Memories of Kents Hill for my Fiftieth Reunion

Memories of Mr. Dunn and Mr. Fosse

by Connie Hanson, Class of 1961


When I think of Kents Hill I think first of Mr. Dunn. I think especially of how he would stop individual students when he happened to meet them walking and ask them their opinion about something, usually something to do with school. Mr. Dunn was always trying to improve things for the school at large and he was always directly involved in everything going on. Once I saw him resign as coach of the boy’s hockey team because they had behaved badly with another team. They hung their heads in shame and took the lesson to heart--he had that kind of effect on the students and I am sure on all the faculty too. He had a wonderful hearty laugh, he really enjoyed giving each student his report card (in those days his inferred hers as well), and every year when your birthday came around, he baked a cake for you himself, for you and your entire floor to enjoy at his house in his living room. He took the entire student body--minus the day students--out into the street one dark night in the Fall of ‘58 to watch Sputnik go by overhead in the sky; and he always had interesting people come and give us lectures--one was an arctic explorer; another a parent of one of our classmates who was also an author. He made it possible for me to tour the state briefly with Margaret Chase Smith, and some of my classmates with Candidate John Kennedy. You had the feeling he really cared what you thought and how you felt about the school.

But when I think of the Kents Hill faculty, I think of Mr. Fosse first--he has stayed with me my entire life. In his rare ability to discuss ideas fluently and in context of whatever we were studying, he woke us to a level of awareness of the world which required our whole intellectual effort to respond to it adequately--each to his best effort.

When I first heard about him it was in the Fall of 1958, when I was still a Sophomore--he taught the Juniors. One of the boys was hollering “MOBY RICHARD!” and waving at Mr. Fosse way across the lawn in front of Sampson.  I asked someone “What’s that?” It was explained that Mr. Fosse, whose first name was Richard, always taught his students Moby Dick. I just remember that both the student and Mr. Fosse, way off in the distance, were laughing. I began to see how popular he was among the students who had him. I was delighted when he recruited me to help paint sets for the play he was directing that year.

He was not a tall man, but rather broad-shouldered and heavy set, with a huge head and wonderful intelligent eyes. His hair was dark and just starting to turn gray at his temples, and he wore it a little long, at least two inches behind his ears.  He gave the impression of being and indeed was a supreme intellectual. He was not an athlete--when he went for and dropped the ball in left field at the faculty game in the Spring my senior year everyone booed, but somehow lovingly. Everyone did love him. He had a Master’s degree from Yale in music and would improvise on the hymns we sang in the chapel everyday at 10:30 on the organ after Mr. Dunn told us stories about the old days at Kents Hill. I would go up afterwards and tell him how much I enjoyed it. Eventually, I had him for a teacher.

When I came to Kents Hill as a fourteen year old in 1958,  I was a very bookish, shy, and athletic; but I did not think of myself as particularly intelligent. It is true that the 97 I got in Mr. Dunklee’s geometry class  made me realize I must be smart in some things, but I still didn’t seem to be able to get to the places everyone else seemed to be getting to at the same time they did. When Mom Sickles said to me when I was late once “I’ve got a bone to pick with you!” I hadn’t the slightest idea what she was talking about (new expression to me), except that I was in left field again somehow.  All that changed in my Junior year when I got Mr. Fosse for a teacher. He talked about IDEAS, and I became very, very interested. I did NOT day-dream in his classes--I listened, I heard, I thought, I wrote--I got A’s for what I wrote, A over C- that is. Mr. Fosse gave us Content over Form for grades--my form was not good (spelling, punctuation), but what I had to say was, according to him, very good.

I can remember whole lectures of his verbatim--the common root for “genius, ingenious, ingenuous”--Huckleberry Finn was all three of these and a picaresque hero too. Epic protagonists go on quests by water (he brought in The Odyssey, The Aeneid)--was Huckleberry Finn an epic protagonist? Then we read Moby Dick--not all of it, but assigned chapters to read and think about and write--took weeks and weeks to do it. What was the meaning of these short chapters like “Brit,” and “The Try-works”--? These were little allegories, metaphors--Mr. Fosse introduced me to metaphors. He read Moby Dick aloud to us, brought up the differences in prose and poetry, talked about Moby Dick’s narrative opening, its metaphysical middle, pointed out the play-like quality of some chapters, how like a Shakespearian fool Pip was. He talked about Shakespeare’s influence on Melville, and assigned us all intensive close-reading assignments in Moby Dick. When school was over at 12:36 we had lunch. After lunch we had a time when we could do any activity and then sports. Mr. Fosse and Mr. Higgins invited some of us to read and study Oedipus Rex--just for fun --in the building we used for art and movies, and where all the lectures were. I soaked it all up like a sponge. I couldn’t get enough of it.

