Bi/Mid/Next
Behind a rack of cloud the moon
is pale. Cold stone, its fires
out. And who’s to say
the brightest star
has not long since become a gap
in heaven, an appetite for light?
My own does little good against
such darkening.
-from "Storm System”
I was thinking about Rennie McQuilkin recently.
Little known outside of poetry circles and Connecticut, McQuilkin was a poet and teacher, editor and publisher, the former state Poet Laureate, and the co-founder and longtime director the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival in Connecticut. It was through that last job that I first met him. He was never my formal instructor, but he was one of the first people to take my ambitions as a writer seriously and modeled what it meant to live a literary life, before I knew what that meant.
Like many teenagers, I read and wrote a lot of poetry and the festival was in the next town from where I lived. Every other Wednesday in the summer, in a sunken garden at a historic home – hence the name – it hosted some of our great poets. Readings saw more than one thousand people who left work to crowd into the garden, or lean against the rock walls that lined it. The running joke, which was not a joke, was that the festival caused the only poetry related traffic jam in the country.
This was a festival that featured Billy Collins and Lucille Clifton, Martin Espada and Donald Hall, Patricia Smith and Natasha Tretheway, Richard Wilbur and Yusef Komunyakaa, Joy Harjo and Eamon Grennan, Marie Howe and Mark Doty, Galway Kinnell and Marilyn Nelson, Sharon Olds and James Merrill. That’s what Rennie’s taste was like. I think of the poets I’ve met at different places or have interviewed over the years and mentioned that I first met them or heard them read at the festival and they always have some story about much they loved it.
I continue to love hearing about people’s great experiences there, not because I worked there, but because it meant a great deal to me. In his book, Unpacking the Boxes, Donald Hall wrote: “One’s life begins on so many occasions, constructing itself out of accident derived from coincidence compounded by character.” When I first attended the festival to hear Hall, giving his first public reading after the death of his wife Jane Kenyon, was such an occasion. During high school and college, I worked or volunteered there during the summers. Never full time, often leaving my summer job early.
The summer I remember best though is one when I didn’t have a title. I also wasn’t getting paid either. These two facts may offer some insight into my subsequent career struggles. First thing Wednesday morning I rode with Rennie in an old pickup truck to the nearby Miss Porter’s School, where we would fill the bed of the truck with folding chairs, drive back, set them up in the garden. And repeat a few times. We hauled the podium on a dolly down into the garden. There were a hundred other little tasks to be done dealing with the programs, checking various equipment, overseeing volunteers and last minute decisions he had to handle before Wednesday night’s performance.
On Thursday we did everything in reverse.
During those hours we would talk about what we were reading and writing. He was honestly curious what I was reading and my reactions. He suggested what I should read and tell me about the poets who were coming.
There’s a metaphor in these actions so obvious that I can picture Rennie shaking his head, kindly but firmly making it clear that something so un-subtle had no place in a good poem.
For most people, the festival was a brief couple hours. They arrived at the museum, browsed the selection of books that had been laid out on tables, bought food and drinks or picnicked during the music prelude before the reading. That was people’s experience of the festival. But that was not what the festival was. That doesn’t touch on what it took to make the festival happen. On that day, to say nothing of the behind the scenes work that took place over the course of the year.
One of the festival’s sponsors was Northeast Magazine, the Sunday supplement of the Hartford Courant newspaper. The victim of corporate cuts many years ago, but in the 1990s and 2000s, when the newspaper was ubiquitous, they were the most important sponsor of the festival. Though I remember that Rennie had a number in his head about what it would take if the magazine ever stopped its support. Today it’s hard to imagine a single media sponsor with the same reach.
Anne Farrow, one of the editors, wrote long profiles of the poets that appeared the week of their reading. I wanted to write them. I didn’t want to write like Farrow– whose work I do like, especially her books Complicity and The Logbooks– but it was an early moment where I saw what I wanted to do and understood that people read such work and that people made a living from it. Not that I ever asked Anne, or the magazine’s editor Lary Bloom, both of whom I was on a first name basis with because of the festival, for advice or an internship or a job. Like my disinterest in a title, this perhaps also prefigured my later career struggles.
*
I have a hardcover first edition of Rennie’s first book, North Northeast. I must have gotten it from him. I can’t think where else I would have gotten it, but I can’t think of when. The inscription reads:
“For Alex
One of the Truly Faithful
Best, Rennie”
I’m not completely sure what was meant. I knew that he had written something in the book, but not what until I pulled the book out to write this. He likely wrote this before the time when I began writing professionally. When I interviewed poets I would sometimes send him the articles. I think this took place before I interviewed him for a celebration of the festival’s twentieth anniversary that I wrote for the Poetry Foundation. The festival changed over the years, as did the people who ran it– until it ceased entirely. Before it did, Eamon Grennan read there when I was a student at Vassar and I got to know him slightly, and then he returned years later, when I was one of many alums there to see him. In one of the last seasons, I got to hear Ladan Osman, a poet I have interviewed and befriended, read at the festival.
Maybe it’s obvious that I’m one of the faithful to everyone but myself.
Rennie taught me about the work that underlay a literary life, but his most important lesson was one that I didn’t understand or even notice at the time. Wisdom, like youth, can be wasted on the young. In his own work and the work he liked, Rennie was not fond of heavy handedness. I remember his lukewarm and sometimes puzzled responses when I mentioned some of the more polemical and political poets I had been reading.
