Max Wickert Office: 407 Clemens Office Hours: on research leave Fall 2005, office hours by appointment only Phone: 645-2575 ext. 1032 E-mail: wickert@buffalo.edu

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I began my academic career as a Victorianist, with a Yale dissertation on William Morris. That specialty, however, went to the winds after I was hired at Buffalo. The department of Al Cook, John Barth, and Robert Creeley jolted me, as it did many of my peers in the heady 'sixties, into a complete change of life.

Powerhouse colleagues like Irving Feldman, Robert Hass, the late Mac Hammond, and, above all, the late John Logan, encouraged me to think of myself as a poet. I began to publish verse, as well as verse translations from German, principally from Georg Trakl. (For the latter, my being a native German was an advantage.)

My most satisfying and productive years were the 'seventies. In those years, I wrote more prolifically than at any other time in my life. I was also associated with several interesting Buffalo writers' groups, not only at the university, but in the Buffalo community, as a founding member of NEW (Niagara-Erie Writers), and as director of the Outriders Poetry Project and of the University of Buffalo/Art Park Summer Poetry Festivals.

In the interim, I had come to realize that as a teacher I was far more useful to undergraduates than to graduate students. I designed a monster course, the Intensive Survey of English Literature--a kind of boot camp in British literary history for upper-division English majors--which I offered in alternate years for two decades, with great pleasure. I have rarely taught graduate seminars.

A push in a new direction came in the mid-'eighties, when an NEH summer fellowship at the Dartmouth Dante Seminar started me studying Italian. Since then, after several summers at the Università per Stranieri in Perugia, I have regularly taught sophomore World Masterpieces courses on the Divine Comedy, as well as junior/senior period courses in Medieval and Renaissance literature that stress the Italian influences (Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Castiglione, Ariosto, Tasso) in the English tradition.

Aside from my own poetry, my principal current project is a verse translation of Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered. I expect to finish it by the end of the Fall 2005 semester; I will retire in January 2006.

Selected Publications

Books
All the Weight of the Still Midnight (poems), Outriders: 1972
Since When (poems), privately published: 1988
Since When--Second Series (poems), privately published: 1990
Pat Sonnets (poems), Street Press: 2000

Poems in Journals

Poetry: "Two Poems" (January, 1972); "Eight Pat Sonnets" (October, 1980); "Six Pat Sonnets" (April , 1982).
Shenandoah: "Two Poems" (Winter, 1983); "Three Sonnets from Unholy Weeks" (Winter `1983/84)
Sewanee Review: "Parsifal" (Fall, 1984)

Other poems in: American Poetry Review, Anonym, Berkeley Poetry Review, Buffalo Courier Express, Buffalo News, Choice (Chicago), Concerning Poetry, Descant, Escarpments, Hands, Klingsor, The Lyric, Michigan Quarterly Review, Presence, Prologue, Spree, Pequod, Pacific Poetry and Fiction Review, Pembroke, Street, Works, Works and Days, Xanadu,

Fiction

"The Scythe of Saturn" in: Michael Blackburn, Jon Silkin and Lorna Tracy (edd.), Stand One (London: Victor Gollancz, 1984).

Translations

"The Scythe of Saturn" in: Michael Blackburn, Jon Silkin and Lorna Tracy (edd.), Stand One (London: Victor Gollancz, 1984).

Critical Articles

"Structure and Ceremony in Spenser's Epithalamion," ELH (June, 1968)
"Orpheus Dismembered: Operatic Myth Goes Underground," Salmagundi (Summer/Fall 1977)

Samples of Work

[Here are three poems that, I think, represent me at my best, such as it is.]

NOCTURNE

Because every blade of grass
points to a star and all light
has been lent to another
world
because wind and water
have enfranchised the swishing
of bare feet and the sleepy
cicadas
and because now
although the road is endless
the concrete of the road ends
at your toes
nobody knows
that a girl slips off her black
sweater in the pitch dark while
her man lies smiling and skinned
invisible even to
himself
and only the smell
tells field mice and foxes what
shape to give unfamiliar
fright
until night floats away
like a ghost in a garment
while morning paints nakedness
cleanly back on the landscape.

SHIBBOLETH

Let's say the overcast that has made gray
our air for years suddenly clears. The sun
comes out in a flash, triumphant. Let's say
for centuries no gentleness has won
more than a passing compliment, but now
all mankind opens yarely to the heart.
Say, though till now we've all been quick to allow
divorce, now in one glance none feels apart.

Let's say that's how it is. The sun shines and
our quarrels are the pastimes of our feeling
of solidarity. We understand
everyone with the need to be concealing
his need, though we can't force him to display it
in the one way we know, which is: "Let's say it."

THE DISAPPOINTMENT

He said yes.
He said it
all. He said

all that was
necessary.
He said he

would come. He
said he was
sure he would

come, firmly
insisted
that he would

be there when
occasion
called him. He

would come was
what he said.
He would come

was what he
said with great
emphasis.

Coming, he
said, was the
one thing he

was, so to
speak, wholely
committed to.

And he came.