UpDate - Vol. 11, No. 2, Page 3
September 12, 1991
Campus poet; Gibbons Ruark has fifth collection published

     Gibbons Ruark admits to being a little shy. For example, when
a stranger asks him how he earns a living, Ruark says he tells them
he's a "schoolteacher."
     But Ruark, a University English professor since 1969, is more
than just a schoolteacher: He is a poet. And on Aug. 16, Louisiana
State University Press published the poet's fifth collection,
Rescue the Perishing. Still, Ruark uses the title "poet" carefully.
     "There are too many people going around in the world
immediately announcing themselves as poets to the general public,"
he says. "I am certainly proud of what I've done, but I don't want
to wear it around like a badge."
     At his Newark home, however, among comfortable furnishings set
on hardwood floors, Ruark speaks freely of his poetry. In fact,
much of what the poet writes about surrounds him in his home,
including a small glass swan that he brought from Ireland for his
wife.
     Ruark, who has been to Ireland almost every year since his
first visit in 1978, describes poetry as a means of capturing
fading memories-a way to "rescue the perishing."
     Standing near a large photo of Irish poet and playwright
William Butler Yeats, one of his literary heroes, Ruark explains
that he writes poetry about "what's at hand, rather than trying to
invent subject matter."
     Often, for the North Carolina native, what's at hand is his
family, Ireland and jazz and classical music.
     In recent years, Ruark says, the Emerald Isle has played a
prominent role in his poems. That prominence is evident in Rescue
the Perishing : about two-thirds of the collection's 36 poems are
about Ireland or its people.
     But Ruark says many of the Irish poems could just as well have
been set in the mountains of North Carolina. The poems' settings
are flexible, he says, because most of the poems are love poems.
None of the poems are political commentaries, he says.
     "Ireland has just had a powerful kind of fascination for me,
partly because of the powerful poetry that comes out of it," Ruark
says. "I'd been teaching Yeats long before I ever thought about
going there."
     Carl Dawson, chairperson of the University's Department of
English, describes Ruark's poetry as having "a kind of subdued
power," which is reflected in "subtle explorations of his own
thinking."
     Many reviewers have recognized Ruark's poems as masterful
blends of mourning and love. Ruark says Rescue the Perishing
reflects that mix of sorrowful elegies and love poems.
     Ruark says he writes his poems after the events they describe
have passed. In the spirit of William Wordsworth, who said that
poetry "takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility,"
Ruark says he has to let some time pass to get a new angle on the
subject.
     In "North Towards Armagh," a poem in the new collection, Ruark
recalls a meeting between himself and a "handsome woman" in an
Irish pub:

        The slant, rainy light through the plate-glass window
        Welcomes the absence of soldiers in the street.
        The publican's grim story of the car bomb
        Six months back, just inches from where we sit,
        Ripples through us, and we turn to our glasses.
        I show her my poem for Kay and the swallows.
        She mentions her recent savaging breakup,
        Says nobody writes a poem without love.

     In a 1989 interview with Yarrow, a Kutztown University
publication, Ruark described himself as "an elegist, basically. I
like to say only half-facetiously that there are two kinds of poems
in the language-elegies and love poems. And the love poems turn
into elegies when people die, so there's really only one kind."
     Rescue the Perishing is "actually a borrowed title," he says.
"It's the title of an old Methodist hymn. I grew up as the son of
a Methodist preacher and I listened to those hymns week in and week
out. They're probably the first poetry I ever heard."
     Ruark says the personal and "self-sufficient" nature of poetry
makes it difficult to discuss. "The best poems," he says, "probably
say everything there is to say about that particular subject, on
that particular day, from that particular view, so that your
response to a good poem is, 'That's true, I guess.'"
     But, he says, "I don't think appreciating poems requires, in
any way, you to be able to articulate what you like about them. A
lot of poetry that matters comes from people's privacy, so a lot of
it just goes into someone else's privacy.
     "Robert Frost said one time that it is a straight line from a
groan to a sonnet. One of the things he was saying is that there's
a very strong connection between powerful, inarticulate feeling and
elaborate, elegant form."
     In "With Thanks for a Shard from Sandycove," another poem from
Rescue the Perishing, Ruark recounts an afternoon he spent with two
friends, Irish poet Seamus Heaney and his wife. The poem tells how
Heaney dropped

        one stone on another to give
        This pilgrim a shard of where he'd been.

     Later in the poem, Ruark identifies with Heaney:

        Guilty as charged with a faithless penchant
        For the elegiac, shy of the quick-drawn line
        In the schoolyard dust, we prayed for nothing
        Less than calm in the predawn hours and the laughter
        Of disarming women when the hangman comes.

     Ruark says Ireland was "not something that was made much of"
when he was growing up. "I think I went there once before I
realized my name is Irish," he says. "I grew up with a strong sense
of family," Ruark says. "I suppose one might say that's typically
Southern....The stereotypical view is that Southerners place a,
possibly undue, emphasis on family connections.
     "Growing up in a small Southern town made certain aspects of
Irish life familiar and appealing," he says. "It feels familiar to
me, somehow. I'm not from there at all, and have no relatives
there, but I've felt some connection that seems to go back a long
way."
     In addition to Rescue the Perishing, Ruark's poetry
collections include A Program for Survival, Reeds, Keeping Company
and Small Rain. Ruark's poems have appeared nationally in The New
Yorker, Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, American Poetry Review
and Harvard Magazine, among others.
     In 1977, "American Elegy," a poem included in A Program for
Survival, was one of 25 selected for display in a worldwide
traveling exhibition, sponsored by the U.S. Information Agency, on
contemporary arts in the American South.
     Ruark, who received a grant from the National Endowment for
the Arts to support the publication of Rescue the Perishing, says
he enjoys giving readings on college campuses, where he has been a
frequent guest. He will give a reading from Rescue the Perishing in
Memorial Hall on the evening of Oct. 18.
                                        - Stephen M. Steenkamer

Editor's Note: Copies of Rescue the Perishing are available locally
at the University Bookstore and at Volume II on Main Street in
Newark.