People noticed I got an A figuring out these chapters Mr. Fosse assigned us. People asked me what the meaning was of such and such a chapter and asked me to write it down for them. Soon I was ghost-writing essays for some of Mr. Fosse’s other students. This gave me a great boost in the ego. We studied The Tempest and Mr. Fosse gave me a nickname--Ariel. One day he sent me in the mail a poem by Hermann Melville called “Art,” beautifully illuminated (he was a master illuminator):

ART

In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt--a wind to freeze;
Sad patience--joyous energies;
Humility--yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity--reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel--Art.

We graduated, and Mr. Fosse went around congratulating us: “You done good!”-- he was always very witty. But within months after graduation we got news that Mr. Fosse had died suddenly, of leukemia--he was only thirty-nine. Hundreds came to his service at Kents Hill, and each one of us had a story about how fundamentally he had affected us in giving us insight into our own hitherto unrealized capabilities. Every one of us remembered how he had told us that if he were to be killed in a random car accident that it should not be considered “tragic”-- tragic was a specific literary term used for and only to be applied to GREAT people--in literature, presumably. We all agreed he had been totally wrong--his truly was a tragic loss, because he truly was a great person, and we all knew it.

Mr. Fosse stayed with me always. As a junior in college in 1967 I wrote about Shakespeare’s influence on Moby Dick. For my Master’s thesis in 1976 I found common metaphors in Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Japanese Noh play Nishikigi,  Bob Dylan’s lyrics, and John Donne’s poetry. When I wrote my dissertation for my doctorate in 1994, I looked for metaphors, similes, and analogies in elementary science textbooks and trade books.  How often I have wished that I could have shared my poetry with him through the years; I imagined always how proud he would be of me, knowing how he introduced me to the language of poetry in the first place. Another thing--he had often wished that college students would engage in political activities instead of just in fraternity house pantie raids--which was all that happened in colleges back in his day. He died in 1961, and later during the anti-war and civil rights demonstrations of the late Sixties I realized his dream had come true, and felt the great irony of his having never seen it.

Sonnets for Julia

My friend Julia Budenz, a wonderful poet whose epic The Gardens of Flora Baum will be published soon, was once so taken with Petrarch's Sonnet 107, she wrote 15 sonnets in response to it, using his rhyme scheme and line endings. In honor of her, after she died last December, I decided to compose fifteen myself, in honor of her, using the same rhyme scheme and rhymes as she had used. Hers are to be found here:

http://www.poetryporch.com/jbsonnets.html

Mine all derive from one day, that of her memorial service, March 7th, 2011, when all her friends and colleagues met at Harvard to remember her. Among these friends of Julia is Frederick Turner, to whom many of my sonnets are addressed, as her death precluded the three of us having met together for the first time, our friendship having been based in large part on correspondence alone.

Julia was a great classicist, scholar, and poet, and had once been a nun and whose forays into considerations of atheism, all in poetry, ought to be considered by theologians. She was an authority of the highest order on the letters of Cicero and Julius Caesar, she translated Newton for Harvard's Science department, and she always read Homer and Virgil, and all other classical authors in the original. Her father was Louis Budenz, once editor of the Daily Worker who re-embraced Catholicism in the 50s.

She is greatly missed, and I wish she could have read these sonnets of mine, because she was an exceptionally perceptive reader as well as writer, and she would have learned not only more about me (mine are autobiographical to a large degree), but also about how much I revered her in every way.
******************************

SONNETS

I

If I begin my sentence with a sigh,

Recalling I am one who also ran

Against another woman, or a man;

Who keeps her secrets deep where none may pry,

Yet once I lay as any girl may lie,

Her back to earth before the marriage ban,

And stroked the eyes on peacock feather fans:

In dreams I’d carry others when I’d fly

And dared to fire the try works of my heart.

I could have conned a lion with my rage;

I would have had to love the one I’d choose.

But mateless procreation’s left me sage,

And I have turned my passion into art,

And all my seaside chanties into blues.

II

I ran into a closet in the door

Into the pub:  my errant molecule,

The gene for error, jesting to be cruel,

Had come upon the scene to prep me for

An aftershock of truth, fate I could pour

Into a glass of cider, barren mule

Of fertile aptitude, my genes all pooled;

And yet my poetry, you said, could soar.

Time passed in paradise pub oh, so slow:

It was so very long since I had sung;

I’d had to pour the curds out from the whey;

So long, so long ago the lowest rung

Of that long ladder first had felt my toe.

