Tributes

You will never get to the bottom of Fernando Pessoa. There are too many of him.

"After looking for him in the poems, we look for him in the prose," wrote the scholar and translator Edwin Honig. Yet we find him nowhere. This was, after all, a poet whose maxim was, "To pretend is to know oneself." Cyril Connolly noted that Pessoa "hived off separate personalities like swarms of bees." He pretended relentlessly, employing more than seventy personae in his self-searching circus. They were not so much disguises as extensions and iterations of himself. "How idyllic life would be," he once wrote, "if it were lived by another person."

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We're happy to present an expanded version of a feature that originated in 1950 on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the PSA and was recently revived as a corner of our exhibit, "Portraits of Poets, 1910-2010 at the National Arts Club this past January and as a feature on our website. This expanded installment more accurately reflects the dynamism and diversity of the exhibit as a whole, and we hope you enjoy it.

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As part of the Poetry Society of America's landmark exhibition Portraits of Poets 1910-2010, we curated a collection of photographs of poets in childhood to complement the more iconic images in the show.

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As the poetry editor of the Ladies Home Journal from 1948-1962, Elizabeth McFarland, "published some 900 poems by authors like Maxine Kumin, Randal Jarrell, W. H. Auden, John Updike, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and Marianne Moore" as an article in the New York Times  noted in  2005.

Daniel Hoffman's essay, available as a pdf below, recounts this period in McFarland's life as both an editor and a  poet herself.  Hoffman's essay was originally published as the introduction to Over the Summer Water, a collection of poems by Farland, from which the two poems below are also from.

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I knew of Thom Gunn almost as soon as I began writing poetry. His name was a presence, his cadences still more so. Somehow, in the muddle of disillusion and self-defense which was post-war British poetry, his wonderful first book took root. It was called Fighting Terms. It contained twenty or more poems, written in an odd, abrasive tone.

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Thom Gunn was always polite, delighted at raucous jokes and banter, kept his silence at times but had a loud, boisterous laugh. He wore cowboy shirts, pointy boots, a big chain for his wallet, and a little earring. The shirts were always pressed. There was some massive tattoo on his forearm, you'd see a bit of it, and never more.

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Though I'd long loved his poems, and I'd shaken his hand after one of his readings, I didn't actually meet and get to know Thom until 2000, when he spent two weeks in St. Louis as a visiting poet at Washington University.

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The last time I talked to Thom, he said he hadn't written a poem in two years and added, with a small heave of his muscular chest, "I might be done writing." Had he made a coffin of couplets, elegy after elegy, shutting away the keepsakes of friends as they fell, tens by tens? He felt some defeat in form. And no doubt some defeat in his role as communal mourner. But who could keep pace with the endless toll? Not even the ever-waking Thom could manage.

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Paul Muldoon was the director of Princeton's creative writing program when I was a student there. But being a fiction writer, and a Philosophy major, I didn't have cause to meet him until my senior year, when I needed to get the department to help cover some exorbitant Xeroxing costs incurred by my obnoxious novel.

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One thing I discovered was that poetry is telling someone something they know and in doing so you also tell them something they don't know, often by using surprising realization. You might even tell someone something that they once knew but forgot and, doing that, you connect with the unconscious or what someone forgot that they forgot.

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The last time I saw Ben Belitt, in the summer of 2001, he took me out onto his back porch overlooking Paran Creek and pointed to the flowers filling his trough planters. "Consider the life-force!" he said, triumphantly. I do.

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Josephine Jacobsen's entrance into the world on August 19th, 1908, was premature and dramatic, greatly surprising her American parents who were vacationing in Canada and anticipating her arrival several months later. Weighing only two-and-a-half pounds, she was not expected to survive, but her formidable and devoted mother, Octavia Winder Boylan, was determined that she would.

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Haroldo de Campos is a defining figure for the poetry of the Americas. His work is essential not just to an understanding of Brazilian poetry but also to the geography—conceptual, intellectual, cultural, and social—of postwar poetry in the world at large.

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Published in the United States in Crossroads, Spring 2004, the poet Ruth Fainlight recounts her friendships with both Bowles and Plath.

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I was just young enough, and just inattentively boringly stupid enough, that it took the appearance of underwear, or, as she put it at the time, panties, to wake me up at the poetry reading. C.D. Wright was reading from Just Whistle, and the revelation I had was sudden and fairly clichéd in its power.

