He died of cancer on July 29 in Stonington, Connecticut, at the age of 62.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn his brilliance and generosity of mind, his breadth of understanding, and in the vital beauty of his writing, he intensified the conversations between poets, critics, and ordinary readers of poetry in America in a way that was hard to match,\u201d says Kenneth Gross<\/a>, the Alan F. Hilfiker Distinguished Professor of English at Rochester.<\/p>\n A Guggenheim Fellow whose work earned recognition from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and other literary and academic organizations, Longenbach published six collections of poetry and an equal number of works of literary and scholarly criticism. His fifth book of poems, Earthling<\/em> (2017), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.<\/p>\n As a poet-critic, Longenbach \u201chad an amazing way of speaking of the work of poetry, and its wonder, from the inside,\u201d Gross adds. \u201cJim wrote his criticism not just for fellow scholars, but as much for common readers of poetry and for other poets, established and developing\u2014though he would have asked: are there ever common readers of poetry?\u201d<\/p>\n Longenbach was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, to Alda and Burton Longenbach and grew up in nearby Westfield.<\/p>\n After receiving a bachelor\u2019s degree in English from Trinity College in Connecticut and a PhD in English literature from Princeton University, he joined the faculty in Rochester\u2019s Department of English in 1985 as an assistant professor. Within three years, he was promoted to associate professor with tenure. In 1992, he was appointed to the named professorship that he would hold for the remainder of his academic career.<\/p>\n Longenbach\u2019s early critical works\u2014Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past<\/em>(1987), Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism<\/em> (1988), Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things<\/em>(1991), Modern Poetry After Modernism<\/em> (1997)\u2014set out to tell new stories about the lives, the work, and the collaborations of modern and contemporary poets.<\/p>\n Throughout his career, he published scholarly articles and literary criticism in a variety journals and periodicals, including the New York Times Book Review<\/em> and Poetry<\/em>. His work also appeared in The Nation<\/em>, where John Palattella \u201992 (PhD)\u2014one of Longenbach\u2019s graduate students\u2014was the magazine\u2019s literary editor from 2007 to 2016.<\/p>\n In his essays, Longenbach combined his breadth and depth of knowledge with clear and elegant prose. According to Palattella, \u201cJim wrote almost exclusively on poetry, returning with fresh eyes to poets he knew well, such as Eliot, Yeats, Stevens, and Dickinson, while also approaching some writers and topics for the first time and offering exhilarating, supple insights, among them George Oppen, Marianne Moore, D.H. Lawrence, 20th-century Italian poetry in translation, Patti Smith, and Virgil Thomson.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition to his six collected volumes, his poetry appeared in publications such as The Atlantic<\/em>, The Nation<\/em>,\u00a0The New Republic<\/em>,\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em>,\u00a0The Paris Review<\/em>,\u00a0Slate<\/em>, and The Yale Review<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cJim the critic knew well of what he spoke. From\u00a0Threshold<\/em>, his first book of poems, to\u00a0Forever<\/em>, his most recent volume, his poetry blends elegance and simplicity in a way that is neither self-indulgent nor simple,\u201d says Palattella.<\/p>\n He also wrote in depth about the language and craft of poetry in The Resistance to Poetry<\/em> (2004), The Art of the Poetic Line <\/em>(2008), The Virtues of Poetry<\/em> (2013), How Poems Get Made<\/em> (2018), and The Lyric Now<\/em> (2020).<\/p>\n During his tenure at Rochester, Longenbach taught courses in modern and contemporary American poetry, British and American modernism, James Joyce, Shakespeare, and creative writing.<\/p>\n \u201cAs a teacher, James Longenbach was an incredibly open, open-minded, generous, and attentive mentor. He met with me one-on-one to go over my poems even though I was just a first-semester freshman\u2014a young kid who came from the USSR four years earlier and who spoke and wrote with an accent,\u201d recalls Ilya Kaminsky, a deaf Ukrainian-American poet and a one-time undergraduate at Rochester. \u201cHis attentiveness, both to the craft and to the human in front of him, was unparalleled.\u201d<\/p>\n That attentiveness left an impression on other former students as well. \u201cJust in the last week I\u2019ve received or read many accounts from former students, talking about Jim\u2019s devotion and inspiring presence as a teacher, his sense of humor as well, and his continual wish to help students find their own minds and strengths,\u201d says Gross. \u201cHe made a central and rich place for poetry here.