issue 27 > nonfiction > hoffman
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Festschrift for Daniel G. Hoffman in Celebration of His 90th Birthday
It's our delight to offer a Festschrift celebrating Daniel G. Hoffman on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday. Some of these essays consider his work as a scholar; some comment on his contributions as a poet; others recount stories about his influence as a friend and teacher. For all these he sets a high standard by example.
He supported Per Contra, which made its appearance before electronic journals were considered to be quite respectable, by trusting us to publish his own poems, by agreeing to serve as a contributing editor, and by sending a number of excellent poets our way. We appreciate what he's done for us, for scholarship, and for American poetry.
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Photo of Daniel Hoffman by Lin Tan. Taken March 29, 2007 on West Chester University campus at a poetry reading by Dana Gioia.
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Tribute to Daniel Hoffman
by Roger Lathbury The words "man of letters" are not heard much anymore. Perhaps critical theory has moved us beyond them. Perhaps one term seems sexist, although "person of letters" does not seem to be used much either. The fact is that the term carries us to an age when critics wrote in honor of the works they elucidated and in the service of general understanding, with the thought that the audience for literature was humanity as a whole.
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Dan, Dan, Dan, Dan, Dan, Dan, Dan
by Dana Gioia I first encountered Daniel Hoffman as a critic. Writing my senior essay on Edgar Allan Poe at Stanford in 1973, I came across Hoffman’s recently published study, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe (1972). The book had an enormous impact on me—not simply in regard to Poe—but also as an example of a critical work that was equally distinguished as a scholarly study and a literary performance. It was not only smart and insightful; it was also moving, amusing, and compelling.
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Daniel Hoffman: A Literary Treasure
by Michael Peich Darkening Water, Daniel Hoffman’s splendid collection of poems, appeared in 2002. I reviewed the volume for the Philadelphia Inquirer and praised Hoffman as Philadelphia's "literary treasure." I was not alone in my recognition of this extraordinary talent.
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Daniel Hoffman at West Chester
by Kim Bridgford At West Chester this year, as part of our nineteenth annual conference, we will be celebrating the 90th birthday of Daniel Hoffman. As part of that celebration, Dana Gioia, X. J. Kennedy, David Mason, Marilyn Nelson, and Jill Allyn Rosser will speak, among others.
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Dan’s Poe: In Appreciation
by Barbara Cantalupo As I write this short tribute to Daniel Hoffman as Poe scholar, next to me is his picture on the back dust jacket of his 1972 Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, and I can’t help but see an uncanny resemblance to Poe, especially from the eyes up—the high forehead; the wavy, thick, side-parted hair and the seriousness of the eyes! Is there, perhaps, an undercurrent of meaning in this resemblance?
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Daniel G. Hoffman and My Youth
by Jack Foley Youth is sometimes wasted on the middle aged or even, as in my own case, on the old.
Some time around 1960, I was attending Cornell University. I was depending on when in 1960 it was 19 or 20 years old. Someone from the campus literary magazine (or was it the campus newspaper?) knew I was a poet and gave me a book of poetry for review. I believe it was the first book of poetry I was ever given by anybody! The book was A Little Geste by Daniel G. Hoffman; it had appeared recently, in 1959.
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Three Candles for Dan's Cake
by John Timpane Just for a moment, let’s think about three things often disliked by a certain kind of literary critic. Dan Hoffman’s poetry is rich with them, and they make his poetry wonderful and rewarding.
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The Riddle of Daniel G. Hoffman
by Lewis Turco I have been an admirer of the poetry of Daniel G. Hoffman for a very long time, ever since I read in his first book, An Armada of Thirty Whales, his wonderful riddle poem "As I Was Going to St. Ives," which took as its texte the ancient nursery rhyme...
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On Daniel Hoffman’s "At Evening"
by Mark Halliday Many of Daniel Hoffman’s poems have found ways to bring the dignity and grandeur of traditional or pre-Modern poetry — in terms of diction, syntax, rhythm, and structure — into relationship with contemporary experience. Sometimes this has led to surprising and stimulating juxtapositions, where a bracing shot of the American quotidian or the vernacular or the demotic enters a texture that until then had been more formally graceful and decorous.
