C.D.

I was so sad to hear that award-winning poet C.D. Wright died unexpectedly this week. I feel very grateful and humbled to have known her while studying creative writing as an undergraduate and graduate student at Brown University. On the necessity of poetry, she once wrote: “Poetry is a necessity of life. It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.” Every year, as the semester was about to begin, she and her husband Forrest Gander would invite us to their beautiful home (nestled in a cemetery) to read poetry and party — I have such treasured memories of those late summer gatherings in Barrington. Here’s a link to a moving tribute to C.D. in the New Yorker penned by my old Brown classmate Ben Lerner. Tonight, as I’m remembering C.D. and re-reading her poetry, I’m cherishing her words: “Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.”