Write a poem about a poet, writer or artist you know. Capture their essence and, if you feel comfortable, share your work or a link to it in the comments below. All are welcome, emerging or established. Prompt inspired poems will be featured here next Tuesday.
“My genes are in mice, and not in the banal way ….”
Max Ritvo (December 19, 1990 – August 23, 2016) was an American poet. Milkweed Editions posthumously published a full-length collection of his poems, Four Reincarnations, to positive critical reviews.
Max Ritvo was born in Los Angeles, California on December 19, 1990 A graduate of Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, Ritvo earned his BA in English from Yale University, where he edited a literary magazine and performed with a sketch comedy troupe, and his MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. In 2014, he was awarded a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for his chapbook AEONS. On August 1, 2015, he married Victoria Jackson-Hanen, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at Princeton University, in a ceremony officiated by the poet Louise Glück. He was a poetry editor at Parnassus: Poetry in Review and a teaching fellow at Columbia.
Ritvo was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma (a rare pediatric cancer) at age sixteen and died from the disease at his home in Los Angeles on August 23, 2016.
Ritvo’s work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, Boston Review and as a Poem-a-day on Poets.org. He gave numerous written and radio interviews before his death.
Four Reincarnations, a full-length collection of Ritvo’s poems, was published by Milkweed Editions in September 2016.
According to Lucie Brock-Broido of Boston Review, Ritvo is
“a Realist, a gifted comic, an astronomer, a child genius, a Surrealist, a brainiac, and a purveyor of pure (and impure) joy. His work is composed, quite simply, of candor, of splendor, and of abandon.”
Louise Glück wrote of his first published collection that it was “one of the most original and ambitious first books in my experience… marked by intellectual bravado and verbal extravagance.”
“…the poems are equally conscious of impending death and of the next day’s life, having spent time in a pool of self-skepticism and then emerged shining, shockingly clean…”
While noting that Ritvo “seems to have written most of this book with the clarity, the near equanimity, the distance from ordinary reversals and struggles, of much older poets who know that they are dying,” Burt also writes, “But mortality is rarely his only subject: shyness, gratitude, and erotic attachment are as important as death itself.”
Literary critic Helen Vendler reviewed his work and likened him to Keats. She wrote:
“Ritvo had the luck to study at Yale with Louise Glück and at Columbia with Lucie Brock-Broido, and to attract, before his death, many admirers of his ecstatic originality. Although he is inimitable, his example is there for young poets wanting to forsake simple transcriptive dailiness for the wilder country of the afflicted but dancing body and the devastated but joking mind.”
David Orr, reviewing Four Reincarnations for the New York Times, wrote “It is good-humored (“My genes are in mice, and not in the banal way / that Man’s old genes are in the Beasts”), appealingly sly (“Enoch has written / We are made in His image / but God may have many images./ He may want even more”) and at times surprisingly whimsical (“Every day a chicken dies so that my mom may live”). Orr also quoted, then commented on the end of Ritvo’s poem, The Hanging Gardens:
“This is very fine, and if it acquires a sheen of sentiment because of what it suggests will never emerge — that is, more poems from Ritvo — this doesn’t change the fact that a reader knowing nothing of poetry or this author might find it worth rereading. This is the life poetry leads beyond the confines of the poetic career; the life in which lines exist for what they are, not for future lines they might suggest. The life in which an early poem is also a poem, and a first book is also a book.”
In 2017, Milkweed Editions announced the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, an annual US$10,000 award and publication contract, supported by the Alan B. Slifka Foundation.
Note: I knew Max Ritvo had a fatal cancer but his death somehow didn’t cross my radar until English poet Reuben Woolley posted an obit earlier this week on Facebook. Such an impossibly sad loss. It has been weighing on me and – however belatedly – I wanted to do a write-up as homage but deadlines and other responsibilities are pressing. Hence, this post is from Wikipedia. Forgive me for not doing my own writeup, though that will come one day. It’s on my ever-lengthening to-do list.
Here is Max reciting My Litter during his self-proclaimed “final tour.” (If you are reading this from an email subscription, it’s likely you will have to link through to the site to view the video.) Max’s Amazon page is HERE. May he rest in peace and may the healing power of the Universe support his wife and family in their lives and loss.
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Everything that exists
can turn to prayer;
even the water,
even the air.
– Robert Lax A Song For Our Lady
If you are viewing this post from an email subscription, you’ll likely have to link through to watch the two short videos included today.
