\u201cI feel like poetry gets mislabeled as a high art that’s exclusionary in some way,” says Gabriel Fried \u201996, a poet, teacher, and poetry editor. \u201cRob made things intimate, but he was never exclusionary. If you wanted in, you got admitted in.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cRob\u201d is Rob Farnsworth, retiring after this academic year as senior lecturer in English. Author of three poetry collections, poetry editor for seven years of the quarterly American Scholar<\/em>, and founder of the creative writing program and the Literary Arts Live reading series at Bates, he was a mentor to Fried \u2014 and to many others who have studied poetry, both the reading and the writing of it, with Farnsworth during his 26 years here.<\/p>\n On Feb. 12, Literary Arts Live presented Fried and two other alumni poets at the Muskie Archives for a reading and a tribute to that longtime champion of creative writing at Bates. Farnsworth himself had offered an LAL reading three weeks earlier.<\/p>\n Rob Farnsworth reads his poem \u201cVagrancy\u201d during the Literary Arts Live session on Jan. 25 in Muskie Archives. An homage to W.B. Yeats, whose poem \u201cThe Wild Swans at Coole\u201d Farnsworth references, the poem is about the \u201cspecific, anonymous, reorienting pleasures of solitary travel.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n
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