John Copley Alter – 50th Reunion Essay

John Copley Alter

2820 Allspice Road

Port Republic, Maryland 20676

johncopleyalter@gmail.com

203-446-1059

Spouse(s): Bett Worcester Alter (1985 – )

Child(ren): Aaron Moses Alter, (1986, Yale ‘09); Emily Beach Alter (1988); Thomasin Malone Alter (1991)

Education: Yale University, BA (1969); Yale Divinity School (incomplete)

National Service: Conscientious Objector

Career: Educator, 50 years

Avocations: Poetry. Basketball (the Celtics). Sauntering. Travel.

College: Pierson

I am writing this account of 50 years sitting in the great room of the ramshackle home my wife Bett and I own on a brittle cliff overlooking the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. We call it Downtime Abbey. A good place to retire. I’m not retired. I’m doing what I have spent much of the 50 years since we graduated doing. I teach. I admire my three children. I write.

I write primarily poetry. You can read some of my poetry in Hanuman’s Home. I wrote poetry then, in those tumultuous days, in Pierson, as many of us did, with Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley, Kenneth Koch, the Grateful Dead in mind, as I do now reflecting on the decades that have elapsed, the water under the bridge, since commencement. That current has carried me to India and West Africa.

The year after graduation for me was spent with two primary, and lifelong, (ad)ventures in mind. I was a Carnegie Teaching Fellow – teaching freshman English to a startled, perhaps bewildered, crew, and participating in Harold Bloom’s seminar on the anxiety of influence. And I was arduously continuing to attempt to persuade my Manhattan-based draft board to grant me the status of conscientious objector. I succeeded on both fronts, launching my “life after Yale.”

My conscientious objector service was to teach at a small college in the Panjab, India. I taught The Waste Land and the 19th century English novel, the history of the sonnet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for two years, to an ambitious, talented cohort of students, many of them the children of Panjabi farmers, many of them reunited all these decades later through the (dubious?) magic of Facebook.

In some fashion or other that is what I have spent my life doing. Teaching. At the university level, in preschool, middle school, high school. And on several continents: India, Africa (Senegal and Mauritania), and North America. Teaching and administering: head of school twice, assistant head, English Department Chair, guidance counselor, director of admissions. Teaching English. Teaching Thoreau and Whitman, teaching tolerance and the power of the semicolon. A transcendental utility infielder of sorts.

For 33 of the 50 years my traveling companion, partner, sidekick, has been Bett Worcester Alter, a girl from rural Maine. She saw in me the horizon, I saw in her home. Together we have been saunterers, the two of us and eventually our three children. Aaron (Yale ’09, Pierson) edited, while an undergraduate, The Angler’s Journal; he now manages to bring together his passion for fly fishing, travel, and education as the director of global education for Christchurch School in Virginia. Emily, a graduate of UC Berkeley, is pursuing an advanced degree in public policy from her alma mater, when not enaged in such adventures as crossing the Atlantic in a catamaran. Thomasin bakes bread in Brooklyn (imagine that yeast!).

Yale, you prepared me well. Classmates, we shared four tumultuous wonderful years.

Come to Downtime Abbey.