At the Sept. 11, 2006, faculty meeting, English faculty member Rob Farnsworth, who spent the summer as the poet-in-residence at The Frost Place, a museum and arts center housed in poet Robert Frost’s former homestead in Franconia, N.H., offered this poem as part of the faculty’s Memorial Minute for the late John Tagliabue. Farnsworth also read a poem of Tagliabue’s, called “Sliding into the Future.”

Canzone

In Memoriam John Tagliabue, On the Gift of His Scarf The Frost Place, Franconia N.H August 2006

Amulet. Talisman. Banner of belief.
It would seem to have arrived so far before
Its season, this long, harlequin neckerchief

You’d wear crossing campus in the iron cold,
Your dancer’s step brisk behind January
Drifts — lively, discerning, meditative, bold

In self-possession. You were yourself possessed –
Wholly given to wild dapples of worlds and words.

Now by grace of your Grace, this keepsake arrives
At the old master’s mountain house as summer’s
Fading, cooling. Your last brave word to the wise

In our long dialogue, flag I should believe,
Bright counterpoint to my ever skeptical
Heart, wistfully reposing here beside old leaves

That evening’s dark will purify to shadow,
But which now a throbbing hummingbird still searches.

Dear, diminished things. Five days ‘til departure,
Until I return to our campus, as you’d
Come back, inspired, from Florence or Djakarta,

And pick back up the weaving of listeners with lines.
Now in time for last cold nights on the famous
Porch, for watching the waning silver moon climb

Out of the granite crest of Lafayette, I have your scarf,
Memory of a master whom I knew, not one who just

Wrote poems, but a Poet, in and of this hard, ravishing
World, whose talisman I will try to wear with courage.

The traditional memorial minute was read at the Sept. 11, 2006, faculty meeting by Professor of English Carole Anne Taylor for the late Professor Emeritus of English John  A.Tagliabue.

Fellow English faculty member  Rob Farnsworth read his own poem in memory of Tagliabue as well as one of the late poet’s own poems.

For John Tagliabue, who devoted 36 years to Bates as teacher, colleague, friend, raconteur and poet laureate, neither a memorial minute, nor even two voices, begins to suffice. Everyone who knew him has their favorite John stories, inadequately represented here. But we hope you’ll indulge us in rather more than a minute and remember this renowned American poet by reading his poems again or for the first time.

John was born in Cantu, Italy, in 1923, to a restauranteur father who encouraged John to dance for customers and a mother whose wit as a storyteller, even in advanced age in Lewiston, helped to explain the phenomenon of John. He received a B.A. and an M.A. from Columbia University, where he became a lifelong friend of Allen Ginsberg and knew such countercultural icons as William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.

But John preferred celebration even then, hung out with dancers, and, in 1946, married his life-partner Grace, a visual artist and fellow visionary whose glad kindness, it did not take a poet to recognize, warrants her name. He would teach in Beirut and several other places before coming to Bates in 1953, at a time when he was expected to get President Charles Phillips’ approval for any poems that he read or published. During the McCarthy era, at a time when faculty of color were few and far between and gay faculty knew that to be outed would mean summary dismissal, no doubt John’s and Grace’s support of civil rights, gay rights and the anti-war and anti-nuclear movements seemed to some dubious engagements. But with extraordinary charm to assist him, John negotiated this terrain by enriching and subverting simultaneously, with such liberatory and allusive poetic reference that a censor never stood a chance.

By the time I arrived in the late ’70s, his merged poetic and institutional personae had become so artful that I would have to learn that his studiously ethereal persona disguised a selective but extremely well-organized competence. (He wrote: “Does any one mail more mail than I do” / I don’t think so: not even Sears Roebuck, / not even seals spouting on their way to one / of their favorite really pleasurable resorts do….”) His colleague of the time Bud Rovett tells a story of walking across the Quad with John and running into President Phillips, for whom John performed a spontaneously hyperbolic encomium to the spring, the birds and the character of infinite wonder until the President managed his formal departure and John turned to his friend and said, “Well, no more committees for another year.”

