of infusion—the famous totemic poet translated into the slang of daily logistic—seems representative of the region.”
The Jones Library special collections offer some of the most crucial material on Amherst’s three most noted poets: Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), Robert Frost (1874-1963), and Robert Francis (1891-1986). Tevis Kimball ’71, curator of special collections, can open insight to all three, as she does to a dozen researchers at the collection on any given day. Frost considered the library the first collector of his work, holding the highly sought manuscript to Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (1922); Francis spent more than three years with a writing studio on the third floor; and Dickinson scholars and fans alike can get a masterful history of the 19th century town that she left only four brief times throughout her life.
“It was the land. It was the place, the hiking here in Amherst, and part of it of course was Dickinson,” Kimball says of her own falling for the town during her UMass years. “As a student I discovered many fine authors in the Jones Library. I always knew I would come back to work here.”
Between the museum and the library, you’ll find Amherst Books, picked as best bookstore in New England by Boston Magazine in 2007. Amherst Books is well regarded as host to some of the best poetry readings in the valley. One of their most popular series is Live Lit, run by students in the MFA program since 1985 as a forum for sharing work. “It promotes a sense of camaraderie in our community of writers,” says Gale Thompson ’11G, MFA poet and co-coordinator of Live Lit. “The poetry selection at Amherst Books is the best I’ve ever seen—not only does it have the mainstays, it also offers a host of chapbooks, small press titles, and a variety of literary journals.”