This day you brought your bellows into play.

III Part A

Deny the throaty wooing frog its croak

And swells the sacred lake with fetid air;

All swallows turn to creeping vile things there,

Each tiny mushroom boasts it is an oak.

The prescient tenure of an inside joke

Belies the jokester’s sigh of pure despair;

And last year’s straw man, smoldering at fair

Bursts into flame in clouds of golden smoke.

Love stoked my fire but briefly, darkly,

Then piled my tender parts in one vast pie,

Just as the fair-ground’s buds were flowering.

I was a girl and never questioned why.

High arching fireworks smelled fragrant, sparkly,

Their spiraling embers arcing and showering.

III Part B

When Dylan asks, ‘Is this some kind of joke?’

When Daniel stands inside the lion’s lair—

These two I use, the better to compare

The fool and hero, thereby to invoke

Unlikely kinship with the common doke.

Around a hero burns a sheen of air

That seems uncommon stuff, unique and rare—

You knew the man was special when he spoke.

But I allude to features figured darkly

Against an ancient Fifties drive-in sky.

Across the screen lights flicker—towering,

Stalking or being stalked until he dies,

My weary cowboy hero stands out starkly:

Others, heads down, are talking, cowering.

IV

Inside my coat my ten was ready, stowed.

I reached, while subway wheels, shrill shrieks and grinds

Behind my back with jostling shoves combined:

The screen before me blinked with squares that glowed.

It was my ancient subway line I rode,

With tendered tokens of the current kind,

If I could make the slot and ten align.

Outside the exit (Harvard/Church) it snowed.

The ticket charged, its change came on its way;

Five dollars fell into the trough, glass-grooved,

And I was filled with poignant, sudden longing

For childhood’s free change:  so my hand had moved

Inside the phone booth well on summer days,

Its nickels, dimes, quarters endlessly thronging.

V

Sure you’d take me for a red-hot hottie:

I wrote, “You’ll have to stoke me for a while:”

The play on words sufficed to make me smile.

Yes, I know I’m your own paparazzi

For your daffy grin and cool karate.

But I’m a sprinter, and you demand the mile;

Our letters are locked away in our files,

And the cane I sent you, not quite knotty

Enough for you to really take to bed.

For all my ardent prayer, paraffin

Of early light, necessity recruits

The best of me, meek harbinger of sin,

Oil of wee hours, votive for the dead:

Children we are, of beauty and the brute.

VI

George Harrison’s Sun, and Dylan’s Blue Moon

Played soft at our reverie’s midnight ball,

Played loud in memory’s total recall,

The day we met at the pub at high noon.

Twenty-two years to remember a tune;

Twenty-four years to give birth to them all;

The house at auction, the auctioneer’s call;

Divorce to decipher marriage’s rune:

Time it takes to learn and to know,

Before the glory finally trumps duty,

Before the trusted turns complicitous.

Before new order from chaos may grow,

Before the blanch of love blushes beauty,

The face of God must show ubiquitous.

VII

A river flowed through Cambridge streets, its glow

Endowed us all with Julia’s second sight,

For Julia’s ghost had joined us in the night:

Like Marley’s chain, Fred’s briefcase slid on snow,

His steps first hurrying, then going slow;

It was the dark phase of the moon--no light

Was shining down, yet all around was bright.

Then Ruby asked how her poem should go.

But Charon nee Ruby had taken the helm

When Julia embarked upon his boat; all

Heard Charon’s voice in the shimmering air.

Who but the dying may enter that realm?

Julia herself heard the dire query fall;

She told Ruby how it would end, and where.

VIII

There is a lift you reach the top floor with—

Its rise is vertical, not like the sun,

But rather like a cartridge in a gun:

It’s how you quickly climb the monolith.

I might have stayed and got a goodnight kiss

Goodbye, from my best friend’s hero’s son—

What was I thinking, after so much fun?

Either way, kiss or lift, I somehow missed

The chance to spend a minute more with you,

To speak of missing Joe and share the shame

Of misread rites, and murmur low “the horror!”

I drifted off in space the way ghosts do,

And hobbled up the stairs a little lame,

Glad to know my escort up was Flora.

IX

She brought us to a table in the round—

I borrowed and wore my daughter’s black boots;

You wore, as promised, your asbestos suit;

For all who needed one, a chair was found.

The restaurant itself was underground,

Where Julia surely would look for tree roots,

Or from a fistful of good friends recruit

Those who would welcome her ghost to sit down.

