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Noshing With Sydney Lea – February 15, 2024
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Author, What Shines
This week, Ira spoke with Sydney Lea, author of What Shines. In this poetic episode of “Ira’s Everything Bagel,” Sydney talks about what drew him to poetry in the beginning (even though he was a late bloomer); how he became “re-intrigued” with writing while teaching a class; how he absorbed stories from “rough folks’ he met along the way and how he wanted to capture it for poetry; how he defines poetry; when he writes, he delights in finding connections that wouldn’t be obvious; how poetry can keep ideas alive; how he wants people to enjoy the poem at the level of language; dealing with old age; why his books are toward a “guarded optimism”; finding himself “unusually blessed”; the virtues of humility; why there’s no element of discover in political poetry; and why everybody can get something out of a Robert Frost poem.
Sydney Lea, once a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, was bestowed the 2021 Governor’s award for Excellence in the Arts from the Vermont Arts Council. He served as Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015. The author of 23 books, he founded the New England Review in 1977, and served as its editor for 12 years. A recipient of a Fulbright Award, and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation, Sydney has taught at Yale University, Dartmouth College, Middlebury College, and Wesleyan University.
He is the author of the poetry collections Searching the Drowned Man (1980), The Floating Candles (1982), No Sign (1987), Prayer for the Little City (1991), Pursuit of a Wound (2000), Ghost Pain (2005), Young of the Year (2011), I Was Thinking of Beauty (2013), No Doubt the Nameless (2016), and Here (2019); his collection To the Bone: New and Selected Poems was co-winner of the 1998 Poets’ Prize. He is also the author of the novel, A Place in Mind (1989).
Sydney has also published Seen From All Sides: Lyric and Everyday Life (2021), a collection of newspaper columns he composed in his tenure as Vermont Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015. He collaborated with illustrator and first Cartoonist Laureate of Vermont James Kochalka, on a book of comics and poetry called The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy: An Illustrated Epic (2020). Lea also teamed up with fellow poet Fleda Brown to write a collection of essays called Growing Old in Poetry (2018).
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