Keith Waldrop, whose first poetry collection was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1969 and won the award 40 years later with his “Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy,” died July 27. He was 90. .
Brown University, where he taught for more than 40 years, posted news of his death. It did not say where he died or say the reason.
Professor Waldrop was more than a poet. She is a renowned translator of French poetry and prose, is an artist whose collages have been exhibited in solo and group shows, and runs a small press with her husband, the poet Rosemarie Waldrop.
As a poet, he has dozens of published volumes to his credit. His poems, as the Brown posting says, “are imbued with an emotional and intellectual undercurrent that can astonish the reader in its capacity to connect disparate thoughts, if not logic, then perhaps something that deeper, richer.”
The judges who awarded him the prize in 2009 had high praise for his use of language.
“If transcendental immanence is possible,” their citation said, “it’s because Keith Waldrop invented it; only he can; and, in ‘Transcendental Studies,’ he has.”
The three interrelated series of poems in that volume, they say, “achieve a fusion from the Romantic to the postmodern that demonstrates the ability of language to go to extremes – and to drag everyday experience into life with it.”
He worked with stark imagery that often disturbed its beauty. A segment of “My Nodebook for December,” from “Selected Poems” (2016), read:
The world — and if anything sees itself
proposal, here – the world
is a big fish. I caught it
my net And now, it’s long into winter
night, tired, I study my net.
The fish stinks.
And later in the poem:
An open door is plain and simple, like a
wall A closed door is an invitation. But if
the knob turns… ?
In a 2009 interview on the radio program “Close Listening,” Professor Waldrop mentioned how some of his poems, including those in his prizewinning volume, were assembled into collages he made as an artist, although ‘t these are two distinct creative processes.
“I didn’t feel like they were together, the verbal collages I was making and the visual collages,” he said. “But I enjoy doing both, so I do them.”
Bernard Keith Waldrop was born on December 11, 1932, in Emporia, Kan. His father, Arthur, was a railroad worker, and his mother, Opal (Mohler) Waldrop, taught piano.
His parents’ marriage did not last, and he was raised by his mother. In a prose work, “Liwanag Habang May Liwanag” (1993), which he described as a memoir written as a novel, he recalled a formative moment with his father. He took Keith, then in middle school, to Topeka, Kan., to see a play often described as “GI Hamlet.” This is a version of Shakespeare originally intended to be performed by soldiers in World War II, and it was given several productions just after the war in the Midwest.
“People who should have known (adults) have told me since then that it was nothing out of the ordinary,” writes Professor Waldrop, “mediocre acting of a poorly cut text – and I remember the Edwardian costumes – but for me it was a glimpse into another realm, a realm infinitely fascinating and, most amazingly, usable by me. I think I was different that day.”
This sparked a lifelong interest in theater. As a graduate student at the University of Michigan and later as a faculty member at Brown, Professor Waldrop was involved in creating theater groups that gave small performances.
It was to such effect that his mother, who was devoutly religious, spent years searching for the “right” fundamentalist congregation, moving Keith and his siblings around the Midwest and South.
“Until I got to high school, I think I read almost nothing but comics and the Bible,” he said in the “Close Listening” interview. At a fundamentalist high school in South Carolina, he began reading and tried to write poetry.
“I remember writing a narrative poem about the universal flood,” he said. “I hope no trace of it remains.”
He enrolled at Kansas State Teachers College, but his studies were interrupted when he was drafted into the Army at the end of the Korean War. He served in West Germany, where he met his future wife; in 1955 he returned to teachers college and earned his bachelor’s degree. He then earned a master’s degree at the University of Michigan in 1958 and a Ph.D. in comparative literature there in 1964.
With two others, he founded Burning Deck, a literary journal, in the early 1960s, but within a few issues his partners dropped out and his wife joined him as co-editor. Soon, the journal became a press. The Waldrops used an old letterpress printer purchased for $175 and brought with them when they moved from Michigan to Connecticut in 1964. Professor Waldrop joined the Brown faculty in 1968. He retired in 2011.
Ben Lerner, a poet and novelist, wrote in The New Yorker in 2013 about taking a class from Professor Waldrop at Brown. That is, he wrote, “a class made up, on the one hand, of young writers eager to listen to one of the best-read men on the planet talk about literature, and, on the other, of sleepers that athlete Waldrop knew. many gave A’s to everything.”
Professor Waldrop, whose wife survives him, published his first volume of poetry, “A Windmill Near Calvary,” in 1968; it was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1969. When he finally won the award four decades later, he and his wife were reticent about it. They traveled to New York for the ceremony, but her husband went to the opera instead of the performance.
“I almost went to the opera myself,” Professor Waldrop told The Christian Science Monitor.