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition to teaching at Rochester, Longenbach was on faculty at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers\u2019 Conference. It was at Bread Loaf in 1995 where author and English professor Jennifer Grotz first met Longenbach, who was delivering a lecture on the poetry of Jorie Graham. \u201cI distinctly remember being struck by the profound clarity and elegance of his mind,\u201d she says. \u201cHis thinking on many poets, from Ezra Pound to C.D. Wright, as well as on most any and every formal aspect of poetry, consistently astonished.\u201d<\/p>\n Grotz came to work regularly with Longenbach after joining Rochester\u2019s faculty in 2009.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was no better person to correspond with about poems,\u201d she says. \u201cHis editing suggestions were always in service of making the poem sound more like you\u2014or like itself\u2014than sound like him. Not only was he one of the most legendary workshop leaders in American letters, he had made himself so without ever having been a student in a workshop himself.\u201d<\/p>\n An accomplished pianist, Longenbach brought a musician\u2019s skillfulness to his poetry. But he also brought a lyric poet\u2019s ear to the study of music. Matthew BaileyShea, an associate professor of music theory at the University, highlighted Longenbach\u2019s contributions to his recent book examining the relationship between poetry, lyrics, and music<\/a>: \u201cHe gave me excellent advice about lyric poetry in general, and I eventually sat in on one of his poetry courses, which was especially eye-opening. It really changed the way I think about poetry and song.\u201d<\/p>\n Adds Kaminsky, author of\u00a0Deaf Republic<\/em>,\u00a0\u201cHe was a brilliant poet who wrote with nuance and love of lyric detail, lyric mode, lyric cadences, and tonalities. The imagery and music go hand in hand in his work\u2014he paints the world and that world enters our ears via music.\u201d<\/p>\n Longenbach was married to Joanna Scott<\/a>, a celebrated novelist and the Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of English at Rochester.<\/p>\n The pair met while studying abroad in Rome in 1981, eventually marrying and raising their two daughters in Rochester. The family spent several semesters abroad, living in England and Italy. In recent years, Longenbach and Scott divided their time between Rochester and their home in Connecticut.<\/p>\n During a partnership that spanned more than four decades, the pair were close collaborators and readers of each other\u2019s work.<\/p>\n Their most recent books\u2014Longenbach\u2019s lyric poems in Forever<\/em><\/a> and Scott\u2019s short stories in Excuse Me While I Disappear<\/em><\/a>, both published in 2021\u2014periodically echo each other, particularly when referencing Venice and other Italian locales. (\u201cThe Italian landscape and language have been a part of our lives\u2014our whole family\u2019s life\u2014for decades,\u201d Longenbach said in 2017<\/a>.) Both works also share a preoccupation with the themes of permanence and transience.<\/p>\n \u201cAs anyone who has read\u00a0Forever<\/em>\u00a0knows, its sense of discovery feels different,\u201d Palattella says. \u201cThe poet who since his college years had dedicated himself to exploring lyric time has been diagnosed with cancer and senses that his own time is coming to an end.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHe has left an extraordinary body of work that rewards close and repeated reading,\u201d notes Grotz. \u201cI will be reading and teaching his work\u2014poems and prose\u2014for the rest of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Black](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/inline-james-longenbach-bw-450x630.jpg\")
The professor and poet-critic<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Making an art form accessible<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"Diptych](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/inline-james-longenbach-books-side-by-side-1-630x378.jpg\")
\u2018One of the most legendary workshop leaders\u2019<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"James](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/inline-james-longenbach-joanna-scott-342x630.jpg\")
Partners in life and in literary pursuits<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\nRead more<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"blueprints](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/fea-how-do-you-make-a-poem.jpg\")
How do you make a poem?<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n![\"Detail](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/fea-forever-poems-james-longenbach.jpg\")
Mortality informs creativity in poet James Longenbach\u2019s latest collection<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n![\"Two](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/fea-ulysses-james-joyce-book.jpg\")
Is this the summer you\u2019re going to read Ulysses<\/em> by James Joyce?<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n