We failed, it seems, at quiet devotion;

Our egos intact, we stood and took bows;

Malbec was ordered; we filled our glasses.

We talked, we waked, just short of commotion;

We did all, in fact, but curse and carouse—

Then silence fell, as when a ghost passes.

X

The Harvard dons sang Julia’s last chorus;

They plucked the ancient strings of her city,

Her Cambridge, Rome—but none sang of Clytie,

A sort of Grecian Isis or Horus.

But Julia kept the tale in Flora’s trust.

The words she wrote, devoid of self pity,

Those words of ironic nobility,

Those not sent to Joe—she kept just for us.

Golden Apollo made Clytie’s heart ache.

Her ever abundant throes of pure love

Left unrequited, she soon learned the part

The heliotropic blue flowers take,

Turning their heads to Apollo above,

Giving her passion and love to her art.

XI

In this repository, nave of bone,

This fabled Roman catacomb, we three

Have vowed to meet, just Julia, you, and me;

The reason why is ken to us alone.

In youth we grappled with a common koan

In which our god was named in trinity,

Or else in none, or else humanity.

In separate search, each for Rosetta stones,

We found each other, staring at the wall

Of Plato’s cave, where truth is shadow-plied;

And in our poetry, our form of choice,

We formed a holy order named “The Fall;”

Then vowed to meet again, again rejoice

Our koan’s lost root on love alone relied.

.

XII

What binds us in its universal arc?

Humanity, if not identity:

We all, in shells, hear sounds of rushing sea.

Though some must bear the indelible mark

Of angels; or beasts, gotten in the dark,

Avoiding touch in common apathy,

Exchanging boon of love for sympathy.

Yet all from watery birth must still embark

On travels tempered in their joy or ire;

And this—the kiss— the pounding of the heart,

The sound of its summoning, lyrical.

What is in ashes, long-remembered fire,

Is in the young love, and in the old art,

And in each others’eyes, lost heaven’s hell.

XIII

My eyes were open. There your Paradise

Confirmed what listening ears could barely hear:

Each morning when I lift my blinds and peer

Out east--those trees, that sky, all greet my eyes.

Ama, vide, veni oh! God replies.

Slide down my banister, run up my stairs:

Thank me for what the good greb cycle bears?

It bears for all an astonishing prize.

All the passed moments like porters bore fruit:

You gave me O’Brien—oh, with such joy!

Until you spoke of synchronicity,

Stunned me with lessons you’d learned as a boy,

Shook me with envy right down to my root:

You and Mei Lin, Survival, felicity.

XIV

In principio I have been a nun,

Though I have given birth to nine in all;

And Julia, Sister too—we heard the call

Alike, and felt our other selves undone

In presence of Homer, Yeats, Rilke, and Donne;

Found stained glass windows inside our cell wall

Time travel machines to Avon and Gaul;

In Ovid’s own prelapsarian sun,

Followed the road to the edge of the West.

The photos we took, all a bit grainy--

Especially that one, that still life of God.

We captured that image, we thought, the best

Inside our children’s smiles; else in brainy,

Zany poetry; or else in the sod.

 X

You watched the faithful soldiers of our state

File off to war: you saw a Rome unending;

In roses’ pale demise glimpsed yours impending,

Sought shelter inside Flora’s garden gate.

There life in running rills did not abate,

But filled with teeming rivers, tree trunks bending,

Alive with wind of yours and Flora’s rending.

You bore these wondrous things without a mate,

Without your lover’s soft caress--the tree

Where you could carve your runes inside its core,

Would rise above the temple he had razed.

You sang a solemn, clear-voiced liturgy

Against your stained glassed panes, where rain still pours,

And left us with your poetry, amazed.

The moral imperatives for making paths (bring on the pink champagne)

We had a blizzard yesterday on April Fool's Day. The picture below is proof it's so and no joke. Today I went out to take pictures of it for posterity, and most importantly shovel a path through it. This reminded me I almost didn't write that thing I thought about while I was out shoveling way back at the beginning of the winter, that shoveling snow is a noble act of charity for others and ought to be celebrated, maybe with Snow Shoveler's Day, on which everyone sends their own much appreciated snow shoveler a bottle of pink champagne--make sure it's in the Spring sometime, long after there's even the slightest chance of another blizzard, such as the one we got yesterday--see photo:



Well darn it all, I see in this blog format only half the picture shows. It may be just as well, since that can be symbolic of something which is only half appreciated. There you see the clumps of snow the shoveler has hoven out, huffing and puffing and remembering her mother's ominous comments of long ago when she told her people were always having heart attacks doing that. Long ago I learned my mother was always right, so that is why I probably have a worried furrow in my forehead while I shovel, though I know I carry the low risk genes for said heart attack and eat plenty of Omego3, you bet, anyway.

