Remembrances

We are touched and grateful for the emails and condolences. Thank you. The outpouring of love, affection, remembrances and recollections are deeply appreciated.

John Darnielle posted his on Twitter and, as it is now in the public domain, have included it here. Maurya Simon wrote a tribute and was kind enough to share it with us.

If you have an anecdote or story to share please send them in and we would be happy to include them.

Naomi, Judah. I know I join so many whose lives were touched - improved - shaped - made better by your father. He is such a special figure in my life. I wrote the following on Twitter which I will share with you. Love and comfort to you in this hard and awful time. –jd

If you like what I do, an outsize helping of the credit is due not to me but to Bob Mezey, under whose tutelage from 1992 to 1995 I learned to take no pity on my shortcomings.

I'd known Bob before. I went to school with his children; in my third and final year of Little League, he'd been my coach, the gentlest and most encouraging coach I played for. Claremont's a small town. We had many connections.

Working as a nurse and reading books and writing songs in my off-hours, I knew I wanted more from the world. so I went back to college. in Bob's class, we studied versification. on the questions of nuts and bolts he was peerless, and relentless.

In the sixties he'd edited an influential volume called "Naked Poetry," but by the 90s he felt that traditional forms were getting the short shrift; he had devoted himself entirely to the craft by then.

With Dick Barnes, he translated Jorge Luis Borges's poetry for over a decade; sadly, these translations only circulate in private, though they are definitive.

I'll tell you a story. It's a harsh story, and one which his daughter, Naomi, and I have cherished for years.

I was getting better at writing poetry by '93 or so, and was casting my net around for meters -- I was enjoying iambic tetrameter; watching the news one night, there was a ghastly story about a father killing his children. Did the young poet think himself up to the task of conveying this horror in quatrains of iambic tetrameter? He did.

In Bob's class, we'd hand in new poems during the week; he'd print them up so everyone in class could have copies when we next met, and we'd read them aloud and discuss them.

Proud, I read my poem that attempted to decry the ugliness of the story I'd seen on the news.

Nobody ever wants to be the first to comment in class, right? so Bob cocked his head, looked me dead in the eye from across a round tible, smiled a little, and said:

"You don't feel much, do you?"

Some people want support and encouragement from their teachers, and I get that, and wouldn't recommend Bob's approach to me as a general pedagogical method.

But he'd known me since childhood. he knew I'd already had great teachers who'd nurtured my dreams, and he knew I was serious about wanting to write: to make things that reached people, to share the rare air that the greats breathe.

By giving it to me straight, he was letting me know: this ain't it, bud. You know enough about it to be told that this ain't it.

Every single day of my life I am grateful to the poet Robert Mezey, who took my verse seriously enough to hold it to a high standard (and who, per spies in his camp -- remember, I grew up with his children -- spoke pretty warmly of my work when I wasn't around to hear it).

Every single day.

Today I got the news from his daughter. "Pneumonia" -- the family suspects COVID-19. I mourn this loss in all the parts that make up who I am. He is gone now.

But in any line of metered verse I write, if it's any good, if its numbers do their job and the miracle happens where I'm able to through the numbers to communicate with another person: he's there. Even if this is the first you've heard of him, you know him. He brought me here.

I make bold to borrow from one of the greatest elegies ever penned in saying goodbye to my teacher, without whom I am not nothing -- he taught me that, too -- but without whom I would be much, much less than I am:

"Earth, receive an honored guest.”

- John Darnielle

A Tribute to Poet Robert Mezey (1935-2020)

On the evening of Saturday, April 25th I finished editing a long interview with renowned poet, Robert Mezey. Its genesis was eight hours of audiotaped literary conversation that we’d enjoyed back in 1987. An hour after closing my laptop, I received an email from Mezey’s two younger children, Naomi and Judah, informing me that Bob had passed away that morning. Though the cause of Mezey’s death was not yet confirmed, the two said in their email that “we strongly suspect he will be positive for Covid.” Having labored over our interview for hours, I felt as though I’d been in conversation all that Saturday with Bob, whom I’d known for over forty years as my friend, mentor, and colleague. So, his death seemed somehow unlikely, and even impossible, yet I knew it was true.

For though this sad news was heartbreaking, it didn’t come as a surprise. I’d chatted on the phone with Bob just a week earlier, telling him that I’d soon finish editing our interview and would send it to him for revisions. He said he looked forward to reading it, and then with great weariness he’d added, “I find the world so bewildering right now, and I just don’t know if I want to be around much longer.” Mezey had turned eighty-five in February of 2020, and his health had been failing for some time. He’d moved several years ago from Claremont, California to a retirement community in Maryland, so he’d be nearer to Naomi and her family in D.C.