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The Real Thing
by Nathalie F. Anderson I first met Daniel Hoffman on the page. As a grad student down south, immured in my carrel, I too often found myself walled in by literary criticism that seemed written to be musty, and literary theory that seemed written to be cryptic. But Dan’s books weren’t like that: Barbarous Knowledge and Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe told their urgent stories complicatedly, grippingly. This was literary history that investigated, literary biography that speculated, literary criticism that illuminated, and all of it — above all — engaging.
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The Whole Ninety Yards
by Michael Palma In 1963 I was a college freshman who had an ever-increasing appetite for poetry but whose awareness of modern American poets had barely progressed beyond Frost and Robinson. One afternoon, while browsing the shelves of my campus’s surprisingly well-supplied library, I found a small yellow book with the intriguing title An Armada of Thirty Whales. Opening it, I came across a poem whose title, "The seals in Penobscot Bay," curiously segued into the opening lines of the text: "hadn’t heard of the atom bomb, / so I shouted a warning to them." Neither Richard Cory nor the hired man, as remarkable as they were, had prepared me for anything like this.
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Daniel Hoffman, an Appreciation
by Elaine Terranova Daniel Hoffman is and has been recognized as one of our best poets. What I love most about his poetry is the way he combines technical mastery with natural speech. In his sonnets the "happy accident," I think he used that term, of rhyme informs acute observation of the world around him. As a psychologist once told him, "For a poet, you have a strong reality principle."
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Life Comes First
by Frank Wilson I can’t claim to be among Dan Hoffman’s close acquaintances. We’ve only met a handful of times and never for any unusual length of time. On my end, however, this hardly figures at all, because I regard getting to know Dan at all as one of the boons of my life.
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"With Serendipity, as in a Rhyme": in Honor of Dan Hoffman
by Bill Zaranka It was Dan Hoffman who, back in l975, gave me the extraordinary opportunity to be his junior colleague at Penn. I remember he arranged for my introductory reading to the Penn community in the Philomathean room, where a poster identified me as "Poet-Professor, Bill Zaranka," an appellation which tickled two of his most talented and formidable students at that time, Edward Hirsch and Susan Stewart. What was I doing in such company, which even to this day intimidates me? I could not say. Only Dan Hoffman knew, whose An Armada of Thirty Whales had pleased Auden, and whose hard accentuals in "The Seals of Penobscot Bay" (and lilting anapests in "An Armada") sang in my head. With the National Book Award nominated book Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, he was closing in on a dozen books of poems and literary criticism! Had he chosen to hang a shingle on his Bennett Hall door, it might have read "Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress," or "Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets." Yet how modest, and kind, and gentle a mentor was Dan Hoffman!
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Late-Blooming Correspondences
by John Ridland Although Dan Hoffman and I have known each other for only three or four years, we have discovered several unexpected correspondences, a couple of which give me an advantage over many of the other contributors to this Festschrift. First, I will be having my 80th birthday the same year Dan turns 90; although we’re not in the same age bracket, I am catching up with him in encountering the consequences of aging, which have included, for both of us, "surgery that gave a new meaning to the phrase 'open-hearted'," as Dan put it.
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Daniel Hoffman: Friend, Mentor, Exemplar
by Michael Salcman By the time I was able to finish this tribute to Dan Hoffman, my dear friend and mentor had quietly passed away on the 30th of March, 2013. So much has been written about his remarkable career as poet, teacher and literary essayist, that this sad moment may better serve for a brief consideration of his wonderful presence as a human being.
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And from his former students:
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34th and Walnut
by Dennis Barone During the days I attended graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania students and faculty smoked in classrooms. This may be hard to believe, but try to imagine a seminar in the Van Pelt Library with professor and students creating clouds of smoke between words of insight and wisdom — or, as the case may be, foolishness.
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In Quest of Themselves
by Margaret C. Barringer In quest of themselves in motion only
They are themselves. They are moving
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Several birds, one moose.
by Deborah Burnham I once showed Dan Hoffman an utterly impenetrable sestina. He was kind enough to read it, and kind enough to find some other word for "impenetrable." He also allowed as how he never writes sestinas. I was too shy to say anything but "well, you certainly don’t need to."
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Hoffman Between Two Worlds
by Paul Christensen When I arrived at Penn in 1970 as a new grad student, I had one thing in mind: find Daniel Hoffman and begin pleading with him to supervise my dissertation. I didn’t know what I was going to write about, I only knew he was the closest thing to Virgil for guiding me through the underworld of graduate study and depositing me, perhaps, at the starry gates of a doctoral degree.
