He strolled onto the brightly lit podium dressed in a black leather jacket and a pair of slim blue jeans, with locks of unruly brown hair tumbling over his forehead. His tranquil eyes gazed out into the audience from behind a pair of thin-frame glasses. He looked every inch the scholarly biker, except instead of a length of chain, he wielded a portfolio of poetry in his hands.
His name is Sam Witt and his performance last Thursday night at Kimball Theater kicked off this year’s first session of the ongoing Visiting Writers Reading Series hosted by the Whitman English department. Witt read to a full house audience poems from his two published collections as well as select pieces from his new manuscript.
The Visiting Writers Reading Series is the brainchild of poetry professor Katrina Roberts, who created the program nine years ago and has been serving as its coordinator ever since. Although it has a limited budget, the VWRS has drawn many accomplished authors and poets to campus since its inception, boasting such names as Tim O’Brien (“The Things They Carried”), Mary Karr (“The Liar’s Club”) and Robert Hass (“Sun Under Wood”). The mission of the VWRS is to offer students of literature opportunities to be inspired by and benefit from the collective experience of established as well as emerging writers across the country.
Witt is currently acting as a one year visiting professor at Whitman, taking over duties for Roberts, who is on sabbatical. He was born in Wimbledon, England and moved to North Carolina when he was 7. Witt first began writing poetry seriously as a senior in high school while taking literature classes at Wake Forest University. He received his MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and has dabbled in a variety of occupations over the years, including working in an environmental fund-raising group, writing as a freelance tech journalist and
teaching at colleges all over the country. He has also spent a year abroad in Russia and enjoys the works of many acclaimed Russian poets. Witt admitted that his nomadic tendencies may have had a detrimental impact on his personal and professional life, but for Witt, the writing always comes first.
“I’ve sacrificed a lot of personal concerns to become a better writer, a more committed writer,” said Witt. “The writing is, in a way, my mistress. Sometimes by the end of the week, when the weekend rolls around, I feel kind of exhausted, like I’ve given everything of myself to my writing classes and my own poetry.”
“But the writing gives me a lot,” said Witt. “And at the end of the day, it feels like it’s worth it.”
Witt has enjoyed poetry since early childhood and many of his boyhood heroes have been poets, but he didn’t set out from the very beginning to turn his love of poetry into a career. He explained that like many people, he “went through a string of potential identities for [himself]” during his adolescent years, harboring fantasies ranging from becoming a rock star, to winning the Olympic gold medal for gymnastics, to becoming the President of the United States.
“But these were all false motivations,” said Witt. “And I remember that always in the back of my head I had this kind of reassuring leitmotif that came in the form of a chorus, and it was something like, ‘well, if none of that works out, I can always be a poet.’ What strikes me now as I look back on that is that I never thought to myself that I would be a great poet. It was always about the poetry, just being a poet, didn’t have to be great. In short, it wasn’t a fantasy, it was a real thing for me.”
“I’ve always loved poetry,” said Witt. “Poetry can’t be paraphrased … it deals with the peculiarities of existence, it deals with the moment, it deals with the problem rather than the solution. Poetry always brings us back to the real. Poetry is the art form that best catches physical movement, and thus is one of the few art forms that can display real transformation in real time. Also, I love music, and I just love the music in the language.”
Fans of Witt’s poetry frequently remark on its dark subject material. Witt agreed that his poetry does tend to lean towards the darker and more disturbing facets of human nature and it’s a quality that many readers pick up on immediately. He explained that while it’s true that his personal life has been checkered by a number of traumatic experiences, poetry as an art generally tends to “attach itself to moments of intensity.” Witt said that while such moments are usually moments of crisis, they can sometimes be moments of ecstasy. Consequently, many of his poems embrace more positive themes like love and physical intimacy. Witt maintains a strong interest in and draws a lot of his ideas from historical events and the modern day political collective as well as catastrophic climate changes.
“The poet is naturally drawn to instances of injustice in our world,” said Witt. “It has to do with an affinity for language making you more sensitive to the suffering of other people. A big part of poetry is transmuting or mediating suffering into pleasure. Though [my] poems be dark, I hope that they’re not unpleasant to read. Aristotle put it best: Catharsis is the result of sympathetic pain, sympathetic suffering.”
Witt explained that the benefit of attending an author’s reading rather than simply perusing a book of poetry at home has to do with the nature of poetry as an art sprung from the oral tradition. According to Witt, there’s something tangible to be gained from hearing a poem read aloud in the voice of the poet, from receiving the poem through the ear rather than the eye. He presented an example in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” where the king, the titular character’s father, is murdered by poison poured into his ear. Hamlet suspects his uncle Claudius of the deed and attempts to accuse him by staging a mimed play.
“But it doesn’t work, because there are no words,” said Witt. “It’s all acted out. [The play] is obviously about Claudius and Gertrude, but they don’t get it. A lot of scholars and critics have argued that it has to come in through Claudius’s ears, the way the poison came in through the king’s ears. The sound of the accusation, it has to come in through one’s ear in order to be real, to be fulfilled.”
“There’s something to that, if you can borrow that image and apply it to a poetry reading, to the oral tradition,” said Witt.
Witt has recently finished his newest collection of poems, entitled “Occupation: Dreamland,” and looks forward to trying his hand at prose and fiction somewhere down the road. Whatever the future sees fit to deliver to his front step, he hopes that “it involves a lot of writing, and a fair amount of teaching, too.”
Witt’s advice for aspiring poets: read a lot. Take writing classes. Be prepared to re-evaluate your definition of happiness and success, because while poetry may be a lot of things, what it isn’t is a surefire vehicle for making money. Be patient. And most of all, read a lot.
