ALUMNAE & ALUMNI
Accomplished — and Recognized — Poet Chase Twichell ’64 As Foote’s ninth grade English teacher I love knowing that the Twichell Room, where my students can be found at their most relaxed and irreverent between classes, bears the family name of one of our country’s most accomplished poets. This feeds my speculation about which of the ninth graders might turn their distinctive intellects and creative gifts into a lifelong calling, whether as scientist, mathematician, linguist, historian, artist, musician, actor, athlete, or writer. One Foote graduate remarked upon the occasion of her 35th reunion, “What [my classmates] did as adults was pretty much predictable from what they were like as kids ... There weren’t too many big surprises.” The speaker of those words, and granddaughter of the Twichell Room’s namesake, was Chase Twichell ’64, recipient of the 1999 Alumna Achievement Award, author of seven books of poetry, and winner of this year’s Kingsley Tufts Award of $100,000 for Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New and Selected Poems. The award alone — the world’s largest monetary prize for a single book of poetry — would seem to bear out my choice of the word “accomplished” to describe Chase’s career. But it’s instructive to think of the ways that we recognize our poets. With honors and cash, yes, but of equal value are the respect of one’s peers and the awareness that one has provided enjoyment, even revelation to one’s readers. Chase’s Foote contemporary and former New Haven neighbor Jenny Byers ’65 recalls reading “Road Tar” from the poet’s 1998 book The Snow Watcher: Her poem about riding her bike to school, which we did sometimes “in the olden days” … and seeing a squirrel, which had been run over, “doing the Watusi” in the middle of the road to try to pull its squashed body off the pavement, was a shocking and beautifully articulated image I’ve never forgotten, because it brought back my memory of the horror of seeing the same thing at about the same age. One could compile a mini-anthology of Chase’s poems about animals. “Aisle of Dogs,” “Stray,” and “War Porn” (to my mind the last word on the Michael Vick case) confirm that all is not benign in this domesticated part of the natural world. Other titles reveal her wit: “Snow in Condoland,” “Tomboyhood,” “Negligent Worldicide,” “Sayonara Marijuana Mon Amour.” Chase’s writing reflects her affinity for the vernacular, her upbringing in New Haven and the Adirondacks, and her Buddhist studies (“I wanted to know what I was / and I thought I could find the truth / where the floor hurts the knee”). “Tech Help” incorporates each of these strands while trusting the reader to braid them together at the end. The Twichell Room was dedicated in 1986, too late for us to know how a young Chase would have spent her time there. Buried in a book? Scribbling in a journal? Sprawled on a couch wondering what life after Foote held for her? “There weren’t many big surprises,” her adult self claims in retrospect. The poems argue otherwise. — Michael Milburn Michael Milburn has taught English at Foote since 1994.
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Chase Twichell and Kili (short for Kilimanjaro)
ROAD TAR A kid said you could chew road tar if you got it before it cooled, black globule with a just-forming skin. He said it was better than cigarettes. He said he had a taste for it. On the same road, a squirrel was doing the Watusi to free itself from its crushed hindquarters. A man on a bicycle stomped on its head, then wiped his shoe on the grass. It was autumn, the adult word for fall. In school we saw a film called Reproduction. The little snake-father poked his head into the slippery future, and a girl with a burned tongue was conceived. From The Snow Watcher, published by Ontario Review Press, 1998. Copyright © 1998 by Chase Twichell
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