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Becoming Poets
by Darcy Cummings During the annual end-of-semester gathering, I watched Daniel Hoffman circulating among his students, who listened intently, then smiled. Small groups clustered on the big porch of his Swarthmore home. Though too far away to hear, I thought I knew what he was saying to the students one at a time: "Say, that was a great line/image/metaphor in your poem," and he’d quote the line. Or, "Your wonderful poem—send it out." And he’d offer suggestions for where to submit it. Most of the young writers were dressed in stylish (for the time) grungy clothes.
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Convergences
by Gregory Djanikian Dan Hoffman was the first poet I ever met in my life. I mean a poet with published books, with a reputation, with a way of talking about poetry that had the force of experience behind it.
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With All My Heart, Dan
by W.D. Ehrhart I first encountered Dan Hoffman in the early fall of 1970 at the outset of my sophomore year at Swarthmore College. By then, Dan was teaching at Penn, but he lived in the town of Swarthmore, near the campus, and he was offering a poetry workshop that semester to Swarthmore students. I'd never heard of Daniel Hoffman, but fancying myself a poet (at least in the deepest recesses of my secret heart), I signed up, and every week an earnest group of us young writers would meet in Dan’s livingroom to discuss our poems. (We didn’t call him "Dan," of course; he was Professor Hoffman.)
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Daniel Hoffman: "A Sort of Singing"
by Edward Hirsch I remember the nervous walk across campus to Logan Hall, the musty academic smell of the first floor building, the rap on the door. Daniel Hoffman welcomed me into his book-lined office. He tilted and twitched behind his desk—I was the student, what was he so nervous about?—which I later learned meant that he was concentrating. He was wearing a turtle neck sweater and herring-bone sport coat. He was thin and reedy. His dark hair was a bit too long, a holdover from the Sixties. It parted in the middle and looked electrified. He had the eyebrows of an Eastern European poet. His eyes were dark and piercing. He had a full-throated raucous laugh, which erupted easily. It seemed larger than his body. There was something oddly kind about his face. I realized later that I loved him on first sight.
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Winning the Lottery
by Ann Hostetler When I began to write poetry seriously during my dissertation process in Penn’s English Department, I shyly entered the William Carlos Williams poetry contest and was surprised and pleased with a third place win. I was even more surprised, however, to receive a letter in campus mail the following week from Daniel Hoffman, the legendary Americanist who also taught a graduate poetry-writing workshop. "Why aren’t you enrolled in my class?" he challenged. So enroll I did.
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Daniel Hoffman: First Things and Last Things
by Michael Jennings The first poetry reading I ever attended was given by Daniel Hoffman in one of the small auditoriums on campus. My grandmother was visiting me so I took her along, and as Dan read his poems in his inimitable way (he sort of barks them rhythmically), she observed that he had the eyes of a prophet.
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Thanks Times Three
by Judith Moffett I met Daniel Hoffman in 1970, when I was a graduate student at Penn. I met him personally when I took his course in Contemporary American Poetry, but I had been aware of him before that, because of his activities on behalf of poetry at the university.
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Remedial Writing
by David Moolten The fall of 1986, my final year at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, proved a time of unsettling discoveries. With a sleepless internship and years of residency still in front of me, I never expected graduation to provide respite from the grind. But I at least counted on a clear path.
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A Fairy-God-Father Mentorship
by Marilyn Nelson I first met Daniel Hoffman at the University of Pennsylvania at the beginning of the spring semester of 1969. Professor Hoffman was the professor of my Modern and Contemporary American Poetry course. I was 23, a second semester graduate student, one of two African Americans in the department’s graduate program, 3,000 miles away from home, and pretty much at the nadir of my thus-far existence. I can’t say I remember anything about the course except that I enjoyed it. Nor can I recall a single conversation between us. I am shy, and was so intimidated by grad school that I never spoke in class. But apparently Dan had discovered that I was a poet (I had graduated with honors specifically because of my poetry), and he invited me to submit some poems for a little publication he was editing, of Penn poets, past and present.
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Memory of Dan Hoffman
by William Patrick I interviewed Dan Hoffman for Pennsylvania Review my last year at the University of Pennsylvania, and that obscure conversation mysteriously found its way into Dan’s book, Words to Create a World, which was published in 1993 as part of Michigan’s Poets on Poetry series. In that interview, I asked Dan if Philadelphia was a special place for him. His answer to that question includes the following sentence: "The past hangs on here as I sense it, in salutary ways, in matters of style."
