Dead Poets Society of America

Michael Macklin, Beloved Poet in Maine, dies suddently at 62

Feature Obituary: Michael Macklin, 62, poet and teacher with 'a love for learning from the Portland Press Herald

"It's a very emotional time," said Mark Segar, headmaster at Waynflete. "Many, many students loved him. Mike had a love for life. He had a wry sense of humor that he shared so openly. It was one of the things that drew young people to him. He had an openness to new ideas and a love for learning that was contagious."

The wall of Mr. Macklin's Facebook page this week was filled with dozens of messages and poems from friends, students, former students and colleagues expressing deep sadness.

Ellen Taylor, one of his Facebook friends, wrote: "Deepest condolences -- we never know when our brief time here is up. Michael, you continue to teach us to live our lives fully, with passion and integrity."

Poets' Grave #241: Lillian Hillbom Rogers, North Hampton, NH.
Epitaph (pictured) is one of my favorites. Below a short poem of hers:

First a howling blizzard woke us,
Then the rain came down to soak us,
And now before the eye can focus -
Crocus.

Wisława Szymborska, 1923-2012

Wisława Szymborska, 1923-2012

The winner of the Goethe Prize in 1991 and, yes, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996 (her Nobel speech can be read here), Szymborska once said, “I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.” Also a translator and essayist, her poetic output was small and careful, with no more than 250 published poems. Poems New and Collected, in English, was published in 2000. Other collections of her poems that have been translated into English include People on a Bridge (1990), View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems (1995), and Monologue of a Dog (2005).

Dorothea Tanning, 1910-2012

Dorothea Tanning, 1910-2012: 

Graywolf Senior Editor Jeffrey Shotts wrote today:

We are honored to have published her two poetry books, the first of which was published when she was 94 and the second of which was published just last fall when she turned 101. As she herself remarked, with her usual wry self-awareness, she was ‘the oldest emerging poet.’ The fact that she could have such an illustrious career as a visual artist and, so late in that career, then turn to poetry with such forceful craft and signature imagination is a triumph of her unparalleled vision and indomitable spirit. Working with her over two books has been one of the greatest delights of my career as an editor.

With Respect: Stacy Doris, 1962-2012

(From Harriet): deeply saddened to report the loss of poet and translator Stacy Doris, who died on January 31 at the age of 49 after a battle with cancer. We discussed Doris’s book-length poem The Cake Part (Publication Studio, 2011) just recently. This work, which acts as “an eruption of all the repressed joy and terror of [the] 18th century revolution, back into our time, into the 21st century,” was released with a series of video adaptations of the book, in which many of Doris’s poets and friends in the Bay area and beyond enacted their parts or songs with a rather plucky and loving spirit. It’s clear that Doris “begins with complexity and mixture and continues with complexity and mixture.”

JAY MACPHERSON June 13, 1931 – March 21, 2012

JAY MACPHERSON
June 13, 1931 – March 21, 2012
Died very suddenly, after a long- undetected illness. Jay was a professor at Victoria College in the University of Toronto for 37 years. She brought a keen eye and true feeling for language to both academic and poetic endeavours, and joyfully composed songs of political protest right until the end. She was a much-beloved teacher and colleague. Most importantly, no one could have asked for a better friend or aunt.

"Memories and Thoughts on Adrienne Rich" (PFObit)

"Memories and Thoughts on Adrienne Rich" in Poetry Foundation obit section:

"...Then I turn to Adrienne Rich and her essays, her poems, become a call-to-arms, a reawakening of my fatigued consciousness: “We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separation.”

Cavalieri Interviews with US Poets Laureate

Grave Cavalieri Interviews with US Poets Laureate :

Brodsky, Collins, Gluck, Haas, Hall, Jacobsen, Kunitz, Kooser, Nemerov, Pinsky, Ryan, Simic, Strand, Whittemore

I think I would have liked Reed Whittemore

I really think I would have liked Reed Whittemore,
but now he's dead, and I no more can see no more
this former double Poet Laureate, etc. etc.

Whittemore died in April. He wrote in the early 60's

"“When I look at history, literary and social, I find that I side pretty steadily with history’s eccentrics,” Mr. Whittemore wrote in the essay “But Seriously,” published in the early 1960s. “I don’t mean all the mad astrologists and mystics — the best satirists have not, I think, gravitated toward exotic ideals and idealisms — but simply the mundane eccentrics who have stood on the sidelines with the game in progress, and made frosty remarks instead of cheering.”

 

(article) Deal Reached on Updike Home

Deal Reached on Updike Home from Reading Eagle.

Dead Writer's Club (great blog)

The Dead Writer's Club is one of our favorite blogs here at the Dead Poets Society of America. They have a GREAT visual background for posts:

 

At the Grave of Richard Hugo (from Paris Review)

At the grave of Richard Hugo. Very interesting article in Paris Review. If my brother needs help moving from Colorado this summer, I hope to visit Hugo's grave myself.

 

Christopher Logue, 1926 – 2011

Christopher Logue, 1926 – 2011

By Harriet Staff

Christopher Logue, the British poet best known for his modernist re-working of Homer’s Illiad, died at home in London on December 2nd. He was 85.

