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Poet Unveiled Unveiled last spring, a portrait of poet Dolores Kendrick, the Academy’s first emerita, now hangs in the Assembly Hall. The piece was commissioned by Kendra and Patrick O’Donnell and painted by Numael Pulido. The following is English Instructor John Kane’s tribute to his former colleague, written at the time of the unveiling. I’m happy to represent and speak for the Academy’s English Department on this occasion, because certainly Dolores Kendrick’s contribution to and impact on the department have been considerable. And although someone else now occupies her second-floor corner classroom in Phillips Hall, her presence is still felt, in the decor of our department rooms (including the ever-popular recliner chair), in the writers’ portraits on our corridor walls, in our lower English family history project, in our continuing anxiety over the question of whether we’re including enough poetry in our curriculum. Much has been said and will be said, and should be said, about Dolores Kendrick’s impact and influence on her classroom students. But she taught me, her colleague, some things too. Particularly in our early days at Exeter, when the question of continuing appointment to the faculty was ever in mind for both of us, the lesson I took from Dolores was that there wasn’t much point or real profit in being anyone other than who you were, or doing anything, in work or in life, other than what you believed in doing. She had a head start toward that goal: she was black and female in an Exeter that still looked pretty much like me. As she said to me once, “I couldn’t hide at this place even if I wanted to.” But there was more to what Dolores was and did than just context: she also said once, “I get the feeling there may be people around here who would like to pretend I’m invisible, and that’s a game I’m not going to play.” And she never did. Any number of phenomena in Academy and English Department life, including the Poetry Room in this library and our tenth-grade family history project, not to mention Poetry Stage, are outcomes of Dolores’s active and engaged visibility. I once gave her in tribute a tape of an old café song by an old-time café singer named Mae Barnes. The title of the song was “I Ain’t Gonna Be Topsy.” For me, two of the more significant elements of Dolores’s visibility have always been her art and her faith. She has much bigger portions of both commodities than I have, but whatever I’ve done with my shares has been affected by her example. And every Wednesday, Lord willing and the creek didn’t rise (and in addition to her Sunday ministry as a lector in her parish church), she took herself off to noonday Mass at UNH to pay her dues and recharge her spirit. She did her job, worked her art, served her Church; she’s the only person I know who’s had her writing brought to life on a New York stage and who can number abbesses and archbishops among her good buddies. As far as I could see, Dolores always took the profit she gained from her spiritual and artistic lives and, instead of banking it, came back to school and gave it away again. It wasn’t a handout: she knew from experience that you had to seek for grace and labor for art, and so her most valued students and colleagues were always those who made the move to come and get what she had to give. But it was always available. Though I’ve been speaking about her in the past tense, it’s the best part of the day for me that Dolores is still with us to hear the words and to see herself become, in this portrait, a part of the symbolism of the Academy, as she has been of its reality. So with the hanging of this picture, I hope that for a long time to come I’ll be able to adopt from Robert Browning and say to future students, “That’s our first emerita there on the wall, still very much alive, still being who she is and doing what she knows she has to do.” Dolores, welcome to the walls; it’s not likely that we’ll need to be reminded of you, but we’ll be glad to have this image anyway. —John Kane John Kane has been a member of the English Department since 1973. |
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