Due to Bob’s waning health over the past several months, my editing of our 1987 interview had taken on a new urgency. Strangely, during these intervening thirty-three years, I’d forgotten about our long-past hours of intense literary conversation until a mutual Claremont friend, bibliophile Chick Goldschmidt, mentioned that he’d seen a typed transcript of our audio interview in the Robert Mezey Archive housed at the Huntington Library. Back in 1987, Mezey’s academic secretary had transcribed our tape-recorded interview on her Selectric typewriter, making just two copies of it, one for Bob and one for me. He later donated his copy to the Huntington; my copy was nowhere to be found. Last winter, one of the Library’s staff members sent me a PDF file of our audiotaped interview that she’d kindly digitized.

Stacking up to a hefty 251 pages, this transcript was lively, far-ranging, occasionally controversial, often opinionated, but also instructive and insightful. In addition to discussing traditional, modern, and contemporary poetry and poets, we also examined how America’s counterculture of the 1960s influenced Bob and his work, his writing process, and some of the great themes in poetry—love, death, transformation, and loss.

Surprisingly, during our interview, Bob repudiated the two ground-breaking and deeply influential anthologies that he’d co-edited with Stephen Berg, Naked Poetry, Recent American Poetry in Open Forms (MacMillan, 1969) and The New Naked Poetry (Bobbs-Merrill, 1976). In many regards, these anthologies document and reflect a moment of literary import in American letters, for most American poets who were writing during the 1960s through the 1980s (and beyond), considered Modernism dead and embraced a new poetics of free verse. During the 1970s and ‘80s, these anthologies were widely embraced and enthusiastically adopted for use in literature and creative writing classes across America. They helped shape a whole generation of young poets, myself included. We poets born in mid-twentieth century America cut our teeth on these collections: they shaped us in indelible ways. In compiling their anthologies, Mezey and Berg embraced a credo that American poets must reject conventional and traditional literary forms, especially meter and rhyme, and embrace poetic expressions that arose organically from their content.

In their introduction to Naked Poetry the co-editors say: “Everything we thought to ask about [the poems’] formal qualities has come to seem more and irrelevant, and we find we are much more interested in what [the poets] say, in their dreams, visions, and prophecies. Their poems take shape from the shapes of their emotions, the shapes their minds make in thought, and [they] certainly don’t need interpreters.” The first anthology contains a selection of nineteen poets; the second anthology includes twenty-six poets: most of these poets were born between 1925 and 1935, and some of them arose from vital movements in post-WW II America--the Beat poets, the New York School, and the Black Mountain poets.

Mezey and Berg argued that “the strongest and most alive poetry in America had abandoned or at least broken the grip of traditional meters and had set out, once again, into ‘the wilderness of unopened life’.” And yet, during our 1987 interview, Bob expressed his disillusionment with both the volatile and influential 1960s and the ensuing poetry fueled by that decade’s counterculture. He maintained that “the Sixties were—a lie, like falling into quicksand, in a way, although it was a much happier experience than that.”

There are some wonderfully salient moments in our interview that will always be memorable to me, as when Bob answers my question: what do you believe in? He replies:

“So, what do I believe? One of the most beautiful lines I have ever come across is a remark [by Danish physicist, Niels Bohr,] that John Berryman quotes in one of his poems. He says this wonderful thing: that the opposite of the truth is a falsehood, but the opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth. If I believe anything, I believe that. So, it makes it hard to say—or to produce a credo, exactly. Maybe that’s why I write poems, to try to bring together, at the moment of writing and contemplating, just what it is that I’m experiencing, remembering, feeling in as much complexity that I can get into language. And I think I love that better than anything. Trying to do it, and seeing it done by the real masters. Because that’s one of the things that poetry does, is create reality, it adds to reality. Enlarges it.”

At another point in our conversation, when we’re discussing the relationship between sexual love, lost or failed love, and death, I suggest that poets often “need to transform pain into something else.” Bob concurs and adds,

Yes. To make sense out of [pain] in some way; although there’s always a sense of art, which isn’t quite the same as life, is it? I can’t remember who said it, but it’s a wonderful phrase, by some poet or other, that poetry is a kind of filibuster against death. So, I suppose you keep on talking and then try to raise the talk to a higher pitch, to a higher level, to use that wonderful phrase of Frost’s again, for that’s what art and poetry finally do. You don’t get over your sorrow or grief, but poetry raises it to “a higher plane of regard.”

