Jellema To Deliver April 12 Wiersma Lecture

March 2, 2005 == MEDIA ADVISORY

The 16th annual Wiersma Memorial Lecture will bring an alumnus back to the Calvin College campus who is familiar to the college not only as a poet and a friend of the late Stanley Wiersma (the Calvin English professor for whom the series is named) but also as something of an activist.

Rod Jellema, emeritus professor of English at the University of Maryland and founder of that school's creative writing program, will deliver the lecture, speaking and reading from his poetry, at 7:30 p.m. on April 12 at the Calvin College Chapel.

A 1951 Calvin graduate (as was Wiersma) Jellema is a poet whose latest volume, A Slender Grace: Poems, was named 2004 Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature. The author of three books of poems, Jellema also is the recipient of the Hart Crane Memorial Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Prize.

The lecture's organizers are enjoying the resonances between this year's speaker and Wiersma.

"It's really extraordinary," says Jerry Fondse, chairman of the Wiersma Memorial Lecture Committee, "Rod Jellema's poetry is very much like Stan Wiersma's poetry."

Wiersma's work in such volumes as Purpleanie and Style and Class celebrated stolid Dutch rural life in Iowa.

"But there are also a lot of issues that involve the church and faith and daily life," says Fondse, "and how those things have to come together in a coherent, righteous way."

Similarly, Jellema's poetry celebrates "slender moments, fragments of the lost Eden" in everyday life, according to one reviewer.

In fact, A Slender Grace is Jellema's first collection of poetry since his highly praised The Eighth Day appeared almost 20 years ago. In this volume, which consists of 67 poems, almost all of them new, Jellema confronts a culture that loves bigness with poems that notice what is slender * the thin lines, the threads by which some things hang, the narrow crevices through which divine grace offers to reconcile humans to each other and to the Creator.

George Harper, Calvin emeritus professor of English, is looking forward to Jellema's reading.

"It (his poetry) is good stuff aloud," he says. "It's poetry that's easy on the ear."

Harper remembers Jellema as a member of Calvin's "young Turks," a post-World War II group, including Harper himself, who challenged the Christian Reformed establishment. While still students, the members of the group wrote essays published in 1948 as the book Youth Speaks on Calvinism - a volume that urged Calvinists of that day to engage meaningfully with culture (Jellema's essay addressed the issue of Christian schools).

"They were being really countercultural, radical, and asked hard questions," Fondse says.

Wiersma, who was known for his poetry, and for his encouragement of young Christian authors, died suddenly in 1986 while on sabbatical in the Netherlands. The Wiersma Literary Endowment, which supports the lecture series, was established by Wiersma family and friends in 1988 to encourage Christians in the reading, writing and publication of excellent literature.

"The endowment is set up not only to honor Stan," says Fondse, "but also to perpetuate the kind of conversation Stan would have enjoyed."

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Received on Wed Mar 2 10:40:15 2005