Rhyme and search for reason

It has been two years since Middlebury College student Nick Garza went missing, since the College and the town joined together in search parties, since the surrounding community felt the first pangs of his absence, the uncertainty of his disappearance and eventually the news of his death.

Garza’s absence, and the process of searching, are the subject of a new book of poetry by Gary Margolis ’76, executive director of Mental Health Services at the College and associate professor of English and American Literatures. Margolis’ fourth book of poetry, called “Below the Falls,” deals with these heavy themes.

Even though Nick Garza is never mentioned by name, the poems are intended to reflect the sensation of “unknowingness” that surrounded his disappearance.

After graduating from Middlebury, Margolis went on to graduate school at SUNY Buffalo, where he took courses in the counseling education program, but also dabbled in creative writing courses. Living on an urban campus with a dynamic student body, and interacting with a circle of great writers opened up Margolis’ experience.

He finished his graduate career by producing a dissertation on the use of poetry in counseling, which included an anthology of poems he collected that related to mental health issues and a discussion of what he deemed “the curiosity and healing nature of metaphor, which acts as a bridge and broadens our experience.”

“I don’t think art necessarily makes us feel better,” said Margolis, “but it makes us feel more deeply. For me, healing doesn’t necessarily mean that we fix something, but more that we are with things of meaning — both experiencing situations of depth through our own interactions but also to stand witness to them.”

Though he did not personally know Garza, in a way, writing the poems as time passed during the time of his absence was a healing process for Margolis himself.

“It was, in a sense, my own response — as a counselor, as a teacher, as a parent, but also from hearing how a variety of people were feeling: shop owners, faculty, students,” he said.

“In those months I tried to write poems that reflected and responded to his being missing, and these are scattered throughout the book. A number of the poems wrote themselves” said Margolis.

Though he wrote the poems as events were panning out, Margolis has spent the last few years drafting and revising the poems, as well as collaborating with The Addison Independent, which has published a handful of his poems in the past, and integrating other poems into the collection that would help readers experience and respond to his shaping of metaphor, language and the process of dealing with grief.

“The potential of expression and healing through art comes in being a creator, but also the power comes to those who receive the creation,” said Margolis.

Those who pick up a copy of “Below the Falls” will find sharp, strong imagery and layers of discovery within single poems, which is characteristic of Margolis’ work.

In “The Missing,” Margolis writes: “No one can wear a coat / of ice. When a boy is gone, / he becomes my son. Can he / find a way to be found? / What’s the ground for, / if not to give back / what it can’t hold, tonight / a boy gone cold?”

The internal and intense rhymes within some of his poems were influenced by poet Frederick Seidel, whose rhymes Margolis found “so striking and edgy that they sort of gave me permission to use rhyme in my own poetry, which I’d never done before.”

He also hopes that his poems “start in one place, but quickly develop in a variety of different directions.”

For example, in the poem dedicated to Mickey Heinecke, Middlebury’s former football coach, “What We Thought We Didn’t Say,” Margolis describes a south-bound drive with Heinecke, beginning with the bold lines: “I can’t say, coach, what we’ll think / to say about the deer / we saw dead on the ride / to the championship game.”

His poems weave like the journey down to the game, finding new meaning and understanding along the way.

Margolis referenced Robert Frost, who said that “[he has] never started a poem yet whose end [he] knew. Writing a poem is discovering.”

“You want the poem to gather itself,” said Margolis.

He gathered his poems internally, but also combined other interwoven themes. Margolis estimates that perhaps only 10 poems are sharply focused on Garza. Some poems deal with what it means for a nation, and as people, to be at war, such as “Taking Inventory,” while some develop and connect to the Vermont landscape and still others grapple with the intricacies of human relationships.

The cover of the book evokes memories of that spring, a scene of waiting and watching touched on in the poem “Below the Falls.” Margolis’ son-in-law, Josh Moulton, is an artist in Chicago, and while Margolis was thinking about cover design, he remembered one of Moulton’s paintings, inspired by a photograph he actually took in Italy, though the feel and structure of the painting is very evocative of Otter Creek.

As the book appears in the College bookstore and stands on tables in the local shops, and fingers begin to leaf through the pages beyond that cover and soak in the words, people will begin to re-experience the tragic events of Garza’s absence. Some of the poems in the collection are bound to hit home for many in the Middlebury community, and Margolis has not formulated expectations as to how they will react.

“The goal is not to predetermine or have an expectation of how people will feel; the goal is to have the poems clear and evocative so that people can feel and come to their own experiences,” said Margolis.

“Hopefully [the book] will support and validate whatever it is that people feel.”