Writers in Residence

Marcella Veneziale Arts Editor

Not since 1990, when Howard Norman and Jane Shore became Vassar’s Writers-in-Residence, has the College elected two authors to the position simultaneously. Mary Jo Salter and Brad Leithauser studied poetry at Harvard under Vassar alumna Elizabeth Bishop ’34. The married couple share the Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer position at Mount Holyoke College, and have authored a vast collection of writing, in both verse and prose. They will lead seminars throughout the year with Vassar students, whether officially enrolled in composition classes or pursuing independent work, and will also give a reading on Thursday, Feb. 16 at 6 p.m. in Sanders Classroom 212.

The Miscellany News: Will you be teaching classes at Vassar?
Mary Jo Salter: I think we have an equal amount of work; it’s just a question of where we will be. My understanding from [Professor of English] Paul Kane is that we will be visiting creative writing classes and also having conferences with students who are working on independent creative writing projects.
MN: Do you have any specific plans for seminars that you will teach?
Brad Leithauser: No, I’m just going to try to be agreeable and friendly and be what they need. What I’m teaching at Mount Holyoke is a course called Comic Verse/Light Verse. I’m very interested in comic verse, sort of funny stuff. I’m just looking forward to meeting people, chit-chatting, and whatever anyone would like, I’m here to do.
MN: Do you have any expectations of the students, or for yourselves in interactions with the students?
MJS: We have visited Vassar a couple of times now, and I had the pleasure of going to a few of Paul Kane’s classes. I gave a reading a few years ago when the Poetry Chat Book Series was launched, and I read one of my own student’s poems that was in one of those Chat Books. We’ve invited [Vassar students] off-and-on throughout the years to participate in an intercollegiate poetry contest we have at Mount Holyoke called the Glasgow Poetry Contest. Vassar is well known for its writers.
MN: What do you think of universities today encouraging young writers, especially in the field of poetry?
MJS: The encouragement actually comes in large quantity. It seems that Vassar has a lot going on. I think learning to write poetry is worthwhile in and of itself, and it does not need to be a career path per se, largely because almost no one has ever made enough money in America as a poet to make a living doing that. If you’re a poet and you know you’re not going to make your income that way, you’re free to write whatever you want. Sometimes I’m worried when students think of studying poetry at the undergraduate level as a kind of career path, that the next thing is definitely the Masters of Fine Arts, and the next thing after that is definitely making a living as a poet. That isn’t what it’s about. It’s about learning how language is used, and learning how to say really what it is that you feel and what you mean.
MN: Was there a moment for you when you knew that you wanted to be a poet?
MJS: I did want to be a poet when I was very young. When I was a child, I wrote a lot of poetry, I played the piano, and I did a lot of drawing. I guess it became clear to me by the time I was entering college that poetry was the most important to me of those various arts, and I got increasingly serious about it. In college, I was very lucky to study with some wonderful teachers. It wasn’t a conscious decision; it just seemed kind of inevitable.
MN: Have any particular poets influenced your work?
MJS: I would say one of the earliest, big influences on me was Elizabeth Bishop, who was my professor at Harvard, and Brad’s too. We took her poetry class together in 1974. She was an influence in the way that she was very patient as a writer. She took her time. She was not obsessed with publication. She was obsessed with getting the word right. I would say Auden has been another very large influence on me. I started really reading Auden and Richard Wilbur in high school.
MN: Are there any other arts or influences outside literature that have impacted you in your writing?
MJS: I have recently been more interested in trying other genres. I wrote a play that was produced at Mount Holyoke in 2004, and I’m now working on a song cycle with a jazz composer who also does other kinds of music. I just returned a few days ago from the McDowell colony, which is a writer’s colony in New Hampshire, working with this composer. I write the lyrics and he’s writing the music. That’s been very exciting to be writing poetry—it rhymes, it’s got meter—but to be writing for a different kind of audience, and to be conveyed in a different way. You definitely have to learn to simplify and crystallize things even more when you’re writing lyrics.
MN: Will it be released as an independent album, or is it part of a larger project?
MJS: It’s for a larger project. It’s going to be a staged song cycle, which means that it will be six singers and a small orchestra. There will be some costuming and each song will be acted out, but it doesn’t all together make one plot. All of the songs are about photography in one way or another—the influence of photography on our lives and people looking at different kinds of photographs that trigger memories. It’s called Hold Still and we’re scheduled to have it premiere in March of ’07 in a theater in New Jersey.
MN: What are you currently reading?
MJS: I’ve been reading a lot of books on photography, and the best is Susan Sontag’s book called On Photography. I’ve also been reading a lot of Oscar Wilde. I have a student at Mount Holyoke who is writing her thesis on Oscar Wilde and Tom Stoppard. Stoppard is a big interest of mine. If you want to know exactly what I was reading, last night I was reading Lady Windermere’s Fan by Oscar Wilde.
BL: In the course [I am currently teaching], Writing About the Arts, we begin with novels and we read Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster, and his novel Morris. We’ll move to poetry and read Robert Frost and people like that. Then we’re going to see the movie Top Hat, with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. We’re trying to cover different genres in the course.
MN: What other projects are you working on?
BL: I’m working on a novel, that’s the major project. I was born in 1953, but the book I’m working on is set mostly in the ’40s. I’m working on a number of things, but I’m working on a novel set in Detroit. I’ve got a new book of poems coming out this fall. I collaborate with my brother, whose name is Mark Leithauser, and we did a book together called Lettered Creatures, that I wrote funny—I hope they’re funny—light verse poems, and he did drawings of animals. I don’t know if they have it at Vassar Library—they should!
MN: You lived in Japan for several years. What brought you there?
BL: I was editing legal articles. I have a degree from Harvard Law School, but I managed to forget everything I ever learned there—it’s shocking. I think it shows how remarkably efficient the expunge button is in my brain; it all went out.
MN: How did that influence your later work?
BL: My first novel was set there, so that’s a very direct way. For a while, I spent a lot of time reading Japanese books in translation. In recent years, really for the last more than ten years, I’ve gotten very interested in Iceland. I go to Iceland every year. Last year the president of Iceland gave me an award. I was made a member of the Order of the Falcon. I went to Iceland’s White House, and the president spoke Icelandic, which I didn’t understand, and gave me a medal—very thrilling.
MN: Do you have anything planned for the reading?
BL: No, I’ve been of two minds, or three minds. I gave my very first reading at Mount Holyoke in the fall from this new novel which I’m still working on, so I may look at that, or I may just do some poems. I don’t know, but I will try to entertain.