Walking Through The Four Seasons

Eugene [“Gene”] Stelzig, Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York [SUNY] at Geneseo, has degrees in English from the University of Pennsylvania, Cambridge University [King’s College], and Harvard [Ph.D, 1972]. He found his calling as a poet working on his university’s literary magazine, The Pennsylvania Review, in which some of his early poems appeared. One of his first poems was included in the American issue of an Indian journal [Poet, 1964] which also featured poems by Thomas Merton and Ishmael Reed.

Gene has published poems during the past six decades, including a long poem in The Literary Review [“For the Death of My Mother,” 1976] and two collections, Fool’s Gold: Selected Poems of a Decade [2008] and Assorted Selfscriptings 1964-1985 [2015]. In his essay “My Obscure Career as an Aspiring Poet,” published in the journal Life Writing [18:1, 2021], he has described his struggles getting his poetry published. Whitman scholar Ed Folsom has said of Gene’s poetry that “his lines tend to not leave you . . . to haunt and nurture in equal measure.” Fellow poets Stephen Behrendt and John Roche have praised his “sure ear for the music of language and the voice of the spirit” and his “keen observational powers directed at both internal and external worlds.” For Stelzig, poetry is—or should be—nothing less than the spoken idiom of the living soul: and it should be readily accessible to the ordinary reader. Walking Through the Four Seasons is an experiment in which he took up the challenge writing poems every several days over the course of an entire year, to comprehend the full circle or cycle of the seasons.