Senior Lecturer Emeritus Robert L. Farnsworth passed away on Nov. 11, 2024, at age 70. Six years ago, this tribute was written and read at the May 2018 faculty meeting by his colleague Lillian Nayder, Dana Professor of English, to mark his retirement from the faculty.
Rob Farnsworth received a B.A. from Brown University and an M.F.A. from Columbia University. After teaching at SUNY Binghamton, the University of California Irvine, Ithaca College, and Colby College, he was appointed to the Bates faculty in 1990.
To have an accomplished, practicing poet teaching poetry — as a craft and a subject of literary study — transformed what we taught, and how. Rob established the creative writing concentration in English, now an essential part of the major and founded the annual reading series known today as Language Arts Live. In his more than 25 years at Bates, he has inspired and mentored generations of creative writers, some now well-published poets and novelists in their own right.
Rob published widely; his poetry has appeared in many magazines in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.: The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, and Ploughshares, to name just a few. He is the author of two collections from Wesleyan University Press: Three or Four Hills and a Cloud (1982) and Honest Water (1989). His most recent collection of poems, Rumored Islands, was published in 2010 by Harbor Mountain Press.
For seven years, Rob also edited poetry for The American Scholar. His work has won him a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship as well as a P.E.N. Discovery Citation. Rob was the poet-in-residence at The Frost Place in Franconia, N.H., during the summer of 2006. Rob leads literature discussion groups in the medical humanities for the Maine Humanities Council — meeting at hospitals, libraries, and elsewhere.
Rob’s insight and generosity are the stuff of legend. I myself have taken advantage of Rob’s goodness on many occasions — sometimes when faced with poems I’ve found inscrutable. In a near panic not long ago over Percy Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” which I had included on a syllabus in a moment of folly, I turned to Rob. He calmly explained why, for Shelley, “the everlasting universe of things / flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves” — and helped me understand what really happens in “the still cave of the witch Poesy.”
First and foremost, Rob’s strengths have supported his students, who are lavish in their praise of this, their favorite teacher. Rob has twice won the Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching, and with good reason. Students describe him as “a titan of the abstract and the concrete” and as a “wise sage.” “How stupid of me not to take more of his classes!” one exclaims. They speak of his brilliance and humility — his “faith in poetry and people” — his generosity as a reader of their work. “Professor Farnsworth…opened a door of joyful sound and allowed us all to walk freely through it,” as one remembers it.
Even at the distance of 20 or more years, they have vivid, thrilling memories of what it was like to study Frost or Keats or Bishop with Rob. Some former students signed off their emails with “cheers,” because that’s what Rob says. Many sent poems. Students remember Rob’s humor, his “wild enthusiasm” and his ethics (claiming him as their “role model”).
Many talk about how he’s helped them find their voices. Rob’s teaching has convinced some students to like poetry who thought they didn’t; it’s convinced others to become English majors who thought they wouldn’t. And many lessons are life long. “Rob held me accountable as a writer and a student,” a 1994 graduate writes, and “I am [now] a better educator and parent because of Rob.” That’s a big claim! — but it’s one often repeated by students.
Students not only remember Rob, they remember the poems he taught. That is what Rob does; he lights up poems in your mind and there they remain.
Like anyone who’s heard him read, students remember Rob reading poems. “I can still hear him reading ‘This is Just to Say’ by William Carlos Williams,” a 2005 graduate recalls. Another writes: “Probably my most nostalgic memory at Bates is sitting in a classroom in Pettigrew on a freezing February afternoon, snow falling outside, with Professor Farnsworth reading Robert Frost to us. I’ll honestly never forget that — no single memory makes me miss Bates more.”
A Reading: Toward Hallowe’en
In 2015, Rob Farnsworth read his poem “Toward Hallowe’en,” which recounts a moment of awe and inexplicable joy at the sight of a maple tree suddenly letting go its red leaves:
Students not only remember Rob, they remember the poems he taught. That is what Rob does; he lights up poems in your mind and there they remain. “At this moment I am suddenly reminded of an Elizabeth Bishop poem we studied in that seminar so long ago,” one graduate recalls. “In particular I’m reminded of the last lines, which gave me goose bumps in class and which still float to the surface of my mind every so often, ‘everything / was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! / And I let the fish go.’”
Rob’s Irish poetry course is fabled. Inspired by it, students have taken their semesters abroad in Ireland and written theses on Irish poets. “Rob’s course made me want to spend my junior year in Belfast,” one student reflects, continuing, “It’s easy to share his enthusiasm and keep digging.” This last phrase refers to a poem by Seamus Heaney, “Digging,” one of Rob’s favorites — and a favorite with his students too. A second writes, “Here are a few lines from Seamus Heaney’s ‘Digging’ that ha[ve] stayed with me from that class and into my career and family life today: ‘Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.’” “As Seamus Heaney instructs,” yet another student assures us, “I will continue with the digging.”
Although Rob claims that “poems teach themselves” — the title of one of his Kroepsch talks — it’s clear to everyone who’s seen him in action that it’s Rob doing the teaching, and in a truly inspired way, whether in writing workshops or in literature classrooms. He does so with a focus on what he terms “the reciprocal process of reading and writing as an apprenticeship,” “prompting students to discuss poems in fine-grain detail: how they’re working, what they’re after.” Rob wants to show his students that art is what Frost claimed it to be: “a way of taking life by the throat” — “urgent, relevant, capable of revealing and embodying our many-mindedness,” as Rob says. He has succeeded brilliantly in all this. As a teacher, Rob knows his way around a classroom. As a poet, he “knows his way around a stanza,” as one reviewer puts it.
What some of you may not know is that Rob also knows his way around a tennis court — and that his behavior on the court seems to be that of an alter ego. It’s not the poet we know as kind, gentle, and soft-spoken who appears but an aggressive figure with “a wicked back-hand slice,” “crushing serves” and “overhead smashes.”
Yet there’s also the Rob we know, there on the court — the writer who offers up a line of poetry after an especially good shot, asking “who said that” — who delivers a healthy dose of humor to his fellow players and, when serving, has been known to provide the running score in Norwegian. I’m told that if you guess either Frost or Tennyson as the mystery poet he’s quoted, you have a 50-50 chance of being right. Keep that in mind if you ever play tennis with Rob.
Thank you, Rob, for your art, your teaching, and your generosity: for being such a good friend to us all! We refuse to give you up, and look forward to seeing you nearly as much as ever, next year and beyond.
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