It’s also an obvious lesson. Rennie was born in 1936 and his first full length collection was published in 1985. In the years prior to and afterwards his poems appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. An impressive list of credits, but his first full length collection came out when he in his late forties. The festival began in 1992 when he was in his fifties.
How I knew him, and what I knew him for, was because of his work and accomplishments in middle age. And then he retired from running the festival and founded Antrim House, where he edited and published more than one hundred books by dozens of writers. Mostly poetry, but also nonfiction. Mostly writers from the Northeast, but he wasn’t just publishing himself and people he knew.
Through it all, through his cancer diagnosis, the pandemic, his wife Sarah’s dementia and death, and life alone after more than six decades of marriage, he wrote. I think that like myself, he equated writing with thinking. I always thought of Rennie as a great teacher even though I never had him as one, because he was always excited by new poems, new voices, whether the high school students who read at the festival, the way a poet would find their voice, or new poets he encountered. I suppose that’s what made him a good editor. He was just as eager to find something new in his own work.
A high school teacher who also wrote turned festival director and writer turned editor/publisher and writer may not be the most natural career path, but for Rennie it felt like a natural series of jobs. This is what I mean when I write that he was my first role model. He modeled what it meant to live a literary life. What it meant to be a writer. To have a life where work circles those ideas and values. Which doesn’t mean that life involved nothing but writing. He was married, had children, had day jobs. It meant that we can change. That we can reinvent ourselves. That perhaps we need to and should.
I know that I’m mourning Rennie because I would have liked to talk with him more. I’m mourning because the festival is no more. That my efforts to write about Rennie for multiple local outlets came to nought. And maybe they’re right that no one would care. We clearly live at a time when the values that I was raised with are, if not outright disdained by many, then let’s say, out of favor. I think about the institutions that are gone or have been destroyed or are floundering.
I’m in mourning because I’m now middle aged and I miss those summers and that time. Because they meant so much. Because my life today owes something to those summers. I’ve never been big for nostalgia. Neither was Rennie. He was very much a poet who sought to keep his eye focused on the present moment. He taught that we should be open to possibilities. And that there’s still plenty of time.
When winter croaks, turns green
as frogs,
when tremendously we see the buds
to be the buds they’ve been
since fall
and hear the sap’s obscenities,
when seeds begin to sing ho ho
and pop,
there’s nothing in Ovid I’m not.
-“Spring Song”
*
Just as Rennie was on my mind, so are movies, because it's that time of year. I’m writing this before the Oscar ceremony, but I think that 2025 will go down as a significant year for cinema.
It’s always hard to gauge these things. Plus it’s always feel a bit random. Release dates are always strange complicated things. Finishing a movie one month means it comes out one calendar year, but one that spends more time editing but was shot at the same time, comes out another year. All that aside, we’re always bad at seeing when we have a lot of great art in front of us.
The Best Picture battle at the Oscars is Sinners vs One Battle After Another, but I always loathe such head to head matchups. Also I think about the year and how interesting it's been. I came up with a list of good movies released this year. They are mostly from the US which reflects my own bias, just as they are mostly English language films. Most are fictional. That said, they encompass a variety of genres and approaches and styles. I have my own opinions and preferences when it comes to film, but I also love to be surprised to see new approaches and ideas and in so many different ways I saw something new and different and saw something, often for the first time.
All That’s Left of You. Directed by Cherien Dabis.
Black Bag. Directed by Steven Soderbergh.
Blue Moon. Directed by Richard Linklater.
Come See Me in the Good Light. Directed by Ryan White.
Frankenstein. Directed by Guillermo del Toro.
Hedda. Directed by Nia DaCosta.
Highest 2 Lowest. Directed by Spike Lee.
It Was Just an Accident. Directed by Jafar Panahi.
Mr. Nobody Against Putin. Directed by David Borenstein and Pavel Talankin.
One Battle After Another. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.
Orwell: 2+2=5. Directed by Raoul Peck.
The Secret Agent. Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho.
Sentimental Value. Directed by Joachim Trier.
Sinners. Directed by Ryan Coogler.
The Testament of Ann Lee. Directed by Mona Fastvold.
Train Dreams. Directed by Clint Bentley.
Wake Up, Dead Man. Directed by Rian Johnson.
*Technically Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl came out in 2024, but it was released on Netflix in 2025, so I’ll include it on this list with an asterisk.
Also, there were a number of films that I did not see, or were lukewarm towards but other people who I know and respect loved, liked, or otherwise enjoyed, including:
Avatar: Fire and Ash
Begonia
Colours of Time
Dreams
The Family McMullen
Father Mother Sister Brother
Hamnet
The History of Sound
A House of Dynamite
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Jay Kelly
KPop Demon Hunters
Marty Supreme
The Mastermind
Materialists
Mickey 17
The Smashing Machine
Song Sung Blue
Sorry, Baby
Superman
Weapons
The Wizard of the Kremlin
A pretty good year. Maybe more than pretty good. Something worth remembering even as film has less cultural weight and importance than it used to just a few years ago.
*
The writer Cole Haddon has a newsletter and podcast 5AM StoryTalk where he writes about work and art and interviews artists and thinkers and various other interesting people. In the new season of his podcast which launched last month he's talked with filmmaker Justin Simien, Australian senator Fatima Payman, and most recently Riki Lindhome (who has done a hundred things from Another Period to Hell Baby to The Muppets) but she'll always be one half of Garfunkel and Oates. I say that, but she has a new album, No Worries if Not, which is really good. But a lot of their conversation was about changing approaches, about trying new things, about rethinking one's career. "The Freedom of no opportunities" as Lindhome said at one point.