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A
Toast Offered by President Carol Christ
 It’s
my privilege to toast Annie Boutelle. I say privilege because
Annie is the founder and animating spirit of the Poetry Center
at Smith. When Ruth Simmons encouraged the faculty to dream
big, Annie did, and we are all the richer for it.
Annie always
dreams big, as you know. She has a habit and character of
intense and thoughtful attentiveness that inspires her poetic
projects. Of her first book, Becoming
Bone, poems inspired
by the life of nineteenth-century New England poet Celia
Thaxter, Annie writes that she was inspired by Childe Hassam’s
painting in the Smith Art Museum, “White Island Light, Isles
of Shoals, at Sundown,” which led her to learn about the
relationship between Hassam and Thaxter, and to imagine herself
within Thaxter’s complex life. Annie came to her second book,
Nest of Thistles, through a lecture on Robert Burns
that inspired her to return to her own Scottish childhood,
the subject of many of the poems in that book. Her next book,
Relic-works, a collaboration with Susan Heideman,
offers images and poems that reflect on a series of medieval
reliquaries that they saw in the Netherlands. Her most recent
book, Caravaggio,
takes us into the mind and work of that painter. I don’t
think any of us would have imagined Annie and Caravaggio
as kindred spirits; the book is an astonishing act of negative
capability.
There are common threads in
these four books—the
inspiration—the
breathing in—of the visual arts, and their transformation
to words; the catalyst of travel; the power of place; and
Annie’s remarkable ability to project herself into another
time and another being. Annie’s gentleness of demeanor, her
whimsical smile does not prepare you for what many readers
call the fierceness of her poetry. Fellow poets use the words “etched,” “muscular,” “lean,” “intense,” “elegant,” “spare.” Death
is never far from them.
Annie was born and raised in
Scotland, where, in Ellen Watson’s words, she had an artsy and outdoorsy
youth, not only writing poetry, but painting, singing, and
acting. After taking her degree at the University of Saint
Andrews, she came to the United States to teach French. She
met her husband, Will, and decided to stay. She received
her Ph.D. from NYU, published a book on Hugh MacDiarmid’s
poetry, raised three children, taught at Suffolk University
and then at Mount Holyoke, before joining the Smith faculty
in 1984. She served as the Grace Hazard Conkling Poet from
2009-2012. She was a finalist for the 1999 Walt Whitman Award
from the Academy of American Poets, the 2000 Katheryn Morton
Award, and the 2002 Philip Levine Prize. Nest
of Thistles won the Samuel French Morse Prize in 2005.
In her retirement,
Annie has been spending more time with her twin grandsons
in San Francisco, returning to the visual arts by taking
a drawing class, and working on another book of poetry. Annie,
we raise a glass to you, and look forward to many more powerful
poems.
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