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Home , Spencer Trask, Sylvia Plath, Yaddo

FALL NEWS 2015

POET’S CORNER It is rare for arts awards to be announced without seeing the name of a artist – or two. This year, however, four Yaddo poets were longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry:

Marilyn Hacker A Stranger’s Mirror: New and Selected Poems, 1994- 2014 (W.W. Norton & Company) Jane Hirshfield The Leap: , The Beauty (Knopf) and a Mesmerizing Season Patrick Phillips Elegy for a Broken erhaps no two figures in twentieth- the young couple arrived at Yaddo (Plath Machine (Knopf) century Anglo- had been recommended by Alfred Kazin have given rise to more partisanship as “the best writer at Smith, and a very than Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. remarkable girl in every way”) it was the Lawrence Raab It’s a commonplace that interest first time in three years of marriage that Mistaking Each Pin the personal — their marriage, his they’d had separate, private workspaces. Other for Ghosts philandering, their separation, her suicide — Hughes worked on his second book of (Tupelo Press) has clouded interest in the purely literary. poetry, Lupercal, and an oratorio based Jonathan Bate’s new and well-received on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, while biography, Ted Hughes: An Unauthorized Plath dug in on a large number of new CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL! Life, takes the experiences of Hughes’s poems that were ultimately collected in life and shows how he fashioned them her first book,The Colossus and Other Plath had dreamed of gathering forces into his robust, earthy poetry. (Hughes was Poems. Plath and Hughes, who were into a tight tense ball for the artistic leap. a compatible subject for Bate, an Oxford practicing meditation daily and interested At Yaddo, she made that leap.” (Excerpt don and Shakespeare scholar — during in hypnotism, were part of a lively group follows.) national service at a tiny RAF outpost that included Malcolm Cowley, Ned in Yorkshire, Hughes passed the time Rorem, and May Swenson. Bate writes: addo is an artists’ community memorizing Shakespeare’s plays.) “Very few Plath poems written before located on a 400-acre estate in The excerpt here details Hughes’s Yaddo stick in the mind; almost all the YSaratoga Springs. It was founded and Plath’s time at Yaddo in the autumn hundred or so that Sylvia wrote thereafter in 1900 by a wealthy financier called of 1959, representing it as the fulcrum sear themselves into the consciousness and his wife, Katrina, of Plath’s development as a poet. When of the attentive reader. Years earlier, who wrote poetry herself. Left without immediate heirs by the deaths of their

ABOVE: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in Concord, , December 1959. Photo by Marcia Brown Stern. continues on page 4 Courtesy of . AT LEFT and on mailing panel: Photo by Meredith Maran. NEWS

Blaze of Color l A Magnificent Stained Glass Window Restored t the time the Yaddo Mansion was Though it had undergone conservation in Art and The Arrival of the Halve Maen, 1609 completed in 1893, stained glass was the 1980s, a recent assessment determined (1908), which decorates the Reading Room the height of fashion. It represented that the central panel of the window was in of the New-York Historical Society. craftsmanship, spirituality, and critical need of attention. In October 2014, Over the next ten months, principal uniqueness – qualities that mass it was removed and delivered to Venturella restorer Tom Venturella and his colleague Aproduction threatened to make obsolete. Perhaps no one was more sensitive to the costs of industrial growth than the agents of change themselves. Like other people of their time with industrial and stock market fortunes, Spencer and Katrina Trask were patrons of the revival of Gothic and English Renaissance styles and commissioned numerous stained glass windows for their Saratoga Springs and Tuxedo residences. In subject matter, they range from simple forms drawn from nature, such as the airy pink roses in Katrina’s bedroom, to more complex narrative scenes. The window in the foyer of the Mansion depicts a romanticized encounter between Studio in , whose previous Jim Murphy cleaned each of the window’s indigenous Americans and settlers on the land commissions include works in the Tiffany 1300 individual pieces of glass. Once every that would become Yaddo. collection of the Morse Museum of American piece had been treated, it was fitted into a