And yet, on his own terms, he gave unstintingly generous gifts to the College. Among Bates’s many wonderful teachers, probably no one has been more often invoked or remembered as legendary while still alive, and nobody could match John for how well he kept in touch with former students all over the world. John’s pedagogy, which relied on inspired preparation, involved arriving early to cover the blackboard with brilliantly diverse and relevant quotations, the excitement of crosscultural connections in graphic juxtaposition. Becoming what he was doing, he would arrive in black to teach Hamlet or in a bright multicolored striped sweater to talk about Shakespearean fools. An avid and perceptive world traveler who had six Fulbrights, he taught in Greece, Spain, Brazil, Italy, Japan and the People’s Republic of China; and at Bates, he was the first to teach Asian and other world literatures beyond the European. And, of course, he acted as the first mentor for many who became littérateurs in their own right. He saw his task clearly: to foster a love of literature so intense that it would last his students’ lifetimes. Appropriately, they found him “Buddhaesque,” full of spiritually informed laughter and wisdom (my son was sure that whoever designed Yoda must have known John first). And abundant testimony suggests that he never failed to enact what he taught in a pedagogy at once lyrical, dramatic and utopian in its energies.

I’ll offer here just a couple of comments from a memorial Web site started by Richard Carlson that also includes some of John’s last poems and correspondence, and hope it will suggest the character of his effect on students. John Holt wrote: “He was the Sage of Lewiston and the light that woke us up…. He was the Buddha Uproar at dawn on Mount David, masked dancer, Dionysian spirit, Vishnu by the Androscoggin.” And Diane Davies speaks for many: “…the world needs to hear more of his work. Those of us who knew and loved him were very lucky indeed. It is shocking, like he used to say the death of Mercutio was shocking, to see so much vitality snuffed out forever. So that he may not wholly die then, do what you can to keep his poetry alive.”

As colleague, that vitality brought us all daily delight. John’s early rounds made poems appear on our doors before we arrived, often geared specifically to us. If you’d given him a weird-shaped potato from your garden, say, by the following day it might become the Willendorf Venus making out with Wittgenstein. He involved us in the annual United Nations of Poetry in his living room, where students and teachers alike brought and read poetry across the cultures, as well as in such rich imaginative productions as the fantastical Mario Puppet Plays. Always the singer of praise songs for humble moments or great thinkers, he treated literary, cultural discussions with anyone as worthy of the highest seriousness. And since he celebrated his colleagues, friends and students with the same effusive glee that springs from his poems (indeed, often in the poems), he made us all want to live up to such high description.

The first four volumes of poetry — Poems (1950); A Japanese Journal (1966); The Buddha Uproar (1970); and The Doorless Door (1970) — preceded two later collections ranging over many years, The Great Day: Poems, 1962-1983, and New and Selected Poems: 1942-1997. Those lauding John as a poet read like a Who’s Who in American poetry, including Gwendolyn Brooks (“a shrewd candor that includes beauty, music and an exciting energy”); Hayden Carruth (“a thread of sanity in the general murk, a constant music”); John Ciardi (“like common daylight curuscating through a prism”); Amy Clampit (“a Franciscan act of courtesy and praise”); Denise Levertov (“profuse and various, combin[ing] innocence and knowledge in an unique way”); and X.J. Kennedy, who called him “the Shelleyan colossus of the North.” Locally, John mined the Bates world for lyrical incentives and always surprised, from “Highest Honors; coolness breeze” to my favorite, the poem called “To Dedicate a Library,” read on the inauguration of Ladd Library. Several talk of reviving the puppet plays, and you may now see some of Grace’s miraculous puppets on display in Ladd. John’s poetic stature continues to grow, and Syracuse University has archived his notebooks, journals and correspondence.

When poets came to visit, John frequently introduced them with a praise-poem of his own, so it’s most fitting that Rob perform that function here. But because John was so fond of the luminous detail, I want to end with a personal image of John, who, although Grace grew gorgeous flowers, was in much too intimate communion with nature to own a lawnmower. Nevertheless, when a neighbor mentioned that John’s unkempt grass was spilling through the fence, he took Grace’s largest scissors and plopped himself down in sundry spots to cut concentric circles around himself, producing a temple-like configuration of these stunningly mystical donuts. So we, too, should “weave a circle around him thrice” (Kubla Khan), because he has “drunk the milk of paradise,” and be grateful, in his words, that:

moment by moment we were
granted  all this
verbal eternity.

Professor Emeritus of English John A. Tagliabue, a member of the Bates faculty from 1953 to 1989 and author of six books of poetry, including New and Selected Poems, 1942-1997 (National Poetry Foundation, 1998), died May 31 in Providence, R.I., where he had lived with his wife, Grace, since 1998.

He was 82. In addition to Grace, whom he married in 1946, he is survived by two daughters, Francesca Tagliabue and Dina Tagliabue; and four grandchildren, Phoebe and Alexander Gould, and Juniper and Terra Tagliabue.

