Prof. of English Emeritus Gene Stelzig
Department of English News
News article created by the Department of English.
Gene Stelzig, Distinguished Teaching Professor of English Emeritus, has recently published his fifth and most ample volume of poetry: Just Saying: Selected Poems from My Sixties and Seventies (343 pages, WIPF and Stock Publishers).
According to Al Filreis, Kelly Professor and Faculty Director of Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, “This is a major work of poetry from a writer who has for decades been doing so much more than ‘just saying’ it. His poems’ speakers often figure themselves ‘on the outside looking in,’ but you get the sense that they know the inside of everything. The poems gracefully know aging. The light their words cast upon us falls but never fails. Such refusal of failure is part of a gentle redefinition of life.”
Erica McAlpine, Associate Professor of English at University of Oxford, has written that “Stelzig’s poems are scholarly and formally adept in equal measure. But their secret weapon is earnestness: they wear their learning lightly, always balancing the intellect with a winning generosity and human tenderness.” And Ed Folsom, Roy J. Carver Professor Emeritus at the University of Iowa has also endorsed Just Saying: “‘I would like to land a poem / the way a boxer lands a blow,’ Eugene Stelzig writes in one poem in this rich and varied new collection. I’ve been reeling from any number of Gene’s poems for six decades now. The best poetry sustains us through this life, and Gene’s poetry does precisely that, never more so than in this book, where aging and thoughts of death—from the funny to the chilling—begin to dominate and linger.”
Gene is scheduled for a poetry reading from this volume at Rochester Writers & Books (740 University Avenue) on Saturday, June 27 at 3:30 pm.
In his long career at Geneseo, Gene has published five books and many articles in refereed journals in Romanticism and Autobiography studies. His translation of Goethe’s Faust, Part I appeared in 2019, and his True Lies and Short Takes: Assorted Life Writing Essays was published in 2023. This August Gene will be one of the invited guest lecturers at the annual Wordsworth Summer Conference in the English Lake District.