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Originally published in Crossroads, Fall 2003, this deeply personal and moving article affirms what Kuntiz writes: "If we want to know what it felt like to be alive at any given moment in the long odyssey of the race, it is to poetry we must run."

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My collection of books by Phil is a mess, everything beat up, waterstained, old and overread. I don't think I've abused anyone else's books so badly. I'm trying to find a quote I can never find (I've tried several times in the past few years), but it haunts me: something like "I realized that the realm of poetry was much older and bigger than I was and would go on without me."

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I'm subject to an awful temptation here, and that is to lapse into some version of a shameless imitation of one of his own poems in introducing to you my hero, Kenneth Koch. How easy and disastrous it would be to begin Oh Thank You for giving me the chance of being Kenneth Koch's introducer! Or A serious moment for the novelist is when he is asked to draw aside the curtain for his favorite poet! Or At a reading, one writer may hide behind another—And yet I'm going to try to resist this temptation, this seduction, because I know where it leads, or at least I know where it led me once: when I was eighteen my adoration for Kenneth Koch led me to mistake myself for a poet.

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Published in the United States in Crossroads, Fall 2002, Anne Atik, poet and friend of Beckett's, recalls his love of poetry.

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The poet of my generation who meant most to me, in his person and in his art, was Theodore Roethke. Immediately after Frost and Eliot and Pound and Cummings and Hart Crane and Stevens and William Carlos Williams, it was difficult to be taken seriously as a new American poet; for the title to "the new poetry" was in the possession of a dynasty of extraordinary gifts and powers, not the least of which was a stubborn capacity for survival.

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I've always believed there are certain pieces of writing which are magic doors in locked houses. Just as we think we'll never get entry, never be able to go in, this one door springs open at our slightest touch. And after that we can come and go as we please. Wordsworth's "To My Sister" is one of these and one of my favorite poems.

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Originally published in Crossroads, Fall 2001, this feature includes three essays: David Trinidad's "Anne Sextion: An Actress in her Own Autobiographical Play," Lois Ames' "Anne Sexton Re-Collected," and Maggie Nelson's "A Note on Anne Sexton and Her Critical Legacy."

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Originally published in Crossroads, Fall 2000, Felstiner's writes about the act of translation, and specifically translating Celan's  poem "Lob der Ferne / Praise of Distance".

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Originally published in Crossroads, Spring 2000, this features includes John Ashbery, Elaine Equi, Mark Doty, W. S. Merwin, Barbara Guest, and Thom Gunn discussing their favorite O'Hara poems, as well as articles by Brad Gooch on O'Hara's lasting appeal, and Michael Price on O'Hara's art reviews.

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Hard to believe we met about fifty years ago in New York, when she and Mitch had first married and she had returned from Europe with him in the classic manner to start her own life over again. Certainly as a poet she had to. The distance between her first book, The Double Image, and the second, Here and Now, published by City Lights in its Pocket Poets series ten years later, is a veritable quantum leap.

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Marianne Craig Moore, who died in 1972 at the age of eighty-five, was one of the major poets of the Modernist era, celebrated by her contemporaries as a supreme inventor and precisionist who could, indeed, meet her own high measure of poetry. She is a "literalist of the imagination" who can "present for inspection...imaginary gardens with real toads in them."

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I am not sure that Don Justice would want much said about him. He was a fastidiously private person where it mattered, that is, in public. He did not like to call attention to himself, at least not overtly, and cultivated an amiable distance between himself and others, which, over time, would close and finally cease to exist. He was the "thin man" of his poem "The Thin Man."

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The first time I encountered the poems of Edward Hirsch, I was lucky enough to have them read to me by the poet himself. It was August of 1999 and I was in Vermont, a fellow at Breadloaf, surrounded by writers, hundreds of them, it seemed. There were those who were just starting out, eager to learn; those like me, who had a single book to their names; and those, like Edward Hirsch, who were in my eyes the real writers, with many books and much experience behind them.

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Well over a year crept by after Randall's death before I extricated that knot and saturated my mind with the origins of the war poems from Little Friend, Little Friend and Losses: "The Soldier Walks Under the Trees of the University," ''Mail Call," The Lines," "Second Air Force," "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," et al. Those seventy-some letters Mackie fortuitously preserved and considerately released were hand scripted, rarely dated, generating many fraught queries from me, and radiating an off-putting editorial challenge.

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