The family will hold a private memorial gathering in Providence on July 1.

• Bates has initiated the John Tagliabue Poetry Fund
• The faculty’s Memorial Minute was read in September
• Alumni share memories, stories, and anecdotes
• Rhode Island poet laureate Tom Chandler pays tribute

John Tagliabue was born in Cantu, Italy, in 1923, and came to America with his family at age 4, growing up in New Jersey. A 1997 profile in The Bates Student described Tagliabue the child “as a wanderer” who enjoyed taking the 42nd Street ferry to New York City, where he said he would “walk all day” on the city streets.

He attended Columbia University, where he was encouraged to write by the poet Mark Van Doren. He also pursued dance. “The most natural actions for me are dancing and writing poetry,” he once said. “Otherwise I feel a little awkward.”

After graduating from Columbia in 1944, he taught at the American University in Beirut. He subsequently studied in Florence, and won a Fulbright grant to teach at the University of Pisa (it was one of several Fulbrights, his final one coming in 1993-94 to lecture and give readings in Indonesia). He later would teach in Tokyo and at Fudan University, in Shanghai. Prior to his appointment to the Bates faculty, he taught at the State College of Washington and Alfred University.

At Bates, he taught “Cultural Heritage,” “World Literature” (which introduced Asian literature into the Bates curriculum), “The Short Story” and “Writing on the Maine Scene,” as well as courses focusing on Shakespeare, major American writers and modern poetry. Of his generous spirit with his students, Tagliabue once said, “I love to sound off with praise…a way of lifting the self and the world…as if it’s a holiday.” He welcomed students into his and Grace’s home regularly, hosting what became known as “United Nations of Poetry” gatherings of students who read their poetry.

He published thousands of poems, and he once called his poetry “on-the-spot lyicism. My poetry is not sedentary or academic ­­— there’s a lot of song and dance to it.” As there was in his Bates career. In 2003, upon the dedication of the John Tagliabue Prize in Creative Writing, fellow poet Rob Farnsworth noted Tagliabue’s “passionate dedication…to his writing and to his teaching, as well as the example of his omniverous imagination, by which all his travels, in body and mind, come together in praises wry and joyful, ecstatic and generous.” Tagliabue elicited laughter by replying, “Oh, Rob, you know how I love to be loved.”

Tagliabue studied at Columbia alongside Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, yet pursued a much different style than those Beat Generation peers. Ginsberg, a friend of Tagliabue’s, “tried to get me into that group,” he told The Bates Student in 1997. More inclined to hang out with friends in the dance community in Greenwich Village, Tagliabue would decline. “I instinctively wasn’t interested,” he said. Tagliabue’s poetry, Booklist noted, “demonstrates a certain eclecticism in his approach, uniting an almost old-fashioned technicality…with Eastern philosophy and culture, and an acute interest in and absorption of the natural world.” His poems “are often graceful, fluid and lyrical, while simultaneously exploring the boundaries of thought and poetic structure.”

He was something of a poet of record for Bates, composing and sharing many poems reflecting campus or personal milestones, or events in the lives of friends. He would say, of his poetry written during times of controversy, “All art is political. All art reveals values.” When John Kennedy was assassinated, a Tagliabue poem, “Cortege / 1963,” was published in the Student:

The shadow of the horseless rider in the sun;
the casket drawn slowly; over the face of the dead Hero
the stars; in the memory of the lovers the stars.

He was a frequent visitor back to Bates, and at Reunion 2004 he joined a writers’ discussion with poet Pam Alexander ’70 and novelist Elizabeth Strout ’77. After his visit, he sent this poem to Bates Magazine:

Of course
they made the most of it in Italian Operas,
extended repetitions
of Addio, Addio, Farewell repetitions with
varied trills,
sustained narcissism of farewell, I give my
body away, to
air, earth, to sea, to God knows What;
whatever you do
do it with undulations of song, comedy if
possible, coughing
or snorting or if fortunate cavorting.
I adore you, Sing
O audiences, former students who are former
teachers,
keep paying for my upkeep, keep my company
with
Shakespeare, Blake, Farewell, my Fancy (Whitman);
Fare Well,
my sailing or flying or ambling poems, Fare Well
lyrically
with fanfare of cadenzas, my future readers of poems,
keep the
dialogue lushly operatic; Rejoice Rejoice, extend
and again
extend the many undulating Performances, O Partners
in the Arias.