[Poet and editor Sydney Lea was the subject of my second profile for the New Hampshire Times,which appeared on October 10, 1983].
Sydney Lea: Poet of Natural Facts and Signs
In the mid-1970s poet Sydney Lea, now forty, was in a bad patch of his life. “I was in a lot of trouble with alcohol,” he says, and his first marriage was suffering. Then he was “turned back for tenure at Dartmouth.” Lea had said to a close friend: “I think I’m just going to go off the deep end.” But his friend’s response helped Lea to keep going and to begin a new life. “Anybody can do that,” the friend said. “We all knowyou can do that.”
“It was such a simple comment, but it hit me like a ton of bricks,” Lea recalls. “I said, yeah, that’s no trick at all. I can do that. Right now if I want to. But the harder thing is to try to do something else.”
It was the Dartmouth job, which was about to lead only to one of those academic dead ends we hear so much about, that held the source of Lea’s growth beyond self-destruction. As Lea explains it, the old system in Dartmouth’s English Department was to assign beginning professors creative writing courses, with the idea that beginners would probably do the least harm. “That assignment, however,” Lea adds, “was a b