2 Fall 2015 Tiffany pattern made of new lead. While most celebrate. Guest speaker Jennifer windows of this size are comprised of small Anderson, associate professor panels connected by a lap joint, ours is a of history at SUNY Stony Brook, single panel, and the restoration team had to spoke of the window as a historical build a wooden frame in order to flip it. (Tom artifact, observing that that the Venturella said it “wanted to fold like a large 1890s marked the end of armed piece of cloth” and they “had to move like conflict between Native Americans ballet dancers” to hold it steady.) It weighs and settlers that there was a approximately 325 pounds. The window was cultural trend toward recasting reinstalled on August 28. the past in a benevolent light. The Two days later, around fifty friends of medium itself lends itself to that Yaddo, including elected officials, gathered to use: as she noted, the purpose

of stained glass, with its ecclesiastical associations, is “to elevate, to inspire.” She finished by likening the window’s glass fragments to pieces of a shared American identity. Following her remarks, New York State Senator Kathy Marchione, whose help was instrumental in securing for Yaddo a combined $500,000 in state funding to begin restoration of the Mansion, and who called Yaddo a “gem of the community,” introduced Congressman Paul Tonko. The congressman said that as a “member of the Congressional Arts Caucus and the National Heritage Areas Caucus, [he] look[s] forward to supporting Yaddo and all it gives back to the Capital Region each and every day.” The two raised their glasses and led everyone in a toast to a job well done. The restoration of the window is just the first step in what will be a multiyear undertaking to preserve the house for the benefit of the more than two hundred artists who come to Yaddo each year to work. It is the acknowledged heart of the artist retreat, which was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2013 in recognition of its contribution to American culture, and an iconic sight for the fifty thousand annual visitors to the Yaddo Gardens.

OPPOSITE PAGE Top: Once cleaned, the fragments were fixed in place with pins until the glazing process – the final step – began. Left: Each piece of glass was assigned a number corresponding to a place in the lead network. Note the coins for scale. Photos by Peter Peregrine.

THIS PAGE Top: Congressman Paul Tonko (center) talks with restorers Jim Murphy (at far left) and Tom Venturella and State Senator Kathy Marchione. Left: The window is a testament to the superb craftsmanship of its original makers and restorers. Photos by Lynn Farenell.

Yaddo is grateful to American Express, Nana Lampton, and the Charles R. Wood Foundation for their generous support of this project.

3 NEWS

THE LEAP continued from front cover in the woods – the perfect place for him. ‘A the Intermediate State’. These ‘intermediate four young children, the Trasks decided regular little house to himself’, Sylvia wrote states’ included the dream state, the moment to bequeath their palatial home to future to her mother, ‘all glassed in and surrounded of death in which the clear light of reality is generations of writers, composers, painters by pines, with a wood stove for the winter, experienced, and the ‘bardo of rebirth’, which and other creative artists. Katrina had a vision a cot, and huge desk’. A writing hut away involved hallucinatory images of men and of generations of talented men and women from the main house would be his salvation women erotically entwined. The project was yet unborn walking the lawns of Yaddo, at Court Green in later years. The chance to never finished, but it took Ted into territory ‘creating, creating, creating’. The idea was live together but work apart was exactly what that he would make his own in almost all his to nurture the creative process by providing they needed. Meals were taken care of and later mythic works. an opportunity for artists to work without the food was very good, a welcome change His main project at Yaddo was his play (now interruption in peaceful, green surroundings. from the campground cookery of the summer. lost, save for a few fragments), ‘The House The great American short-story writer John Breakfast was available from eight till nine, of Taurus’. Sylvia described it in a letter home Cheever would write that the ‘forty or so lunchboxes were then collected and taken to written in early October: ‘a symbolic drama acres on which the principal buildings of each resident’s studio, and in the evening they based on the Euripides play The Bacchae, all gathered for dinner. only set in a modern industrial community Being a quiet season, under a paternalistic ruler’. She hoped that there were only a dozen it would at least get a staged reading, but artists in residence, explained that she had not yet typed it up. including painters, an During the weeks at Yaddo Ted also revised interesting composer and one or two of the poems in his forthcoming a couple of other poets ‘Lupercalia’ collection, but for poetic whose names were not development it was more of a breakthrough familiar to them. moment for Sylvia. Before Yaddo, her verse One of the painters, had been highly accomplished but somehow Howard Rogovin, did brittle. A self-description in a journal entry of portraits of both Sylvia late 1955 was harsh but apt: ‘Roget’s trollop, and Ted. For Sylvia, he parading words and tossing off bravado for set up his easel in the an audience’ (Roget’s Thesaurus was the old greenhouse. To the vade mecum of writers looking for unusual sound of ‘rain in the words for ordinary things). Very few Plath conifers’, he painted poems written before Yaddo stick in the Sylvia lifted out of herself mind; almost all the hundred or so that Sylvia ‘In a flaming of oils’, wrote thereafter sear themselves into the her ‘lips exact’. But he consciousness of the attentive reader. Years also seemed to catch a earlier, Plath had dreamed of gathering forces shadow on her shoulder, into a tight tense ball for the artistic leap. At a dark marauding Yaddo, she made that leap. ‘doppelganger’. At one On 10 October 1959, she wrote in her point, a graceful snake journal: ‘Feel oddly barren. My sickness slid across the dusty floor is when words draw in their horns and of the hot greenhouse. the physical world refuses to be ordered, Both this portrait and recreated, arranged and selected. When the one of Ted, which will I break into a new line of poetry? Feel was said to be less trite.’ It was certainly odd to feel barren West House, the second-largest house for artists on the estate, where Sylvia successful, are lost. when she was at last pregnant. Then on Plath and Ted Hughes lived and worked in 1959. The composer was the 13th: ‘Very depressed today. Unable Yaddo stand have seen more distinguished Chou Wen-chung, a United States immigrant to write a thing. Menacing gods. I feel activity in the arts than any other piece of from Shandong in China. A protégé of the outcast on a cold star.’ Ted told her to ‘get ground in the English-speaking community radical experimentalist Edgar Varèse, he desperate’. On the night of the 21st, she felt and perhaps the world’. sought to integrate Eastern and Western ‘animal solaces’ as she lay with him, warm When Ted and Sylvia arrived just after Labor classical (and modernist) musical traditions. in bed. The next day, walking in the woods Day, the main house had been closed for They struck up a friendship and Ted began in the frosty morning light, she found the winter. They were given spacious rooms in the work on a libretto for him, for an oratorio ‘Ambitious seeds of a long poem made up clapperboard West House, among the trees. based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. of separate sections: Poem on her Birthday. Each of them had a separate ‘studio’, Sylvia’s The original title, Bardo Thödol, literally To be a dwelling on madhouse, nature. on the top floor of the house and Ted’s out means ‘Liberation through Hearing during The superb identity, selfhood of things.

