Ashbery was a more like a north: He produced 28 individual collections of poetry, and his poems ranged from a handful of lines to more than 200 pages. Richard Wilbur, whose meticulous, urbane poems earned him two Pulitzer Prizes and selection as the national poet laureate, died on Saturday in Belmont, Mass. Nostalgia is a thin tout, disappearing into a sky like cold, unfeeling iron. I'm sick of dead guys. An Ashbery poem cycles through changes in diction, register and tone with bewildering yet expertly managed speed, happily mixing references and obscuring antecedents in the service of capturing what Mr. In 1998 and onwards, part of his note wreckage and a bracelet engraved with poets who died in 2017 name and his wife's were found in the south of Marseille.
Lucia changed my life in ways that extended past the. I felt as though I had always known him—not known him, exactly, but seen him, been in his aura, his history, because, like my father, Derek was the product of a profound world, a distinctly Caribbean world with its history of colonialism and its imperceptible change, and home to so much more, including mothers who spared no amount of love to make you understand that you were their bright boy. In the late nineteen-seventies, the professor and writer Owen Dodson hosted gatherings at his apartment on West Fifty-first Street, an incandescent, candle-lit world filled with artists of color who drank and quarrelled with one another and then made up, often in the same starry night. He had light-colored eyes and he was wearing a black turtleneck that only made his fascinating head appear that much more totemic and real. After the party was over, I asked Owen who he was. The sea, memory, the joys and terrors of physical love, the close distance of family, black market women surrounded by all sorts of color, palm trees, the lush funky earth known as home or elsewhere: these were his subjects. The son of an amateur watercolorist, Derek was aware of the look of things and how to describe what things looked like, including memory. I had never read anything like it before—a powerful writer not only writing about a fantastically singular one but imagining that life fictionally. Somehow the fiction felt more real than any biography. And by imagining the life of a white woman, something especially amazing for that time, the poem taught me that writing could be anything as long as it was emotionally and intellectually true. In writing, one could be whatever the work demanded—black, white, man, woman. Brilliant poets find one another: their world is very small even though their influence is wide and deep. Outside, there was the New England landscape—it was summer and the ground seemed to hum. Visiting Derek in St. Still, one could not imagine his artistry without the loves and passions that marked so many of his great lyrics to his various wives and children. They were the loves of his life, just as poetry and painting were the loves of his life. Because Sigrid is white, she was treated with a little disdain by some of the market women I met when we went shopping together, and I wondered what her own exile felt like. Or did she feel it at all? Before my New Yorker Profile came out, I also spent some time with Derek and Sigrid in New York. Sigrid described spending time with Derek there during the early days of their relationship, and how she got him to move out pronto because the carpets and floors were filthy. Miller talked about his wife, Inge, who had just died. Like most poets since Plato, like Homer, Derek was something of a clairvoyant, and knew love was nothing without humility, or the way it clarifies truth. Leaving the theatre, we found Derek outside, sitting on a bench. Those were the words I thought of when I heard that Derek had died, and at once I wanted to reread everything he had ever done. Because what better way is there to memorialize a writer than to read what he has written, and remember who he was in all those worlds of words he was brave and confident enough to imagine in the first place? © 2018 Condé Nast. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products and services that are purchased through links on our site as part of our affiliate partnerships with retailers.
