A haunted mansion. A dancer who fell to her death. Helen Frankenthaler’s alma mater. Where Martha Graham invented modern dance, and where Zora Neale Hurston delivered a lecture in 1935. Donna Tartt started writing The Secret History there, and Brett Easton Ellis sold his first book Less Than Zero before graduating. On her diploma, Mary Ruefle requested her middle name, Lorraine, be spelled “Low Rain” and her parents “were horrified and kept asking me how I could have done such a thing, after they paid for my education and all.” And on it goes. For such a small college in the middle of nowhere in Vermont, Bennington College’s contributions to the arts are oversized. The campus itself occupies the collective imagination, continuing to show up in literature as recently as Bruna Dantas Lobato’s Blue Light Hours. Last week, I met a current Bennington College student who told me she chose Bennington based on a book written by a member of the poetry faculty, who’s now her teacher. In “Satyrs and Poets and Jazzman and Muses: Anne Waldman on Life at Bennington in the Early 1960s,” Waldman writes of her teachers Howard Nemerov, Bernard Malamud, Barbara Hernstein Smith: “I felt myself fortunate to come up against serious writers, and readers, who practiced their art with purpose and ambition. Opinionated, egocentric, solipsistic masters.” The piece is an excerpt from her book Bard, Kinetic, a portrait of her life as a poet. Anne Waldman is a bridge between two special places: Bennington and The Poetry Project, which she co-founded. The physical location of St. Mark’s Church is part of The Poetry Project’s magic. In “Satyrs and Poets,” Waldman describes trips to Greece and Egypt as making her alert to the power of experiencing times and places as “alive in your own psyche.”
-Morgan English