4 Fall 2015 To be honest with the train pulled out of Homecoming what I know and have the station, Ted shouted Newest Board Member Has Strong known. To be true to out, ‘We’ll be back in two Links to Our Past and Future my own weirdnesses.’ years!’ He was looking Madhouse, nature, forward to home, and e are delighted to announce that identity, self, weirdness: English beer, having attorney Willis J. Goldsmith was in ‘Poem for a Birthday’, found the American Welected to Membership at our board Sylvia began for the variety ‘unspeakable and meeting in September. first time to write unspewable’. Goldsmith’s association with Yaddo goes poetry overtly about her On a clear blue day in back many years. Raised in Saratoga Springs — suicide attempt, mental March 1959, Ted and he returns frequently to visit family who still breakdown and electro- Sylvia had gone out from live in town – he was a recipient of the Yaddo convulsive therapy, their little Willow Street Medal, which is awarded annually to two albeit refracted through apartment to Winthrop, Saratoga Springs High School seniors, one a symbolic narrative of the southernmost point man and one woman, who exemplify academic descent and rebirth. of ’s North Shore. excellence and character. He earned his Within a fortnight In the morning, Sylvia undergraduate degree at Brown and his law the sequence was had been with her degree at . A Jones Day ‘miraculously’ written. psychoanalyst, probing partner since 1983, and resident in the firm’s The title came from the further at her feelings New York City office since 2005, he chaired fact that her birthday fell about her dead father. the firm’s labor and employment practice for halfway through the process of composition. It was time, they decided, for her to visit Otto many years and What was it that released the flow? The Plath’s grave in Winthrop for the first time. subsequently headed example of Lowell confronting his nervous When they found it, she felt cheated by the the New York breakdown in was crucial. Ted, plain and unassuming flat stone, tempted to office. He continues who was convinced that this was indeed the dig him up in order to ‘prove he existed and to represent turning point in her poetic career, pointed really was dead’. management to the influence of the poetry of Theodore Then they walked over some rocks beside clients across the Roethke, which she read in the Yaddo library the ocean. The wind was bitter. Their feet country in labor (where she also renewed her acquaintance got wet and they picked up shells with cold and employment matters. His many career with the wonderfully confident and supple hands. Ted walked alone to the end of the highlights include successfully arguing a US poetry of ). Conversations bar, in his black coat, ‘defining the distance Supreme Court case on behalf of the US with Ted about the death and rebirth structure of stones and stones humped out of the Chamber of Commerce and representing the of Bardo Thödol would also have played sea’. Afterwards, Sylvia wrote a poem called New York Philharmonic in its negotiations with a part. But her journal offers other clues. ‘Man in Black’. It was soon accepted by the the American Federation of Musicians. He and It reveals that she was ‘electrified’ by , one of her first big successes his wife Marilynn have a deep appreciation consonance between the imagery she was in getting her work into high-profile print. for the arts, especially theater and classical developing and the language of Jung’s It catches the moment: the breakwaters music. In addition to Yaddo, he has long been Symbols of Transformation, another book in absorbing the force of the sea, the March ice associated with Appleseed, a nonprofit network the well-stocked Yaddo library. And a couple on the rock pools, ‘And you’ – Ted, that is – of seventeen public interest justice centers, of days earlier, her creativity released by some striding out across the white stones: and currently serves as a member of the board. breathing exercises that Ted taught her, she He recently completed a six-year term as a had written two poems that pleased her, one in your dead member of the board of the Legal Aid Society to ‘Nicholas’, the name they had chosen for Black coat, black shoes, and your of New York. their child if it proved to be a boy, and the Black hair … other on ‘the old father-worship subject’. The MILESTONES … father who had died when she was eight and There he stands, a ‘Fixed vortex’ on the edge ember Deborah Berke has been the unborn child in her womb. She was on a of the land, holding it all together, the stones, appointed dean of the Yale School cusp, about eighteen weeks pregnant. Did the air, Sylvia’s life and her father’s death. Mof Architecture. When she assumes the baby quicken and give its first kick at this The line-break catapults the word ‘dead’ into the role on July 1, 2016, she will be the time? Before her stood tomorrow. double sense. At one level, Ted’s coat is dead first woman at the helm since Yale started They returned to Wellesley just before black in the sense of pitch black. At another teaching architecture a hundred years ago. Thanksgiving. Sylvia was now noticeably level, it is black because black is the colour of Meanwhile, Susan Brynteson, longtime pregnant. Aurelia later remembered Ted death. Sylvia’s black imagination has indeed Member and Recording Secretary, has retired working away in the upstairs bedroom while dug Otto out of his grave – and reincarnated after thirty-five years as vice-provost of Sylvia ‘sorted and packed the huge trunk’ him in her husband. libraries at the University of Delaware. Under that they had set up in the breezeway. On her leadership, the library system developed the day they left, ‘Sylvia was wearing her hair From Ted Hughes by Jonathan Bate a strong research focus, became a pioneer in in a long braid down her back with a little Copyright © 2015 by Jonathan Bate. offering state-wide programs on information red wool cap on her head.’ She looked like a Reprinted courtesy of , an imprint of literacy, and acquired the senatorial archive of teenage girl going off to boarding school. As HarperCollins Publishers. Vice President Joseph Biden.

