Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2008 - (Page 12)

ARTS & CULTURE bookshelf POETRY FORGED FROM STEEL When asked why he now writes about the steel mills of his hometown, poet Robert Gibb ’78G, ’86G responds: “I don’t think I chose to write about it. It chose me.” Originally from Homestead, Pa., the gritty former steel town outside Pittsburgh, Gibb started out as a portrait and landscape artist who occasionally wrote poetry. He eventually traded his brushes for pens, entering Lehigh University to pursue a master’s and doctorate in English. At the time of his doctoral hooding ceremony, Gibb had published two books of poems, most about the natural world. “As I got a little older, memories would insist, and a poem would appear that had something to do with the mills,” he says. Gibb returned to his hometown, where he published The Homestead Trilogy—a collection of almost 100 poems spread across three volumes invoking images of his grandfather’s grave, of the cold Pittsburgh winters, and of the steel mills where he once worked, as did his grandfather and father. World Over Water (University of Arkansas Press, 2007), the final installment of The Homestead Trilogy, reﬂects his belief in an everpresent past by exploring his personal, cultural, regional, and family history. “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past,” he says, quoting William Faulkner. The other books in The Homestead Trilogy are The Origins of Evening (W.W. Norton & Company, 1997) and The Burning World (University of Arkansas Press, 2004). “It seems to me that the past is the resonance of our lives,” Gibb continues. “The American push to the present creates no depth or impact in the passage. I’ve been trying to connect the present with history on a number of levels: commercial, geographic, economic, personal, and family.” Good literature and poetry should exist outside time’s conﬁnes, Gibb says. “One of the purposes of literature is to hold out from time and dissolution and the world that passes. Literature [captures] a moment in time that would otherwise have been lost [and gives it] a place of permanence,” he says. If members of the literary community are to be believed, then Gibb’s poems have earned a place of permanence. He is a winner of the 1997 National Poetry Series, the Camden Poetry Award, and a Pushcart Prize. Most mornings, Gibb rises early and stares, waiting for a line or phrase to strike him and “establish contact” with a yet-unwritten poem. He pursues that line until it leads him to another and another, and in time, the lines weave themselves into a poem. “It’s amazing,” Gibb says. “I have no idea where I am going, but sense that the poem will go somewhere with me. It mystiﬁes me more each time.” Although of a mystical origin, the final poem arises from hard work and repeated edits. Gibb returns again and again to his creations, pruning them until he ﬁnds the perfect phrase. “I go back after a while and read them. If something seems flat and vague, or I have a sense that it is not yet at the place it needs to be, I’ll revise it,” he says. Gibb first moved to the Lehigh Valley to study visual arts at Kutztown University in 1971 and returned in 1973 after he received his master of ﬁne arts at the University of Massachusetts. While supporting himself with odd jobs, the portrait and landscape artist dabbled in poetry. He eventually realized that he would have to choose between the visual and the literary arts, and increasingly found that poetry had become the more important of the two. His time as a visual artist “gives me a stronger sense of the poem as a tangible being,” he says. “When working with a brush you are involved with material, but words can be ethereal. My painting gave me a sense of the physical aspect of language.”—Becky Straw DEED for the purpose of human sepulcher alone Crosswise from the plaque for the Homestead martyrs And back down the slope past the Protestant edge of things, I have come to stand here once again, importuning my dead. ROBERT GIBB, the stone says, three chiseled links Of a chain above the blocked-out letters. And the dates, 1870-1905, since this is the grave of my father’s father, The machinist who died in the mills. In the photos of him That survive—stiff, mounted, sepia prints– He stands posed beside the enormous shears and presses He worked upon, his arm cocked on the lever Of the industrial world. A world that’s now faded as well, The color of the dust into which my father’s ashes Have been scattered in turn, as though he’d been flung Back into the stone and a name that was also his own… —From World Over Water, by Robert Gibb (University of Arkansas Press, 2007) 12 lehigh alumni bulletin

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2008

Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2008 Contents From the President's Desk Mailbox On Campus Research Arts & Culture Sports Ugly is in the Eye of the Beholder Fitch's Law of Motion A Blessing to the Community The Amidonian Acclamation China Trip Bridges Cultures, Generations From the Publisher's Desk Alumni News The Last Word

Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2008

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