Stanley Plumly, an Ohio University alumnus and award-winning poet, will conduct a reading of his latest work in which the themes of art, immortality and friendship are explored.
Stanley Plumly’s The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb explores the theme of immortality, both how it is achieved and, sometimes unfairly, forbidden from certain artists.
“Immortality is a pretty mortal business — it’s very accidental,” Plumly said. “It all depends on who gets behind your work and what the culture regards as important, as valuable and so forth.”
Plumly, an Ohio University alumnus and professor at the University of Maryland, will be reading from The Immortal Evening on Tuesday in the Alden Library 1951 Lounge. Plumly received the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism in 2015 for the book and serves as the poet laureate of the state of Maryland, an appointed position in which a poet produces work relevant to the community they are living in. The city of Athens appointed a poet laureate earlier this year.
The Immortal Evening is set in 19th century England during a dinner hosted by the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, who is joined by contemporary artists John Keats, William Wordsworth and Charles Lamb. The dinner is celebrating the progress Haydon has made in his painting “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,” for which Haydon’s dinner guests modeled and thus appear in. At the time of the dinner, Haydon was three years into the six-year project of the painting.
In order to humanize these characters, Plumly conducted meticulous research, which included reading Haydon’s diary.
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“He was actually a better writer than painter,” Plumly said. “That’s how we know all of this. He kept a voluminous diary.”
While the painting itself never gained the success Haydon imagined, Plumly said the inclusion of Haydon’s contemporaries is what allowed it to survive to this day.
“They were already on their way to immortality,” he said. “In fact, they immortalized the painting, rather than the other way around.”
Jill Allyn Rosser, an associate professor of English at OU, will interview Plumly at the event after the reading. She said she felt Plumly was successful in the humanization of his characters.
“Most of us have this dream of talking to someone who’s been dead for a long time,” Rosser said. “Most of us just think about it and go, ‘That would be nice,’ and leave it at that, but he actually did it. … It’s as if you can see everything, how the light bounces off the tablecloth. You get to know each of those people as if you’ve known them your whole life.”
Rosser said the book may give interest to those who may have never considered poetry in the past.
The position of a poet laureate is important, Rosser said, in order to continue to introduce people to poetry that will benefit their lives. Instead of only using poetry at milestones like “funerals and weddings,” Rosser said it can be used as a way to become more mindful of the present moment.
“We have to take these milestones seriously, but why not have every day feel like one of those milestones?” Rosser said. “That’s what poetry tries to do.”
@seanthomaswolfe
