The Plutzik Poetry Series was established at the University of Rochester in tribute to its beloved literature professor Hyam Plutzik (1911-1962). Over the past six decades, the Series has welcomed more than three hundred distinguished writers to campus, including US and British poets laureate as well as Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners and National Book Award finalists and winners. The Plutzik Poetry Series is the longest continuous reading series on any American campus.
To commemorate the historic occasion of the series' sixtieth anniversary, this volume presents a poem never before published. Plutzik composed "The Seventh Avenue Express" in his early twenties, inspired by the gritty urban landscape he traversed as a newspaper reporter for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. In his attentive, lyrical foreword, Edward Hirsch finds resonances in Plutzik's long poem with Walt Whitman, Federico García Lorca, and Hart Crane: "The train is moving through tunnels," Hirsch observes, "but the poet is also tunneling into himself. He moves above ground and struggles to surpass his own alienation to find something stable and permanent inside himself, a bright jewel that will outlast the instability of time."