In Sepia
Nets of their lawns, your shadow
Briefly over them. You had been talking about
Death, over & over. Often
You felt dishonest, though certainly some figure
Moved in the dark yards, a parallel
Circumstance, keeping pace. By Death, you meant
A change of character: He is
A step ahead, interlocutor, by whose whisper
The future parts like water,
Allowing entrance. That was a way of facing it
& circumventing it: Death
Was the person into whom you stepped. Life, then,
Was a series of static events;
As: here the child, in sepia, climbs the front steps
Dressed for winter. Even the snow
Is brown, &, no, he will never enter that house
Because each passage, as into
A new life, requires his forgetfulness. Often you
Would explore these photographs,
These memories, in sepia, of another life.
Their use was tragic,
Evoking a circumstance, the particular fragments
Of an always shattered past.
Death was process then, a release of nostalgia
Leaving you free to change.
Perhaps you were wrong; but walking at night
Each house got personal. Each
Had a father. He was reading a story so hopeless,
So starless, we all belonged.
--Jon Anderson
Jon Anderson, nationally acclaimed poet and recently retired Professor in the English Department at the University of Arizona, died on Saturday October 20th at Northwest Hospital after several weeks of illness. He was born on the Fourth of July, 1940, in Somerville, Massachusetts. He received his BS in English Education from Northeastern University in 1964, and his MFA from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1968. Before coming to Arizona in 1978, he taught at the University of Portland, Ohio University, the University of Pittsburgh, and the Writers’ Workshop. Among his many awards were a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, two awards from National Endowment for the Arts, and the Shelley Memorial Award for Career Achievement from the Poetry Society of America.
Between 1968 and 1982, Jon published six books of poems, and along the way established himself as one of the foremost lyric poets of his generation. His poems returned often to the themes of love, death, friendship, and solitude. These graceful, youthful poems were remarkable for their wisdom and generosity, some of which came from his reading of three poets, Tu Fu, Wang Wei, and John Clare. A partial translation Jon made from a poem by Wang Wei shows some of his feelings about friendship:
Please let’s drink one last cup of wine –
When you leave this house, who will be your friend?
“Poems from the Chinese,” from In Sepia
He stopped writing for almost twenty years, then published one more book in 2001, Day Moon, an odd, playful and inventive book, after which he stopped writing completely. Charles Simic, current Poet Laureate, once said in conversation, “Jon taught us a new way of looking at ourselves.” In an interview for The Wall Street Journal, Jon explained, “My prime motive for writing is self-confrontation, and I find poems the best way to employ language to do this. My poetry isn’t for everyone. It’s for people like myself who want to contend with themselves. I think of my poems as intimate conversations with close friends, to whom I’m not afraid to reveal my vulnerabilities and loneliness.” Poet David Wojahn says, "One of my teachers, the poet Jon Anderson, was fond of saying that ‘the task of poetry is to say the toughest thing.’" The end of “The Secret of Poetry,” also from In Sepia, bears this out:
I’d like, please, to leave on your sill
Just one cold flower, whose beauty
Would leave you inconsolable all day.
The secret of poetry is cruelty.
Jon was a renowned teacher of poetry, especially in his early years. He told great stories about poets and poetry. In workshops, he tended to nurture that which was good in a poem, and forget the bad parts, in the hopes that the poet would eventually learn how to deal with them. His overall advice, he once wrote, was to “accept the act of writing as both artificial & mysterious.” His love for words, and for the power of lyric thinking, is best expressed here, in the introduction Helpful Hints: Notes on Writing Poetry, a pamphlet published in 1982: “When I was a teenager I loved imagining certain scenarios; one, that with the psychopath’s luger pressed daintily between my eyes, there was always one sentence, phrase, word said rightly that would reduce him to tears (or at least a moment’s deliberation) – unlike my touching speech to the United Nations that would bring world-wide lasting peace – this depended on brevity and quick escape.” Poets who have acknowledged Jon’s influence on them, both from the model of his poems and from his teaching of aesthetic values, include Shahid Agha Ali, Joe Bolton, Rita Dove, James Galvin, Jorie Graham, Brenda Hillman, Larry Levis, Michael Ryan, Richard Siken, and the poets among those cited below.
Although Jon was in love with the idea of friendship, he preferred his solitude. Still, many people would be pleased to remember the close friendship they had with Jon when they were around him, and, for some, the profound effect he had on their lives: Bruce Cohen, Michael Collier, Hank Combellick, Stuart Dischell, Mick Fedullo, Loren Goodman, Francesca Guido, Mark and Bobbi Halperin, Tony Hoagland, Patrick Hoctel, Matthew Kirsch, Kevin Lanoue and Deb Gregerman, Howie Michaels and Francine Prose, Jane Miller, Bill Olsen and Nancy Eimers, Gail Marcus-Orlen and Steve Orlen, Nancy Pitt, Boyer Rickel, David Rivard and Michaela Sullivan, David Schloss, George Shelton, Vivian Teeter, Burn Thompson, Julie Willson, Gibb Windahl, and David Wojahn. Our thanks to everyone who took special care of Jon over the past several years: to Chris Kiesel of the Department of English, and to his good pals, Peggy Flyntz, Annie and Jet Guido, who saw him through his dying hours. They meant the world to him.
He leaves behind his son, Bodi Orlen Anderson, his daughter-in-law Ayaka, and his former wife Barbara, all of Flagstaff; and his sister Vicki Cahalane, her husband Michael and daughter Christine, of Osterville, Massachusetts.
Jon will be cremated and his ashes spread in the woods outside of Flagstaff. In accordance with his wishes, there will be no service. Plans for a memorial in spring are underway, to be organized and presented by the University of Arizona Poetry Center. If we were given the chance to bury a few of Jon’s favorite things with him, among them would be the remote for his aged, giant television set, his Boston Red Sox hat, a CD of Thelonious Monk, and a volume of ancient Chinese Poetry. We will miss his sense of humor, his remarkable acceptance of people as they were, and his presence among us in his parlor for all the Wildcat basketball games. The television is off, but the porch lights are still on.
– Steve Orlen
