Published Works

Watch the Documentary: Hyam Plutzik, American Poet

The film traces Hyam Plutzik’s growth as a poet from his youthful days on a Connecticut farm as the son of Russian emigrants, through his education at Trinity College and Yale, and finally as the first Jewish professor at the University of Rochester. Plutzik’s Pulitzer Prize nomination came for Horatio, his long narrative poem that shows how elusive memory can be in searching for the true identity of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In similar fashion, this film juxtaposes memory, interviews, literature, and home movies to lead viewers on a journey through the life and legacy of a modernist whose voice resounds powerfully within the best formal and elegiac traditions of Theodore Roethke and Wallace Stevens.