Given the number of prominent artists and writers in Vermont, winning a statewide award in the arts is no small thing.
Newbury poet Sydney Lea didn’t have any illusions after his wife nominated him for the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.
Since it was first awarded in 1967, to pianist Rudolf Serkin, its recipients have included artists of national and international acclaim. Hartland painter George Tooker (1983); Thetford novelist Grace Paley (1993); Brookfield, Vt., cartoonist Ed Koren (2007); and so on.
“I know a score of people who might have gotten it, and that’s just poets,” Lea said in an interview.
But the award also honors those who have been of great service to the state and its people. Lea, a Newbury resident since 1991, fits that description. The Vermont Arts Council is adding him to the list of Governor’s Award winners.
Usually there’s a big party to celebrate the five statewide awards the arts council gives out, but this year it plans video tributes instead, because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Lea is only the third person to win the award whose chief mode of expression is poetry, following Hayden Carruth (1973) and Galway Kinnell (2014). Paley wrote poems, too, but was mainly a fiction writer.
Like Carruth and Kinnell, Lea’s primary subject is nature and living in it. After growing up in Pennsylvania, he came to the Upper Valley in 1969 to teach at Dartmouth College and became a fixture.
He taught the college’s first creative writing course in 1970, though he’d had more straightforward academic subjects in mind.
“I wasn’t hired to do that at all,” Lea said, but he’d had some writing experience and was willing.
“I just found that when I started teaching the course, … it rekindled my interest in writing,” he said.
He ended up not getting tenure at Dartmouth and was told to engage in more scholarly work if he wanted to rejoin the professorate.
“I was drawn in another direction,” he said.
During his final year at Dartmouth, 1977, Lea founded the New England Review in what he called “a fit of extreme naivete on my part. I had no idea what it entailed.”
He had the help of writer Jay Parini as co-founder and co-leader, and within a few years the publication found a long-term home at Middlebury College. When it appeared, NER was the first literary journal in northern New England, and it’s still in publication.
Lea is the author of 14 volumes of poetry, a novel and five collections of essays. He writes in an unfussy and unhurried narrative mode that makes a virtue of his hawkish observations of both the natural world and the terrain of the human heart.
In addition to writing and teaching, Lea has been active in adult literacy, starting as a tutor through Central Vermont Adult Basic Education in 1998 and eventually becoming chair of the organization’s board of trustees. He left the board in 2015.
“I was unsuccessful with probably 50% of (students),” he said. But the satisfaction of it was “like no other teaching I’d ever done.”
“You sort of live by words in your writing career,” he said. “Maybe there ought to be some payback.”
From 2011 to 2015, Lea served as Vermont’s poet laureate. He took to that post with energy and humility.
He wrote a regular column that circulated in Vermont newspapers, including this one. I had the good fortune to edit those columns and I just looked back through my shambolic email account and confirmed that he sometimes sent columns with the subject line “poet low-rate,” a play on laureate that could disarm an editor with its self-deprecation.
He also visited 115 community libraries around the state, “not to proselytize, and not to read my own work,” but to talk about poetry with all comers.
“I met so many interesting, bright people,” he said. “There are smart people everywhere.”
In the Governor’s Award, Lea doesn’t see another platform, at least not one he wants to clamber onto.
“I’m looking down the road, not very far, at 80 years old,” he said. He’s got seven grandchildren, more than enough to keep him occupied.
And at least in Vermont, poetry might not need his help. It’s always been a “minority art,” he said. A successful book of poems might sell a couple thousand copies, and a wildly successful one three times that.
Yet Vermont is liberally strewn with poets, more than any other state per capita, Lea said. He and Chard de Niord, his successor as poet laureate, edited an anthology of Vermont poets and are working on another.
“I had no idea how good the writing would be,” he said.
That experience, among others, makes Lea optimistic for poetry and its readers.
“My hope, and I hope I’m not being naive, is that people will always need their poetry, that there will always be some way to put it out there.”
Through their Here in the Valley concert series, musicians Jakob Breitbach and Jes Raymond are hosting Enfield native Brooks Hubbard on Friday night at the Briggs Opera House in White River Junction.
Hubbard has spent the past six years in Nashville, honing his chops, and he returns with a new band. The hosts will open as the Americana duo Jes & Jakob.
Doors open at 6, show at 6:30. Tickets are $25 in advance and $35 at the door, or $10-$15 for a livestream. For tickets, hereinthevalley.org.
A2VT, a Burlington-based outfit that mixes traditional African music with pop and hip-hop, plays two free HopStop shows on Saturday, at 11 a.m. in the Hop Plaza in Hanover and at 3 p.m. in Claremont’s Broad Street Park. Tickets are free, but you must register in advance at hop.dartmouth.edu or 603-646-2422.
This column is taking next week off, so here are a couple of events to look forward to:
■Lebanon Opera House is busy in the next couple of weeks, starting Tuesday with a performance by celebrated mandolinist Chris Thile on Tuesday, Oct. 12 (tickets $38-$58).
■On Oct. 15, pianist Bob Merrill will accompany a screening of the silent classic Nosferatu (tickets $10). And the following night at 9, continuing the silent theme, the opera house will host another night of outdoor “silent disco,” where DJ Sean of Livemixkings spins records for an audience wearing headphones (tickets $15). This method of beating the city’s noise ordinance appears to have caught on at the Nexus Festival in August. This one falls on Lebanon’s homecoming weekend.
Tickets are available at lebanonoperahouse.org or 603-448-0400.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
Correction
Sydney Lea is the author of 14 volumes of poetry, a novel and five collections of essays. His record of publication was incorrect in an earlier version of this story.
