CCA Grant Will Allow Charles Rafferty To Concentrate On His Poetry

By Shannon Hicks

Charles Rafferty received a phone call last month that he isn’t likely to forget any time soon. Mr Rafferty, in fact, could probably recite the dialogue of that particular phone call by rote at this point.

A few weeks ago State Representative Pat Shea (R-112th D) contacted Mr Rafferty at his home in Sandy Hook to congratulate him on winning a $2,500 grant from Connecticut Commission on the Arts.

The arts grant from the state agency was one of 28 awarded in 2000 to Connecticut artists. The grants provide direct support to those who are seriously committed to their art form. Mr Rafferty was among the nine honorees selected for poetry.

Over 150 residents applied for last year’s available grants. Funding for the program is provided by the federal government agency National Endowment for the Arts.

“It was shocking — and happy — news,” Mr Rafferty said recently, much calmer now that the idea of the award had settled in. “I had heard nothing from the arts council until that phone call from Representative Shea.”

Mr Rafferty was among the Connecticut artists who applied in September to the CCA’s Artist Fellowship Grant Program. Artists in six categories were invited to submit manuscripts or samples of their work and a résumé and fill out applications. Then the waiting process began.

Artistic categories alternate each year, with choreographers, composers, fiction writers, film/video artists, poets, and playwrights invited to apply for grants during each even-numbered year. Visual artists working in the disciplines of digital/cyber art, crafts, painting/works on paper, photography, and sculpture/installation can apply during odd-numbered years.

Awards are based on the artistic excellence of work samples as determined by a panel of professional peers. Robert Cording, Amy Dryansky, and Ellen Watson judged the poetry field for 2000, and the grant recipients were announced right around Christmas.

“I think it’s great that Connecticut is encouraging people in the arts,” Rep Shea said in a press release. “I’m sure there are many people in our state who are published authors or poets who have created other works of art but who cannot afford to take time away from their regular jobs to pursue careers in the arts.

“CCA’s Artist Fellowship Grants Program gives these talented people the opportunity they need to become established artists,” the representative’s statement continued.

A Serious Poet

Charles Rafferty is a technical editor for Meta Group, an information technology consulting firm in Stamford. He and his wife, Wendy, and their daughter Callan have been living in Sandy Hook for three years, and a lot of Mr Rafferty’s poetry work is done, he says, “in small amounts of time, when I can find it.”

He spends much of the time during his daily train commute writing. In the past he has also taught evening classes, but that drew even more time away from his poetry.

His writing style includes free verse and traditional including sonnets and epigrams, or rhymed couplets. His work is very easy to read and therefore quite enjoyable — the poems are straightforward in their theme, rather than using illusion to convey a mysterious idea or train of thought. His subject matter covers everything from jumping from a barn into a haystack, courtship and romance, even the idea of poetry itself, as is illustrated in “A Glass of Water.”

Part of the purpose of the Artist Fellowship program is to provide direct support to Connecticut artists so that the artists can more easily allocate time to work, to purchase supplies and equipment, and to rent studio or office space if needed.

“This grant will give me the option to not teach at night for a while,” the Sandy Hook poet said. “I’m not sure exactly how it’s going to be used, but that’s the first thing I thought of: More time at home, during the evening, to devote to my writing.”

Mr Rafferty has taken his poetry writing very seriously since his college days. He began doing some writing while still in high school but began taking his efforts “as a craft, not just getting an emotion on the page” by the time he started attending Stockton State College.

After graduating from Stockton with a bachelor’s in literature in 1987 he continued his education — and his writing — by attending grad school at University of Arkansas for the next three years. He received his master’s in creative writing from UA in 1990.

The first time Mr Rafferty had his work published came “around 1986,” he said, when one of his poems appeared in “a little literary magazine” called Piedmont Literary Review.

The CCA grant represents the second time Mr Rafferty has been recognized with a grant for his efforts, and far from the first time his peers have acknowledged his poetry. His first chapbook, The Wave That Will Beach Us Both, published in 1994 by Still Waters Press (Galloway Township, N.J.), was winner of the Still Waters Press Winter 1993-94 Poetry Chapbook Competition. In 1995 the University of Arkansas Press published Mr Rafferty’s first book, The Man on the Tower, which had won the Arkansas Poetry Prize in 1994.  

 The Bog Shack, a chapbook published in 1996 by Picadilly Press of Fayeteville, Ark., was funded by a grant from Will Hall Books, also based in Fayetteville. And in 2000 a third Rafferty chapbook was produced. The new collection was called A Darkness with Brighter Stars (Piccadilly Press).

Last year Mr Rafferty was also honored with the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry for his poem “Crossing a Field of Bees After Being Recently Stung,” which appeared in A Darkness with Brighter Stars. The annual award imparted by The Tor House Foundation of Carmel, Calif., was accompanied by a $1,000 honorarium.

“That,” he understates, “was great news.”

The new grant from Connecticut Commission on the Arts will help Mr Rafferty finish his latest project, a collection of poems to be published as his second book. The working title is Where the Glories of April Lead, and the Sandy Hook resident says he hopes to have the book completed by March.

Mr Rafferty expects to have about 50 poems in the new collection, but says he doesn’t do any of his writing with the specific intention of publishing.

“It’s only after writing a whole bunch that I can look back and see how they stand together,” he explained. The poet says he writes best when calm, not “during the heat of the emotion.” He works instead to get the feeling of an event on paper, to put life together.

Because his writing time is so meager, Mr Rafferty concentrates not on capturing a specific moment’s emotions but the overall picture. For that reason, he makes sure he has clearly painted a picture before considering a poem completed.

“I’m definitely not a first-draft poet,” he said. “Most of my works go through 10 or 20 drafts before they’re done.”

His work is divided between autobiographical and fiction, with a much larger percentage falling into the fiction division.

“People would be wrong to assume that I am the main character in all of my work,” he said. “If that were the case I would be a very flawed person,” he laughed.