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Out and About: Yaddo in Conversation Our fall was eventful, in every sense: as either the host or invited guest, we were busy engaging in talks and forums in Saratoga and farther afield on topics that ranged from diversity in the arts to psychology and global conflict.

mpathy and intellect were on display when Yaddo writer and board member , Eprofessor of clinical psychology at and the president of PEN America, appeared at NYU Washington DC on October 7. Solomon and Yaddo President Elaina Richardson discussed the genesis of his award-winning book Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity; his reportage from Afghanistan; and the effect of screen time on learning. A catalyst for much of the exchange was his forthcoming book Far

and Away: Reports from the Brink Photo by Anika Mian of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years, a selection of essays regular contributor to , for about finding herself at the center of a public about cultural transformation. conversation. health storm in 2009, when she published In residence in 2008, 2009, and 2010, a piece for the Times on parental anxieties Give Me Shelter: Perri Klass is a second-generation Yaddo over the H1N1 vaccine. Her hospital had a Perri Klass on Mothers, Medicine, artist: her mother, Sheila Solomon Klass, supply, and she took calls both from parents and Refuge author of nineteen books, was a guest for a who wanted it at all costs and by parents The Community Foundation Board for the month in 1974. Klass recalled her mother’s whose hostility to vaccines outweighed their Greater Capital Region supports philanthropy “messianic passion for writing” and said that panic over the flu. When the article came out, in our region by matching she believed her mother was “never more she received a threatening letter that was donors to their interests, herself” than she was in the month she was investigated by the FBI. As she noted, there including the arts, and at Yaddo; at other times, the busy English are a great many other Yaddo writers whose we were delighted to professor and mother of three had to write work addresses controversial topics or takes host them at Yaddo between five and seven in the morning. them to turbulent areas of the world. on an afternoon in Growing up in a household “knowing that late September. Karen there was something so special going on in Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Bilowith, the Foundation’s board chair, was the attic that [her] mother would get up at five the Evolving 21st-Century Residency joined by thirty guests, many of whom were at to do it,” Klass knew that writing would be part When Yaddo was founded in 1900, it was Yaddo for the first time. of her life as well. She spoke of the leaps in one of only a handful of artist residency After a hard-hat tour of one of the five new creativity and productivity that are possible at programs in the world — virtually the only live-work studios currently under construction Yaddo, saying: “you don’t know what you’re game in town. Today, there are over 1500. and a walk through the Greenhouse capable of doing” until you have a period of Many of these newer residency programs Studios, which opened in 2013, the group uninterrupted time and privacy to create. operate along very different lines than joined Yaddo writer Perri Klass, a practicing While Yaddo’s virtues as a retreat in this our own, eschewing the retreat model for physician; professor of pediatrics and sense are well known, Klass also called community engagement. Yaddo’s annual journalism at New York University; children’s attention to another aspect of our history — as board meeting this past September featured book author, novelist, nonfiction writer; and a safe place for challenging ideas. She talked a panel discussion on new models of

