Fred Chappell, Consummate Poet and Beloved Teacher
When I left Chapel Hill for Greensboro I was determined not to be a professor/writer-wannabee and was highly suspicious and dubious of university writing programs. But UNC-G is a small campus and I was soon active and prominent as a new papermaker and nebulous Creative, though the term did not exist in 1976. I became acquainted with the renowned Fred Chappell, and though I did not become his writing student, he read what I gave him and was kind and very helpful in chats and, later, letters. What a generous soul who celebrated life in some of the richest detail to be found in verse. He wrote the story of his life in rural Canton in poems that were like the richest bits of a short story. His actual fiction was wonderful but never became as well known. The first of his science fiction pieces was Dagon, and having read in an interview that he considered it readable in one sitting, and wrote it with that approach, I immediately did so and told him. He seemed tickled, but then Fred was always bubbling with some kind of energy. He was a learned man and intuitive teacher; he could sound out a human condition and reach out to it with an effortless good humor.
Fred drank in the late afternoons, usually with his graduate students, at the bar on Walker Street and I sometimes bicycled there and sat near them. I was starting a new life after leaving my high school sweetheart wife and starting to write The Suicide of Hooker Van Dusen, which was dedicated to Fred and to the memory of Randall Jarrell, who preceded Fred as a great writer at UNC-Greensboro and whose wonderful poetry was sometimes tinged by a smallness of moral fortitude in living out his L.A. style life in a small town while looking out from his lectern at future schoolteachers, mostly female who, in one infamous poem, reminded him of doe-eyed cows. In huge contrast, Fred Chappell was a southern saint who embraced the beauty and power of rural life and fused his vision of it with a sophisticated and supremely expressive sensibility. He also took his teaching very seriously and gave of himself like few of his talent do. He did like a drink, and that became a hallmark of his legend. My favorite Fred Chappell memory is auditing a film class he co-taught with another UNC-G prof. It was not Fred’s turn to teach, and he was sitting in the back of the tiered lecture hall, having arrived a bit late from Walker Street. The film was Blue Angel, and the professor asked, “Why did the director pick Marlene Dietrich?.” From the upper back, Fred stands and bellows “BECAUSE SHE WAS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN THE WORLD!!” Fred stopped drinking a few years after I first met him and entered his retirement years as a legendary and transformative figure in North Carolina literature. My novelette became my first published book, and its writing was permeated with the ghost of a writer gone and the warm encouragement of the one who was there. Fred wrote me a nice note about the manuscript of it, and later gave me a couple of excellent PR blurbs in comments about future projects.
I worked hard to stay in touch with Fred, and when I started publishing, he was first on my list of possibilities, and after seeing samples of my hand-laid paper broadsides, he sent me two poems. The first exists in reprinted form and is still in print. The original publication in 1983 had a second poem on the back. I am sharing Fred’s manuscript copy of that one. I am so proud of having published these, and so grateful Fred had such a long run of life and literature. He passed on January 4, 2024.
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portrait by Guillermo Velasco
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