Distinguished Alumna Award 2013
The Poetry of Lifelong Learning: Joan Hutton Landis ’47S by Hannah Richards, Public Relations Coordinator
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f an artist must live with her arms wide open to every experience in order to enrich her work, Joan Hutton Landis seems to take every opportunity to nourish her craft. Landis, a poet, professor, and self-identified lifelong learner, lives a life full of adventures. One can imagine how thoroughly these moments have informed her poetry. Words have always stood out to Landis, whose deliberate speech indicates a mind adept at weeding out the superfluous, measuring the sound of each word. She remembers her mother reading aloud to her as a child and how “those cadences meant a lot. A.A.Milne,“ she says wryly, “may have had the greatest influence on me of any writer.” At Stoneleigh-Prospect Hill, her favorite teacher, Ethel Johnson, once challenged her “on a word I used in a theme and offered to write it on the board 500 times if I could find in the dictionary the word ‘Canorous.’ She got to 50 when she was rescued by the bell.” During my conversation with Joan, a word kept surfacing for me: moxie. Dusty, as her classmates and friends know her, has this tangible, magnetic spirit. Imagine her gusto on stage as Pitti-Sing, performing a lead role in the Mikado during her senior year, one of several Gilbert and Sullivan operettas put on by Deerfield and SPH. It comes through her poems, in the moments of hidden rhyme that one can only hear aloud (the way we are meant to experience poetry) and in our discussion of what it means to know intellectual excitement. Upon graduation from Stoneleigh-Prospect Hill in 1947, Landis applied to only
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one college. Bennington provided her with the “intellectual excitement I yearned for,” sparked by professors Stanley Kunitz, Howard Nemerov, Kenneth Burke, and Ben Belitt. Of Kunitz, she notes, “he was the best teacher I had at Bennington. He knew how to take a bad poem and find just where to cut it to actually make it good.” His ruthless paring and art of revision gave Landis the tools, confidence, and self-discipline she desired while earning her B.A. in English.
“I will always be grateful that I went to an allwomen’s high school. Back then, there was a lot more self-consciousness between the sexes, and if you loved to study, as I did, it was an essential choice.”
After Bennington, Landis worked for a short time in publishing before her marriage to Kendall Landis, whose work as a banker took them overseas to live in Paris, Jeddah, Beirut, and Casa Blanca. While abroad, Landis wrote poetry and was active in theater. She starred in the American Repertory Theater’s “Oh Dad, Poor Dad,” “The Boyfriend,” Tennesee Williams’ “Something Unspoken,” and finally played Martha in “Who's Afraid
of Viriginia Woolf?” to rave reviews. All this, while also raising three young sons. When the family moved back to the States in 1967, Landis was ready to return to academia. She earned her masters degree from Wesleyan University, studying poetry with Richard Wilbur. Her poems were published in the Transatlantic Review and the New York Times, as well as several other literary journals. Her son Joshua remembers, “From a kid’s point of view, Mom was ideal. She stayed home while we were young, spoiling us with constant love, games and adventure. When we got into our teens, she returned to school, turning the house into a world of ideas.” Continuing with her education after the family moved to Swarthmore, PA, where Kendall became Vice-President of the College, his alma mater, Landis received a Danforth Graduate Fellowship for Women to complete her Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr. During this time, she also wrote articles on Shakespeare that were published in Hamlet Studies, The Upstart Crow, Shakespeare Quarterly, and others. Her reviews of the poetry of Louise Gluck, Ben Belitt, and John Peck appeared in Salmagundi. As Landis was finishing her course work at Bryn Mawr in 1977, she was hired by The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia to “teach musicians honeyed words.” Arriving at the inception of the Liberal Arts Program afforded her the opportunity to help develop the core curriculum. She established poetry, fiction and theater workshops as well as courses in Shakepeare, American literature, and Joyce. She was elected Chair of the Liberal Arts in