[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 12]
[Senate]
[Page 16413]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       REMEMBERING DAVID BUDBILL

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, Vermont is saddened by the death of the 
poet David Budbill, whose poetry celebrated the simple pleasures of 
life in Vermont and highlighted the lives of working Vermonters. He 
died on Sept 25, at the age of 76.
  In the State that gave the world Robert Frost, Vermonters know and 
love our authentic poets. Through David Budbill's 10 books of poetry, 7 
plays, an opera libretto, 2 children's books, and many public 
performances and readings, he became the most widely known and loved 
Vermont poet since Robert Frost.
  He was born in Cleveland, OH, in 1940, and after attending Union 
Theological Seminary in New York City and teaching at Lincoln 
University in Pennsylvania, he moved to Vermont--to Wolcott--in 1969.
  He then learned to use a chainsaw and worked in the woods to make a 
living, while also writing poems about the people he met and about his 
experiences there. His first book of poems, ``The Chain Saw Dance,'' 
was published in 1976.
  Other poems and books of poems followed, and David gradually created 
a fictionalized version of his own community, which he called 
Judevine--a place where rough-hewn loggers, sawyers, farm wives, gas 
station attendants, and shattered Vietnam veterans struggled to make a 
living amid the rugged beauty of rural Vermont. That material was later 
shaped into a play, also entitled Judevine, which was widely produced, 
both in Vermont and nationally.
  Then in the 1990s, Budbill's focus deepened. He began writing poems 
about his own life in Walcott, thinly disguising himself as ``Judevine 
Mountain,'' an old Chinese sage, who somehow was settled on a nearby 
Vermont hillside. He wrote with the spareness, directness and clarity 
of the ancient Asian poets he admired. One short example is ``What Issa 
Heard.'' Issa is an 18th century Japanese haiku poet. Here is what 
David wrote:

                          ``What Issa Heard''

     Two hundred years ago Issa heard the morning birds
     singing sutras to this suffering world.

     I heard them too, this morning, which must mean,

     since we will always have a suffering world,
     we must also always have a song.

  David wrote poetry and plays that tapped into and expressed the 
essence of northern Vermont, and he plumbed these subjects so deeply 
that they became universal through his pen. His rural characters, 
Antoine, Grace, Tommy, and others, are quintessential Vermonters, but 
they are also vivid human beings with the same sorts of hopes, fears, 
triumphs, and disappointments that we all experience. Similarly, his 
``Judevine Mountain'' poems were expressions of his own life, but they 
continue to resonate deeply with the lives of everyone who has read and 
loved his poems.
  In short, David Budbill's poetry and plays accurately, meaningfully 
and profoundly depict rural Vermont--his place, that is also our place. 
They have a universality that have and will enrich lives in Vermont and 
in the larger world forever.

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