Poet Farnsworth inaugurates new convocation tradition

Bates News — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 05:00:51 +0000

Convocation is about the new, and novelty abounded at the 2006 Bates College convocation. Of course, the ceremony always opens a new academic year — this is the 152nd — and welcomes new students, some 500 of them this time around.

Yet this year’s convocation, held Sept. 6, also included the public debut of the College’s new chaplain, Rev. William Blaine-Wallace, and marked the start of an important tradition. Where Bates for years has invited outside speakers to give the convocation address, that honor this time went to a faculty member, the poet and English professor Rob Farnsworth.

A Convocation address from Robert Farnsworth (video and audio)
Orientation Slide Show

Also speaking was Bates President Elaine Tuttle Hansen, who offered valuable advice about two fundamental skills: listening and asking good questions. “A Bates education,” Hansen noted, “isn’t just about getting better and better at answering harder and harder questions. Answers matter, but in some ways and at some point they matter far less than you might think.”

Asking a faculty member to give the convocation address, explained Dean of the Faculty Jill Reich, re-emphasizes the primacy of the faculty-student relationship at Bates. But it also honors an elemental bond sometimes overlooked: the one between arriving first-years and their forerunners who graduated last May.

Chosen by last spring’s seniors to represent the quality of Bates teaching, Reich explained, Farnsworth was the “symbolic gift from the departing class of 2006 to those who take their place as members of the class of 2010.”

Farnsworth returned to campus after spending July and August as poet-in-residence at The Frost Place, a museum housed in poet Robert Frost’s former homestead in New Hampshire. Titled Three Lower-Case Virtues, his talk considered the importance of passion, discipline and generosity to the college experience.

The best kind of human passion arises when we “make and comprehend metaphor,” Farnsworth said. More than a poetic device, metaphor is potentially a way of thinking, even of being — “the central passion of the human creature.” Metaphor, learning and life, he explained, are all about making connections. And that’s a process best done “by hand, on foot, by means of your senses, by listening, by your strict, passionate attention to what happens.”

He discussed discipline as pertaining to thought, urging his listeners to be “susceptible, but not sentimental; suspicious, but not cynical; rigorous, but not rigid.” But it may have been his treatment of generosity that rang most resoundingly across the Quad. “The world would be a more interesting and livable place were we all to strive to be not fulfilled, but fulfilling, people,” he said.

President Hansen devoted most of her talk to the skills of listening and questioning. “Like the best and hardest listening,” she said, “good questions reflect careful observation of what’s difficult, what’s confusing, what’s strange, what’s startling. They entail self-questioning, self-doubt, and, like listening to yourself, they can produce self-awareness.”

“Institutions need to listen and ask questions, too,” Hansen added, noting that Bates itself is in a time of profound asking and listening as it revamps its general-education requirements, undertakes new substantial new construction and explores what kind of campus climate exists for members of underserved minorities.

Blaine-Wallace, an Episcopal priest who joined the Bates community in August as multifaith chaplain, closed the ceremony with a benediction. “Open us to the gift, and strengthen us for the task, of creating together the next chapter of Bates’ great tradition of imaginative and enlightened care for a fragile Earth, and respectful attention to a hurting world,” he said.

Bill Jack ’08, president of the student government, opened the speeches with a brief welcome whose high energy belied his advice to the new students: “Just relax.” No one was relaxing as the ceremony began, thanks to an ominous drizzle, but by the end a warm sun was cutting through the clouds and vignetting the Coram Library stage.

Poet Robert Farnsworth to address Bates College convocation

Bates News — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 15:27:41 +0000

Bates College begins its 152nd academic year with a convocation address by Robert Farnsworth, a member of the English faculty and a nationally known poet, at 4:10 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 6, on the college’s Historic Quadrangle.

Farnsworth 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. Farnsworth’s convocation address is titled “Three Lower-Case Virtues.”

The convocation ceremony is open to the public at no charge. The rain site is the Alumni Gymnasium. For more information call 207-786-6255.

Farnsworth will join Bates President Elaine Tuttle Hansen in welcoming more than 500 students new to Bates, part of a student body totaling 1,872.

A Lewiston resident, Farnsworth has published two collections of poetry with Wesleyan University Press, Three or Four Hills and a Cloud (1982) and Honest Water (1989). His poems have appeared in such national publications as The Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Ploughshares and the Beloit Poetry Journal.

From 1998 to 2004, Farnsworth served as poetry editor for The American Scholar, the highly esteemed literary and intellectual quarterly of the national honor society Phi Beta Kappa. He received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry in 1989, and has also won Bates’ Kroepsch Award for excellence in teaching.

As poet-in-residence at The Frost Place, a farmhouse where the famed poet Robert Frost spent 19 summers, Farnsworth lived, wrote and offered public readings in July and August 2006. “I can think of no other writer I’d rather be haunted and inspired by than Frost,” he told the college’s alumni magazine last spring.

A visiting assistant professor of English at Bates and a member of the faculty since 1990, Farnsworth’s courses include modern Irish poetry, an offering reflecting a longstanding interest in Irish literature.

In past years, outside speakers have been invited to address convocations at Bates. Farnsworth’s address this year begins a new tradition of faculty speakers, a practice intended to emphasize the enduring importance of the student-faculty relationship to a Bates education.

Bates is welcoming 494 new first-year students and 17 transfer students this fall. According to the college’s admissions office, 87 percent of the new students graduated in the top fifth of their high school class. New students have residences in 33 states and 32 foreign countries, from Bangladesh to Vietnam.

More than 10 percent of the new students are U.S. students from underrepresented minority groups, 5 percent are international students and 4 percent are citizens of both the United States and another country. First-generation-to-college students make up 8 percent of the entering class.

Some 1,717 students are expected on campus this fall, with another 155 in Bates-sponsored programs off-campus, including 22 in the Bates Fall Semester Abroad Program in Austria, 17 in the Bates Fall Semester Abroad Program in China, 129 on junior semester abroad programs and 23 in junior year abroad programs.

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Poet Farnsworth inaugurates new convocation tradition

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Poet Robert Farnsworth to address Bates College convocation