“And in the beginning was love. Love made a sphere: all things grew within it; the sphere then encompassed beginnings and endings, beginning and end. Love had a compass whose whirling dance traced out a sphere of love in the void: in the center thereof rose a fountain.”
– Robert Lax
from his renown poem, Circus in the Sun (about the circus of creation), it was read at Lax’s funeral in New York
“I think it’s a metaphysical concept starting with Aristotle and flowering in St. Thomas that God is pure act and that there is no potentía in him …. Almost everything else in the universe is potentía, it’s on its way to being pure act”
Robert Lax (1915 – 2000)was an American poet who converted from Judaism to Catholicism. He has been called “saint,” “mystic, “one of the great enigmas of American poetry, “a pilgrim” and “a prophet.” His poems where innocent, ecstatic and even whimsical. Over time they became more and more minimalist … one simple word or strings of sounds stretched into long narrow word-cascades that sometimes stopped here and there to puddle.
“Robert Lax’s poems [prove] yet again that the gift to be simple is the gift to be free, that less is more, and that least may sometimes be most.”—John Ashbery
In addition to his poetry, Robert Lax is know for his friendship with the writer, poet and Trapist monk, Thomas Merton, also a convert to Catholicism.
Lax went to school with John Berryman and was mentor to Jack Kerouac. He was friends with and appreciated by the Beats and one of my fave writers, James Agee (A Death in the Familyand –with photographer Walker Evens – Let Us Now Praise Men). Denise Levertove and e.e. commings numbered among Lax’s friends as well. He was also close to the artist Ad Reinhart.
In 1962 Lax began his travels in Greece, settling into life as a hermit on the island of Patmos, seen by many as a sacred space. Patmos is the alleged site of the vision of and writing of the Christian Bible’s Book of Revelation. Because of that connection, the island is a destination for Christian pilgrimage.
Although Robert Lax lived quietly in Patmos and did nothing to promote his poetry or himself, people – including the Beats and other poets – came to visit him. He always welcomed his visitors and purposeful or accidental students. He was mentor to more than a few.
If poetry as prayer is a topic of interest, you could do worse than to explore Lax’s life and work. A light read and good introduction to this poet is The Way of the Dreamcatcher: Spirit Lessons with Robert Lax. It was written by San Francisco writer, S.T. Georgiou (Greek Orthodox), who went to Patmos in search of some spiritual answers. As good fortune would have it, he met Robert Lax, became friends with him and visited often with him on several trips back to Patmos. Subsequently, after Lax’s death, Georgiou wrote The Way of the Dreamcatcher, a book about this adventure in friendship, mentoring, the sacred and poetry.
Robert Lax received the National Council of the Arts Award in 1969.
“because yes – he likes to ‘write’ – but to ‘do’ – to do a particular thing – perhaps on paper (perhaps on canvas – perhaps in stone – perhaps, perhaps in a musical score) – a thing that will stand, a thing that will bear (that will sustain) repeated contemplation: a thing that will sustain long contemplation, and that will (in a ‘deep’ enough way) reward the beholder.” Robert Lax, Love Had a Compass: Journals and Poetry
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Saint Lucian poet, Derek Walcott (1930-2017) Nobel Prize in Literature 1992; picture taken at his honorary dinner, Amsterdam, May 20th 2008
“… the truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element…” Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott died this morning at the age of 87 after gifting the world with some of its finest poetry.
There is much in Derek Walcott’s life and work that is worth noting but for those who self-publish or are considering doing so, Walcott was a part of that long tradition. In his late teens he self-published his first works – 25 Poems (1948) and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949) – with money borrowed from his mother, a school teacher and principal. He sold copies to friends and recouped the costs. I’m sure that if he was a teen today he’d be blogging his poems.
Bill Moyers once interviewed Walcott …
” . . .about the United States’ discomfort with its role as an empire and the difference between the American dream and the “black man’s dream.” The Caribbean-born writer also speaks of poets’ obsession with language and truth telling, and the “divine discontent” at the heart of all art.”
The reason I remembered this long-ago interview is that as a first-generation American I appreciated what he had to say about the motivations behind immigration to the States, about the ideals we have that are valued even though we fall far short of living up to them. I searched for and found the transcript online this afternoon and mention it here because I think some of what Walcott said is relevant to current struggles. Link HERE to read the transcript.
Jamie Dedes' THE POET BY DAY Webzine 