But back to the subject of shoveling paths being altruistic behavior of the most emu-la-table kind ever. If you see someone shoveling a path you ought to think about making paths for somebody yourself. It's a good thing to do. Do you know why? Because if you don't the person has to stagger through maybe one or two or three steps into deep, deep snow and then collapse in a heap and find themselves unable to move--clearly if the snow is not deep enough to do this to you, you should just forget doing it at all--this is the kind of snow a priori it is agreed it's important to shovel or else you will be in deep trouble.

Path shoveling is definitely for yourself, yes, but it's also a very nice thing to do for others who might follow after you. It is removing the dangerous obstacles from your path and from that of others who might decide to go in a similar direction for some reason. Paths are broadly generalizable too--paths made over rivers are called bridges and prevent drowning in rapid currents and deep depths, paths made through mine fields are extremely altruistically made and prevent death and dismemberment. This seems far afield from paths through the snow, but only someone who has not tried to cross a field of snow and fallen and has been unable to get up and has started to freeze to death while immobilized would think this. Paths not only provide free easy, comfortable transport through thickly imposed walls of  snow, jungle, rock, water, buried explosives, or other obstacles of the impervious  and dangerous kind, but they save lives and are made by others at considerable expense of time and energy. There--I've said it:  making a path for others and for oneself is a morally sound and admirable activity. It deserves a day of it own in recognition of its noblity on every level...Bring on the pink champagne somebody!

What happens when you get older? Surviving the tsunami of free time

Well, it depends on your circumstances, but until age 62 I was still in the traces--supporting a family, working full time, fitting in the creative stuff around that--mental capacity very good. Then, against my will (laid off by my thrifty governor) I retired. Simultaneously my youngest went off to college and I got a pension. I realized I was free to pursue all creativity in unrestricted time--to make a long story short, this emerged as a problem, not a benefit. I found having responsibility to others (job, family) had structured my life in a way that allowed creativity to flow, whereas no restrictions were baffling. I reverted to focusing on housework! (wrote a poem about that)--short-term memory goes at this age, so the need to focus is paramount. After 42 years being externally structured by responsibility I have had to re-learn how to handle free time. I would say finding really concrete projects helps, keeping connected with people who are like yourself,  keeping moving physically--to the limit really--and not languishing in the past too much is all important to keeping happy. The old body finally begins to show signs of wearing out--you just can't move as fast (I was a sprinter once), and mentally you need to do things you truly get motivated to do. When you are younger all of this happens naturally. You have to work at it when you are older. You ask the best questions!

Here is that poem about reverting to housework after the Tsunami of free time hit:

LAMENT OF HESTIA'S SLAVE

I am bound to Hestia--am her slave:
Every day she binds me to her service.
I wonder where my muse has gone.

For when I come to write, I sweep instead,
No holy words, no light and confession--
And when you come to the end of confession,
It cannot be long to the end of ends.
Venerable poets would say, wouldn't they,
The task to write a poem is holy?

But Hestia will not let me go and write.
Someone of sufficient stature must
Be made to sweep the house in endless hours:
She turns to me. I fear these twilight beings
Who walk in shades of truth and beauty here
Won't come to whisper in my ear again.

"Here-- take this" she says, and holds me out the broom.
"Prepare their rooms for them. They've traveled far
And need a night of peace and quiet now.
Perhaps their dreams will drift on down to you
While you are sleeping on the hearth--now go."

Poets long must toil, I know,
Never-ending days and nights,
Keeping house for Hestia's guests.
I am bound to Hestia, am her slave:
Every day she binds me to her service.
Oh, how I want my muse to come again! (6/4/10)

The Echo

THE ECHO

Heeding your call I try to devise

A delicious repast in a shady vale

Enduring, refractive and sung to a lyre.

Who would you be then? My images lost,

I’d call you by name, and then take your hand

Along by the ocean, down a long winding path;

Indeed like good luck, wrapped up in a caul

Of a newborn babe full of howls and yells

Left on the doorstep, the throne in crisis,

Exhumed from the oyster,  a pearl of chance.

My pencil point pen would sooth the parched throat

With floes of impending devotion,

Its sand and mud flats would banish the flagrance

From minds remiss of design and then bloom,

While flares of brilliant hues exterminate

Throughout all fields of sloth, the call

Of despondency:  the long lost jetsam

Washed ashore, deriding mortality

Resting in the sun of the breaking morn.

March 5, 2011