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Confidence & Joy
by Melanie Rehak I've moved more times than I care to count since I left college—and Dan Hoffman's graduate poetry workshop—in the spring of 1993. Up and down the east coast, back and forth across an ocean or two, and into and out of numerous apartments in numerous cities. Through all of these places, I've carried a certain list that Dan handed me one afternoon in his office, roughly twenty years ago.
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Gifts from Dan
by Jay Rogoff In my first encounter with Dan Hoffman, he gave me encouragement. In my second semester at Penn, my instructor in a first-year creative writing seminar suggested I show Dan a poem I had written for the class. I nervously made my way to his office in Bennett Hall, knocked, and explained myself. Dan looked the poem over (it was called "Kelp," and written in pentameter quatrains) and, to my surprise, read it aloud. It was satiric and intended to be morbidly funny. Dan chuckled, maybe politely, then suddenly said, "Why don’t you send this to The Nation?"
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Daniel Hoffman's Layered Precision
by J. Allyn Rosser For many readers, the phrase "well crafted poem," in its journey across the remarkably fast-moving tide (practically all surge, practically no ebb) of the last half-century, has gathered all sorts of misleading associative barnacles. If a poem is precise, economical, double-entendred, and overtly formal in structure, one popular assumption now is that the poet is insufficiently engaged with the poem's content; that he must have inserted too much distance between himself and his utterance (O'Hara's "raw" vs. Lowell's "cooked"). I believe the logic behind this misconception derives from two salient logical encrustations.
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A Remembrance of Daniel Hoffman
by Margaret Ryan I started writing poetry in the summer of 1965. I turned 15 that June, and the culture was falling apart. People were crazed because Bob Dylan used an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival. "I got you, babe," was the number one hit single and played on the radio night and day. Psychedelic paint jobs were showing up on houses and shops in beach towns all along the Jersey Shore.
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Well Now
by Barry Schwabsky The way I remember this one story Daniel told, back when I was a student of his forever ago, was that when he was a student at Columbia University right after the war, there was a poet on the scene, more or less a generation older, and not formally connected to the university, but who played a sort of guru to some of the young or aspiring poets there. Daniel was among those who frequented this man.
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Daniel Hoffman: A Teacher for All Seasons
by Lee Slonimsky I was a member of Daniel Hoffman's graduate poetry writing workshop at the University of Pennsylvania long ago: in the spring of 1990 and again in the spring of 1993. I had known his superb work as a poet since I was a college student at CCNY, majoring in creative writing, in the early 1970s. My mother was working at Bantam Books at the time, and one day she gave me Hayden Carruth's newly published The Voice That Is Great Within Us, which she had seen at work. Dan was prominent on the list of poets I discovered within its pages at the time, who stayed with me as lifetime influences -- others included Mina Loy, Kenneth Rexroth, Robinson Jeffers, Countee Cullen, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, Frank O’Hara, Harvey Shapiro, and Adrienne Rich – many others I already knew. I remember in particular the impact Dan’s remarkable poem "Signatures" had on me.
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On the Other End of the Bucksaw: Poet, Teacher, and Friend
by Catherine Staples Dan Hoffman is an exceptional teacher and friend, a marvelous mix of energy, intelligence, and wit balanced by an outgoing sympathy and a discerning yet kind spirit. Then there's that joyous grin of his and those expressive eyebrows, urging you on, challenging, and delighting.
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The School of Dan
by Susan Stewart Going through some plover-egg-speckled cardboard boxes of old papers last summer, I discovered a half dozen or so neatly typed letters that Dan Hoffman had sent me during the year I was writing my dissertation in Boston--far from Penn and on my own. Dan had been my teacher in several seminars, but he wasn't one of my thesis advisors, and our letters were mostly about poems I was reading and writing. In those letters he struck a perfect balance between pointed criticism and unfailing encouragement.
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A Note in Thanks for Dan Hoffman
by Jeanne Murray Walker It was dangerous to write poetry during the years I studied for my Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, or at least I thought so. And with some reason. In the early 70's, after the bottom dropped out of the job market, the faculty became determined to turn out scholars who could get and keep jobs. The English Department shed students. Among graduate students, rumors abounded: who was in, who had been turned out, what a person had to do to stay. I, who had written poetry before I entered, never touched the stuff anymore. It was frowned upon.
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