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z y ish M iddlebury Opening remarks Bread Loaf School of English 24 June 2008 Good evening, and welcome to the opening of the eighty-ninth session of the Bread Loaf School of English. A very special welcome to the 118 students at this campus attending Bread Loaf for the first time, as well as to the many students who have attended at least one of our other campuses in a past summer and are in Vermont for the first time this year. Yesterday, many of you new Bread Loaf students came a day early, so that you could get to know the place, and some of the people, and look upon the returning students, mostly arriving today, as interlopers. I hope that you still feel a special glow about yourselves, because this evening’s welcoming remarks are mostly for you. The rest of us are always excited to see our new colleagues. So could all of you who are first-year students, as well as those who are attending the Vermont campus for the first time stand, and let the rest of us welcome you? Despite all that Emily and the rest of the staff and I do every year, I always feel that arriving here for the first time can be an unsettling, even an off-putting experience. All the returning people seem to be a part of a community already, whereas you as yet know no one, or, after yesterday, only a handful of people. You are understandably a bit wary. Everyone seems smug and certain about what a good school this is. You are understandably a bit skeptical. Some of you have been away from formal education for several years and are anxious about returning. Some of you are even sitting there with the dreadful suspicion that one, only one, terrible mistake was made by Sandy LeGault, our admissions officer, who fell asleep at the switch as she was reading your application. This, by the way, is in fact true. But to the wary, the skeptical, and the anxious, let me say that if you enter the summer determined to make the most of it and if the rest of us do our jobs, this summer will begin for most of you an extraordinary intellectual experience; you will have some of the greatest teachers of your lifetime; you will make some of the deepest friendships of a lifetime; and you will find yourself a member of one of the most gaining and stimulating communities you have ever joined. It’s a community that has an ideal, among others, of being a community of tolerance—across race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class. That’s not a bad communal ideal to begin with on opening night. There are many of you first-year people sitting there thinking that this is probably going to be a one-summer thing for you. But in fact it’s statistically almost certain that 80% of you--including many of you who think that it’s one summer and you’re outta here--will come here for four or five summers and receive the M.A. degree. It’s even statistically likely that a generous handful of you first-year people will be sitting in this theater or in Santa Fe, Asheville, or Oxford in another five years, beginning your second Bread Loaf degree, the M.Litt. There are right now about 25 M.Litt. candidates enrolled at Bread Loaf, most of them with a Bread Loaf M.A. degree already under their belts. All of you first-timers in Vermont, please drop by the Bread Loaf office, preferably early in the summer, see Elaine, and make an appointment to see either Emily Bartels or me for a talk during the summer. It will be entirely informal: a get- acquainted talk, a talk about your plans, a talk that I hope will answer at least most of your questions. Tonight, I’m welcoming you to the opening of Bread Loaf/Vermont, but other Bread Loaf campuses have already begun. We’ve started staggering the openings of our campuses, since many teachers, especially in the East, have school years that end very late, while others, especially in the South, have school years that begin very early. Bread Loaf/New Mexico opened two weeks ago; Bread Loaf/North Carolina opened a week ago; Bread Loaf/Oxford will open in still one more week. There are at last count almost 260 students here in Vermont. The great majority of you are teachers: public school, private school, and international schools; elementary, middle, and high school teachers, as well as college teachers; teachers of English, history, psychology, and art; substitute teachers, tutors, guidance counselors, cultural coordinators, student teachers, future teachers, and (I admire the modesty and candor of this category) possible future teachers. But there are also many of you from other professions as well. One of you is an assistant bookstore manager in Hawaii; another is a literary assistant to John Irving; of education, or any non-profit foundation and would be willing to make contacts there to explore the idea of their funding teachers to come to Bread Loaf, make an appointment to speak with Emily or me this summer. Once again, all of Bread Loaf, and I from the bottom of my heart, thank our comrade-in-arms for securing funding, Dixie Goswami, who, if a school superintendent’s door is slammed in her face, will climb over the transom and demand money for teachers to go to Bread _ Loaf. It’s going to be a great summer. Our major dramatic production will be Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. This marks, by the way, the very first time that Alan MacVey has ever presented a second production of a play he’s done before at Bread Loaf. He has been mentally reworking the play for 24 years, so it had better be good. Brian McEleney, who played Malvolio in 1984, will