David Tucker, a resident of South Orange, NJ, and one of the two 2007 Witter Bynner Fellowship winners, read before a full house on November 14th. The reading, co-sponsored by the Rutgers University Libraries, The Writers House and the New Jersey Center for the Book, brought in a mixed audience of students, faculty and members of the community, who stayed after to ask Tucker questions, both formally, in a Q and A session, and informally at a Writer’s House collation.

David Tucker is a lyric poet who has said, “journalism is about what the facts tell us, poetry is about what the facts don’t tell us.” Although he is a veteran journalist of 28 years, a member of the New Jersey Star-Ledger team that won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news, few of the poems Tucker read concerned public life, the activity of the newsroom or the calling of journalism, although he did read an anti-newspaper poem, and a poem about reading while waiting for a reporter to phone in a story. His short, translucent poems tended to reflect on private emotions. Philip Levine’s description of Tucker’s language as “precise and economical” seemed apt. His concerns, which are the concerns of the individual in sympathy with other individuals, whom he observes with a compassion that belies his reputation as a “gruff, grunting, yelling, bull-dog sort of editor,” are expressed in the language of ordinary, honest speech. Several of the poems he read were about or inspired by family members, such as his “The Dance,” a Yeatsian lyric for his daughter, Emily, which contains the beautiful lines “Turning gran jetes / Through the haze of late afternoon” and two poems about his mother, who struggled with schizophrenia, “That Day,” and “My Mother’s Voices.” His two poems about his hometown, Linden, Tennessee (which he described as a having “a population of 1000 with 900 Baptist churches,” “Columbus Discovers Linden, Tennessee” (“There are, it turns out no dragons here / Only scrawny women who dump the heads of chicken into kettles”) and “God Goes Fishing in Your Home Town,” exemplified his sensitivity to the imagination’s incongruities, which a gentle whimsy draws back from the shadows of surrealism. “Portrait Of a Woman,” with its anti-Jamesian implication and “After All” were Tucker’s homage to connubial felicity. His poem “Detective Story” (“Happiness is a stubborn old detective / Who won’t give up on us”) commemorated the poet, Jane Kenyon, whom Tucker met in a seminar he took with Donald Hall (Poet Laureate and thus the selector of this year’s Witter Bynner winners). Tucker explained that he met Kenyon the year she and Hall met and fell in love, and his comment that, while it was extraordinary to share a seminar with an emerging great talent like Kenyon’s, it seemed unfair to be in a class with someone with whom the instructor was falling deeply in love, made everyone laugh.

In addition to hearing David Tucker, attendees were treated to a short introduction of The Writers House by its director, Dr. Carolyn Williams, and a tour of the Writers House collaboratory by Dr. Richard Miller, the Chair of the English Department. Betty Turock emceed the program with her typical wit and sparkle, and, pinch-hitting for Renee Swartz, Dr. Gus Friedrich described some of the many events supported by the New Jersey Center for the Book. Jonathan Cole, the Director of the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress, who took time away from his preparations for the National Book Award ceremonies in New York, began the evening, and offhandedly shared his hope that Robert Haas, a solid contributor to the Center for the Book, would win this year’s award for poetry – which it turned out, he did. We thank Jonathan for introducing us to David Tucker, and Rick Lee of the English Department, who helped to make the evening a flawless success.

Michael Joseph