My Favorite Marsden

In today's Wall Street Journal I review Elyssa East's Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574566772944605580.html. Among her subjects is the New England painter Marsden Hartley, who after…

Bill Kauffman

December 1, 2009

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review Elyssa East’s Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574566772944605580.html. Among her subjects is the New England painter Marsden Hartley, who after years of expatriation in Europe and New York City came home to do his best work. He wrote a poem about it:

Return of the Native

Rock, juniper, and wind,

and a seagull sitting still—

all these of one mind.

He who finds will

to come home

will surely find old faith

made new again,

and lavish welcome.

Old things breaketh

new, when heart and soul

lose no whit of old refrain;

it is a smiling festival

when rock, juniper, and wind

are of one mind;

a seagull signs the bond—makes what was broken, whole.

Bill Kauffman

Bill Kauffman is the author of eleven books, among them Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette (Henry Holt), Ain’t My America (Metropolitan), Look Homeward, America (ISI), and Poetry Night at the Ballpark (FPR Books). His next book, Upstaters, is due from SUNY Press in 2026. He is a columnist for The American Conservative and The Spectator World. Bill wrote the screenplay for the 2013 feature film Copperhead. He is a founding editor of Front Porch Republic and has served as a legislative assistant to Senator Pat Moynihan, editor for various magazines and publishers, and vice president of the Batavia Muckdogs, a professional baseball team that was euthanized by Major League Baseball. He lives with his wife Lucine in his native Genesee County, New York.