6 Fall 2015 supporting creativity curated by one of our WHILE SIGNING Directors, Laura Callanan. Lisa Hoffman, COPIES of The Fox at associate director of McColl Center for Art the Comics Depot in + Innovation in Charlotte, and Alyce Myatt, downtown Saratoga an independent consultant working with the Springs, writer/illustrator Maryland Institute College of Art, joined us Dean Haspiel got a visit to share their insights. Trained as a botanist, from filmmaker Mitch Hoffman said that the McColl Center, built McCabe. Both were in in the 1990s in the ruins of a church, serves residence this summer. as an “intermediary” between artists and Haspiel’s community. For example, one of the earliest new graphic projects she oversaw brought together artist novel Beef Aurora Robson, sculpture classes at a local with Tomato, community college, Charlotte’s Parks and an account of Recreation Department, and residents of his move from the Anita Stroud Park neighborhood; under Manhattan Robson’s direction, the college students to made artifacts out of plastic recovered from a in the late streambed and held an auction to benefit local 1990s, complete with improvements. Myatt, an expert in media arts surreal misadventures, and philanthropy, spoke about MICA’s new was published by Baltimore’s Artists Support for Economy and Alternative Comics this Equality initiative, whose goal is to connect fall. Fellow Yaddo writer artists to resources and help them launch Jonathan Ames wrote the sustainable businesses. The session was introduction. the start of a conversation that we hope to continue in the years ahead about ways that Yaddo can incorporate fresh approaches while staying true to our core mission. FRIDAY NIGHT Brought to You by Yaddo

Opening Doors and Dialogue risp fall days encourage curling How to encourage greater diversity up with a good book. And Yaddo’s in residencies was the topic of a highly authors have you covered. There’s anticipated panel at the annual conference ’s epic Purity of the Alliance of Artists Communities, C(Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Rick Moody’s which was held in Providence, Rhode witty Hotels of North Island, from October 13 through October America, and James 16. Yaddo President Elaina Richardson Kaplan’s Sinatra: The and Kemi Ilesamni, executive director of Chairman (Doubleday), the community-arts-based Laundromat a follow-up to Frank: Project, used Yaddo as a case study to The Voice, that gives discuss issues of outreach and community us the singer at the building. (Support for Ilesamni’s report on peak of his power, for underrepresented groups at Yaddo was good and ill. Jacob provided by the Hearst Foundation.) Mario Lawrence, subject of Garcia Durham, president of the Association a major exhibition at of Performing Arts Presenters, moderated. MoMA this year, gets The an encore at the Institute of Contemporary conference Art, Boston, where Leap Before You Look: kicked off Black Mountain College 1933-1957 is originally published the AAC’s on view; Lawrence taught at the college as The Price of twenty- in 1946. (Before you go, reread Vincent Salt, hits theaters. five-year Katz’s introduction to Black Mountain Cate Blanchett anniversary College: Experiment in Art (The MIT Press).) plays the upper- and had a record-breaking number of As we change over our closets for the new class Carol, attendees. Yaddo was recognized as a season, it’s a good time to listen to Jacki Rooney Mara the charter member of the Alliance on several Lyden’s podcast The Seams, on clothes and salesclerk (and occasions throughout the four days. their meaning. In December, Todd Haynes’s aspiring set designer) she falls in love adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Carol, with, in the 1950s. ABOVE: Audience at Yaddo’s panel (Open Doors) at the Alliance of Artists Communities conference. Photo by Murray Scott.

7 8 you know it! The firstresidents willbesnuglyinresidence before and servedonour board. Frankenthaler Foundation andwillbenamedforHelen, whospenttimeatYaddo wonderful newspaceshasbeen fullyfundedbyagenerousgrantfromtheHelen is complete,andplumbing electrical installationhasbegun.Oneofour studios underconstruction,when ourBoardhadatourthisSeptember. Framing : Fall sunlightbeamedononeofourfivenewlive-work REAL GETTING

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