Robert Rehder

Robert McConkie Rehder (1935 - April 6, 2009) was an American poet and literary scholar. He authored two books of poetry and several scholarly volumes. A posthumous volume of poetry, I'm back and still returning, was published by Poetry Salzburg in October 2016. Rehder was professor of English and American literature at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He lived for many years in Corminboeuf in French-speaking Switzerland. In his poetry he treated the small village as a center of cultural life.

Biography

Robert Rehder was born in Iowa City, Iowa, in 1935. He was the first son of Theodore Marten Rehder (1908–1991) and Alyce Marguerite ("Marge") McConkie Rehder (1907–1974). Theodore Rehder was the first director of Dormitories and Dining Services at the University of Iowa, serving from 1929 to 1976. Robert and his brother Richard (1938–2005) attended University High School on the State University of Iowa campus. Robert graduated in 1953.

Robert Rehder matriculated at Princeton University in 1953. In 1954 he won the Morris W. Croll Poetry Prize, and in 1957 the Academy of American Poets Prize. He graduated in 1957 with a Bachelor of Arts in Near Eastern Studies. His brother Richard also graduated from Princeton, with highest honors in mathematics. Richard went on to work in the Navy Space program as a mathematician.

After graduation, Rehder studied at the Ecole des langues orientales in Paris, France on a Rotary Grant He lived for about two years in Tehran, during which time he traveled to Afghanistan and across Turkey. In Iran, he crossed the Dasht-e Kavir and Dasht-e Lut deserts.

The little magazine The Poet's Voice published a Robert Rehder section in issue 5.1 (1998/1999). It contains a long interview (conducted by co-editor Wolfgang Görtschacher), essays by Peter Porter and Tom Artin, and a substantial selection of poems. Porter characterizes Rehder as being "passionate about the mind as the supreme organ of feeling," noting that "his verse is almost a liturgy of insight. His diction is strikingly up-to-date in the serious sense. His wit has a forensic edge: he is always intelligent but shatters common expectation. […] There is no substitute for reading Rehder over and over again – the poems are too clear to be understood at once. And they shine too brightly.” Artin stresses that “Rehder is fond of spinning out into a poem the details of some incident that must strike the reader as trivial […] tracing the ramifications meticulously, methodically, bearing down on each fact until the trivial resonates with the stellar – daily life telescoping into the big bang.”

Rehder's early scholarly and literary work included free verse translations of the 14th-century Persian poet Hafiz. This work was published in 1974 as “The Unity of the Ghazals of Hafiz.” He published books on Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Stephen Crane. At the time of his death he was working on his third volume of poetry.