Logue grew up in Portsmouth, Hampshire. After a stint in the military, where he served as a soldier in the Black Watch and spent 16 months in an army prison, he turned to a variety of jobs to support his poetry. His Illiad project unfolded over 45 years..

As he fell back, back arched,
God blew the javelin straight; and thus
Mid-air, the cold bronze apex sank
Between his teeth and tongue, parted his brain,
Pressed on, and stapled him against the upturned hull

Logue was a sort of magpie of poetry – there are sections lifted from Brecht and others, and he rewrote existing reports of violence into his descriptions. “I’m fickle,” he said in an Observer interview in 2006. “Almost everything I do is based on other texts. Without plagiarism, there would be no literature. I’m a rewrite man. A complete rewrite man, like our Willy Shakespeare.”

Ruth Stone, 1915-2011

 By Harriet Staff National Book Award winning poet Ruth Stone has passed away at 96. From the New York Times: A quietly respected poet who wrote in rural solitude, Ms. Stone became something of a public figure when news of her award was announced in November 2002 and press accounts drew attention to her unusual life story of struggle and belated acclaim, dominated by the suicide of her poet husband in 1959. New readers discovered a poet of varied and uncommon gifts, fierce and funny, by turns elegiac, scathing, lyric and colloquial . . . She began to gain a wider audience when her collection “Ordinary Words” (1999) won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2000. With the publication of “In the Next Galaxy” by Copper Canyon Press, her ascent to the front rank of American poets was confirmed. In 2007 she was named to a four-year term as Vermont’s state poet.

Czech poet Ivan Martin Jirous, 1944 – 2011

By Harriet Staff Ivan Martin Jirous — a Czech poet and the artistic director of The Plastic People of the Universe, an avant-garde rock group banned by the country’s Communist regime — died in Prague last Thursday at the age of 67.

Better known by his nickname “Magor,” which roughly translates as “loony” and derives from “phantasmagoria,” Jirous trained as an art historian, but was banned from doing his work and became a legend of the dissident underground instead. He’s remembered in an obituary from the Associated Press:

Before the collapse of communism in 1989, Jirous spent more than eight years in prisons for anti-communist activities. In prison, he wrote his best poetry, including “Magor’s Swan Songs,” a collection that was awarded the Tom Stoppard Prize — awarded to authors of Czech origin — in 1985.

Taha Muhammad Ali, 1931-2011

Renowned Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali died on Sunday at the age of 80, reports Ma’an News Agency. Ali’s poems “followed the experiences of Palestinians living in Israel, and Palestinian refugees around the world. They were translated into several languages, including English and Hebrew. Muhammad Ali grew in international acclaim after an Israeli-American writer Adina Hoffman wrote a biography of his life…” The New Yorker’s Book Bench covered the biography’s release in 2009:

Emanuel Litvinoff, 1915-2011

The Guardian and The Telegraph both report that poet and novelist Emanuel Litvinoff passed away on September 24. Litvinoff, born in 1915 in Whitechapel, East London, might be best remembered for a “devastating public attack” on TS Eliot. The Telegraph describes the moment:

Samuel Menashe, 1925-2011

(Harriet Obits) We are sad to learn that Poetry contributor and recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Neglected Masters Award, Samuel Menashe, died peacefully in his sleep on the night of August 22, 2011.  Sam was a longtime friend to so many of us, who will miss the phone calls, faxes, and handwritten letters though which he liked to share his latest poems.

I first met Sam when, several years ago, I invited him to give a reading at Harvard.  In the frequent conversations that ensued, Sam – feeling his age – was worried that something might happen to him before he got to do the reading; we joked about it.  When the night of the event arrived at last, Sam seemed vigorous and hale, much to my relief.  But only a few moments into his reading, to everyone’s horror and my complete disbelief – he collapsed.  Fortunately, doctors like to go to Harvard poetry readings, and the police and an ambulance arrived right away.  Sam had only fainted, but of course we were extremely worried about him.  The two doctors and I tried to convince him to go straight to the hospital, but he refused.  He was determined to finish the reading, which he did; and when we feted him nervously at the Faculty Club he glowed with pride.  Yet that is not the most memorable part of the occasion.  Those who saw Sam read will know that he recited his work from memory, that he looked leonine, that he was, both on and off the podium (and this is no euphemism), a perfect gentleman: a mensch.  And so my most cherished memory from the evening consists of a small thing that occurred shortly after the reading resumed.  A very young child was among the listeners, softly chewing a few Cheerios as she sat beside to her poetry-loving parents.  At one point, somebody shifted noisily in a chair to chastise the family with a sharp look.  But Sam demurred from this correction, expressing his keen pleasure in having the child present.  Later, on the flyleaf of her parents’ copy of his selected poems, Sam improvised and inscribed a poem – which he insisted, later, on revising right in the book...

Here

Ghost I house

In this old flat—

Your outpost—

My aftermath

Wilmer Mills d.o.a? July 25th, 2011

And it is with sorrow that we’ve learned of the death of Poetry contributor Wilmer Mills, who passed away on July 25, 2011, surrounded by his family.  In a touching online journal kept by family members for those of us who loved and admired him, Wil was felt to have reached a new place toward the end of his struggle with liver cancer.  Wil and his family sang hymns together near the very end, and read from the Bible: Revelation 21, and Psalm 139.  When he left us, his wife Kathryn posted the text of Donne’s immortal poem.