I studied American Poetry and formal poetics, or prosody, with Mezey at Pomona College from 1978 to 1980. During those years, he’d not yet refuted the primacy of free verse, and instead embraced a broad spectrum of traditional verse modes and contemporary poetry. We read Ginsberg’s “Howl,” as well as Shakespeare’s sonnets. Bob instilled in me a great love for poetry written in earlier forms and meters, including Italian and English sonnets, the lyrical poems written by English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, and the blank verse poems by American poet Robert Frost. From Bob I learned how to write subtly mathematical sestinas, villanelles (which originated in Italy as rustic songs), the musical and Malayan-inspired pantoum, and the intricately interlocked terza rima stanzas that Dante first employed in his 14th century Divine Comedy. I learned more about reading and writing poetry in those two years than I would learn during the rest of my life. I felt endlessly blessed to have learned prosody from such a master.

Bob Mezey nurtured my evolution as a poet over four decades of my writing life, occasionally reading new drafts of my poems and offering gentle and erudite guidance about their revisions. During Mezey’s last decade of living in California, I’d meet him in Claremont over bi-monthly lunches to discuss “po biz,” as fellow poet and friend, Maxine Kumin, called poets’ shop talk. Bob would often bemoan what he considered the sorry state of contemporary poetry, but he’d also voice his praise for the work of various California poets, including Claremont’s own B.H. Fairchild. I remember one day when we mulled over a line from one of John Berryman’s Dream Songs, in which the poet says, “These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. They are only meant to terrify & comfort.” Bob said that’s how he hoped his poems would affect his readers, to simultaneously “terrify and comfort” them.

Our lunch-time talk would usually move from poetry to politics, when it would predictably grow rather heated, and then we’d switch gears. I’d ask Bob about his Philadelphia childhood and was surprised to learn of its economic deprivations and the emotional strife in his family life. But I relished his memories of studying with John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College, and I was surprised to learn he had a second daughter, Evie, whom I’d never met. We grew closer and closer. After he moved to Maryland, Bob and I spoke on the phone almost monthly, and I was always moved by his tender gestures of love and attentive friendship, by his gentle solicitude.

Mezey was the truest and fiercest of friends, nurturing lifelong alliances with California poets, Peter Everwine, Larry Levis, and Henri Coulette, and with his former teacher at the University of Iowa, Donald Justice. His literary commitment and loyalty also extended to two other Claremont poets, Virginia Adair, whose work Mezey and his former partner Nancy Ware, heralded, helped publish, and disseminate--and Richard Barnes, his colleague at Pomona College. His wonderful English translations, with Dick Barnes, of the complete poems by Argentine poet and fiction writer, Jorge Luis Borges, are brilliant, but they represent one of Mezey’s great disappointments, for Borges’ widow never gave him permission to publish them.

Any of his friends and family who phoned Mezey, at some point over the last decade, may have heard this delightful little ditty that was recorded on his answering machine:

I’m asleep or maybe only blotto,
out reading books, or out running around,
in any case I’m incommunicado.
This new-fangled device will hold your sound,
till I get home, or in the mood to hear it,
so, talk to me, I’m listening in spirit.

It gives me the chills to again read and hear Bob Mezey’s voice in my mind, now that he’s truly “incommunicado,” but I hope he’s still “listening in spirit.”

Robert Mezey was born in 1935 in Philadelphia and raised there. At the age of sixteen, he was admitted to Kenyon College, where he studied with eminent poet, John Crowe Ransom, and which he attended for two years before enlisting in the U.S. Army. After his military service, Mezey earned a B.A. from the University of Iowa in 1959 and then completed graduate studies at Stanford University. He also received an honorary doctorate from the World Congress of Poets. Mezey has taught at various institutions, including: Case Western Reserve University, California State University, Fresno, and the University of Utah. During his year of teaching at Franklin & Marshall College, he was suspended after being accused of inciting students to burn their draft cards. From 1975 to 1999, Mezey taught at Pomona College. His honors and awards include the Robert Frost Poetry Prize, a Bassine Citation, a PEN Prize, and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poetry collections include The Lovemaker (1961), winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize; White Blossoms (1965); The Door Standing Open: New and Selected Poems, 1954–1969 (1970); Small Song (1979); Evening Wind (1987); Natural Selection (1995); and his Collected Poems 1952–1999, which won the Poet’s Prize. Mezey has edited numerous works, including Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems (1998), The Poetry of E.A. Robinson (1999), and, with Donald Justice, The Collected Poems of Henri Coulette (1990). His translations include works by César Vallejo and, with Richard Barnes, the complete poetry of Jorge Luis Borges.

-Maurya Simon is a poet and professor emerita at U.C. Riverside. Her most recent volume is The Wilderness: New and Selected Poems, 1980-2016.