Retired SEMO professor Robert Hamblin reflects on a long, storied career

Robert Hamblin has written or edited 39 books, including his latest, “Epiphanies, Large and Small,” a volume of collected poems on subjects including growing up in Mississippi, participating in sports, living in London, reflecting on God and religion, aging, and caring for a spouse stricken with Alzheimer’s.

Hamblin, a retired professor of English at Southeast Missouri State University, described the book in the preface as “a type of autobiography,” reflecting “the innumerable convergences that constitute a life — with family and friends, colleagues, strangers, nature, God, places, events, ideas, memories, dreams.”

The new release is available on Amazon.com or directly from the author.

Hamblin sat down with the Southeast Missourian for a Q&A.

Q: In your writing career, you’ve touched on a number of subjects, from baseball to coaches’ careers to illness to William Faulkner. Do you choose your subjects, or do you write about what you gravitate toward? What does that process look like?

RH: I think it can work either way. Sometimes I choose a topic because of a particular interest or background or experience (my writing about sports, for example), but sometimes (as with the Alzheimer’s poems) it seems as if the subject chooses me. The important thing, which writers learn early on, is to “stay woke” (to use the popular phrase from contemporary slang) — that is, to stay keenly alert; to pay attention to what is being done, said, or read; to be continually on the lookout for what might make a good poem or story. As with any skill or art, the process gets easier the more you practice.

Q: What do you consider a few of your career highlights?

RH: Meeting L.D. Brodsky and collaborating with him on his world-class collection of William Faulkner materials opened up some marvelous opportunities for me to lecture, publish and travel. Teaching in the Missouri London Program led to a book of poems about London. “Win or Win: A Season with Ron Shumate” was fun to write, since I’m a big sports fan. “This House, This Town,” about restoring an historic home and living in downtown Cape, was also a great pleasure to write. The biography of Evans Harrington, the Ole Miss professor who was active in the civil rights movement, has been especially well received in my native state of Mississippi. And I’m very pleased that the recent poems about Alzheimer’s are proving helpful to many who are also traveling that difficult journey with Kaye and me.

Q: How did you select pieces for this collection?

RH: I simply gathered all the poems from the eight books of poems I had previously published, plus a few additional poems that had not found their way into those books. It was, in part, an exercise in nostalgia (at my age one is permitted to be nostalgic). Many people capture their experiences with a camera and in old age thumb through their photo albums to remember. I’ve always preferred the written word to pictures.

Q: Do particular themes recur in your work, even when you’re writing on subjects that appear distinctive?

RH: It’s often said that the grand themes of literature are love and death, and I’ve written my share of poems about each of these. But memory is another important theme in my poems. William Wordsworth defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings ... recollected in tranquility.” Many of my poems, I think, fit this definition. Additionally, I consider myself a Christian humanist, and my poems typically treat the paradoxical nature of life on earth, the here and now, the existential moment. Robert Frost, one of my favorite poets, wrote, “Earth’s the right place for love,” and I agree with that sentiment. That view, too, I hope, is reflected in my poems.

Q: How has your writing process changed since you first started writing poetry?

RH: My early poems, I think, tended to be more lyrical, and I even occasionally experimented with rhyme. But I soon gravitated toward a free-verse narrative form, focusing on an incident or a character — something analogous, it might be said, to a short short story. I’m aware that many people would not consider my poems poetry at all, but I’m quite content to label my poems as “pros-e-ty” instead of poetry. Whatever forms my poems have taken, however, I have always striven (not always successfully, of course) to create a strong coda. To my mind, the most important line or stanza in any poem is the last one — every other part should build toward it, and it should capture the essence of the entire poem.

Q: I understand this book is self-published. What has been your experience with that approach?

RH: This is the fifth book I’ve self-published using an online program since I retired in 2015. I joke that at my age I’m not much interested in long-range projects, and now that I’m retired from academia, I don’t have to worry about peer reviews. More seriously, though, I find that I enjoy being involved in every stage of the production of a book, and I find it greatly satisfying that the time between submitting the manuscript and holding the book in my hands is less than a month.

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