Frank Bidart At Salem State

November 16, 2015  By: Lisa Danca 

“Imagine an award and he’s probably received it,” said Professor JD Scrimgeour as he introduced poet Frank Bidart to Salem State’s third Writer Series event of the academic year this past Thursday.

Bidart’s career blew up in the 1980’s and over the decades has won The Paris Review’s first Bernard F. Conners Prize for “The War of Vaslav Nijinsky” (1981), the National Book Critics Circle Award for Metaphysical Dog (2013), and Yale University’s Bollingen Prize in American Poetry (2007). To add to his impressive line of accomplishments, Bidart is also a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry back in 2003.

My two favorite poems Bidart read were “Queer” and “Hunger For The Absolute.” Bidart is openly gay, and his confessional poem, “Queer,” written in the second person, detailed his struggle to come out.

Bailey Eastwood, a junior psychology major, went to the reading for his Creative Writing class. He also enjoyed “Queer” because “in our day and age, homosexuality is still an issue, which it shouldn't be. I know in his time it was harder to pursue someone in the same gender. I wouldn't personally know that feeling, but I do know it's a hard road and have known many who have been struggling for LGBT rights. I respect Bidart’s work and would listen to more.”

During the event, Bidart also identified himself as a “cynic”  and his abstract poem, “Hunger For The Absolute,” was about his hunger for understanding the purpose of life. “Earth you know is round but seems flat./You can’t trust/your senses. You thought you had seen every variety of creatures/ but not/ this creature” (1-6).  Regardless of what you believe in, we have all had moments when we think we know it all and moments when we have our doubts.

Bidart concluded the evening by sharing some of his newest pieces, which will be published in his forthcoming untitled book. It was Bidart’s first time ever reading them in public and he called the packed audience, who came to see him, his “guinea pigs.” Bidart referred to this book as the “book of his full life,” and the seventy-six-year-old joked, “I’m afraid I’m going to make an asshole of myself.” He said his latest works are love poems and that they are addressed to people, living and deceased, who he no longer has a relationship with. I believe what has made Bidart such a prolific poet over the past thirty to forty years, is his motto: “art is the conversation you wish you could have.”

Contributor’s Note: Lisa Danca enjoyed dining with Frank Bidart at Bertini’s this past Thursday with Salem State professors, graduate students, and members of the Salem Writers Group.