resume that role this summer. One of America’s most eminent poets, John Ashbery, will be reading here this summer, as will one of America’s most talented younger poets, Dan Chiasson. We will also have a poetry reading by Paul Muldoon, a fiction-reading by Patricia Powell, a talk by faculty member Margery Sabin and a faculty panel discussing this year’s play, Twelfth Night. But maybe above all, by a happy conjunction of the planets, this is going to be a summer of music. I have been lucky enough to enlist Bread Loaf student Alex Levin And of course each campus has its own talented group of seniors. Here in Vermont, they are the madrigalists, who will be led by Laura Brown. The most celebratory academic event at Bread Loaf each summer is the Elizabeth Drew Memorial Lecture, named after one of our most celebrated teachers and given each year by a distinguished critic or artist. There are many among the returning students who felt their hearts drop when this year’s catalog arrived and one of Bread Loaf’s most admired, indeed most loved, professors didn’t appear in the faculty listings. Isobel Armstrong had an unavoidable commitment that has prevented her from being with us for the full session, but she will be arriving in early July and will deliver the Elizabeth Drew Lecture on July 8. Many of you, I am sure, have heard about the vandalism this winter at the Homer Noble Farm, a mile or so west of here. The farm is intimately associated with Robert Frost, who, beginning in 1921, spent 42 of 44 successive summers there, while the School of English and the Writers’ Conference were in session. Frost’s own cabin is located a couple hundred yards north of the farmhouse; luckily, it went untouched by the vandals. The vandals, maybe 40 high-school-aged kids, broke a window to gain access to the house, partied, made a fire in the fireplace out of broken-up furniture, and, as the alcohol consumption increased, began generally trashing the place, throwing glasses from one end of the building to the other, Ricans in doors, and so forth. Despite the boorishness and the mean-spiritedness that always accompany vandalism, nothing truly important was destroyed, even though the articles were being published in Australia about the sacking of the great American poet’s farmhouse. I think it’s accurate to say that in the picture Leo looked really, I © mean royally, pissed. Lucy Maddox has remarked that the best possible treatment of the vandals would have been to usher them, one at a time, into a room and to be left there for an hour with Leo. Well. Leo, with blood in his eye, set out to see what he could find, and very shortly he came upon the clue that broke the case open. One of the vandals had parked in an area near the foot of the hill that leads to the Homer Noble Farm. In maneuvering his car to get out after the party was over, he somehow got his car stuck atop a snowbank, with none of its four wheels touching the ground. Don’t you hate it when that happens? It’s very difficult to drive away--and so he abandoned the car. I feel that much of this is worthy of the pen of the great Elmore Leonard, who of all the writers I know is the one most alive to the comic possibilities of the dumb criminal. Well. Leo discovered the car. Ah, said Leo to himself, this is perhaps relevant to the case. Long story short: the car led to the vandal, the vandal led to the rest of the vandals, and the case was solved. The leaders received punishments, while most of the young men were let off with suspended sentences. A part of the punishment of the nada. gives the phrase “poetic justice” a new, much richer meaning. They were sentenced to sit in on a course at Middlebury College on the poetry of Robert Frost. But even a cloudy story such as this one has a silver lining. Middlebury College at once set to work repairing the damage and, upon reflection, decided to renovate the entire farmhouse to make it as close as possible to what it was in Frost’s day. We are Jacques Lezra Victor Luftig Alan MacVey Carol MacVey Lucy Maddox Brian McEleney Paul Muldoon will arrive tomorrow, since he is today at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, discussing his authorship of a libretto for an opera that the Met has commissioned. Will Nash Patricia Powell Margery Sabin Shel Sax Jeffrey Shoulson Margery Sokoloff Robert Stepto Jonathan Strong Susanne Wofford will arrive later this week Craig Womack Michael Wood The Bread Loaf faculty. helpfulness as you move along every step from your initial inquiry through the directions for the travel that brings you here. And this time, let it all hang out, and please applaud them individually: Elaine Lathrop Sandy LeGault Judy Jessup Karen Browne Susan Holcomb Lexa deCourval You have almost certainly already met members of the Front Desk staff, who will be of constant and unremitting assistance to you this summer. They are led by Edward and Victoria Brown. There are three assistants to the director and associate director who are less immediately visible to the community than the Front Desk staff or the office staff, but without them the whole place would cease to function. They organize our dances and other parties; they make airport runs; they set up audio-visual equipment; they show up at the porch of your dorm at midnight on the evenings when some of you are feeling especially convivial—and loud; they first gently ask you to be quiet; then they try to cajole you into being considerate toward your fellow students; and then they issue the final threat, “Don’t make me call Emily.” I want you to see who they