Patricia Goedicke

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Patricia Goedicke (1931-2006). Courtesy Seawall.

Patricia Goedicke (June 21, 1931 - July 14, 2006) was an American poet.

Life

Born Patricia McKenna in Boston, Massachusetts, Goedicke grew up in Hanover, New Hampshire, where her father was a resident psychiatrist at Dartmouth College. During her high school years she was an accomplished downhill skier.

She earned a B.A. at Middlebury College in 1953, where she studied with Robert Frost. She also studied under W.H. Auden at the Young Men's Hebrew Association of New York City in 1955.

In 1956 she married Victor Goedicke, a professor at Ohio University, where in 1965 she completed her M.A. in creative writing and poetry. She divorced in 1968, the same year that while an artist in residence at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, she met Leonard Wallace Robinson. He was a writer for The New Yorker and a fiction editor and book editor at Esquire Magazine. They married in 1971. The couple later moved to San Miguel de Allende in the Mexican state of Guanajuato, where she taught creative writing at the Universidad de Guanajuato. Goedicke and Robinson returned to the United States in 1981, and she became a professor to the University of Montana, where she taught until her retirement in 2003.

Goedicke died of pneumonia and a complication of lung cancer, at St. Patrick Hospital and Health Sciences Center in Missoula, Montana.

Writing

Poetry Foundation: "Patricia Goedicke's poetry has been described in the Times Literary Supplement by David Kirby as 'intensely emotional, intensely physical.' 'More than any contemporary woman poet, perhaps, she exhibits a Whitmanesque exuberance,' claims Small Press Review contributor Hans Ostrom. According to Peter Schjeldahl in the New York Times Book Review, Goedicke 'bears down hard on the language, frequently producing exact ambiguities of phrasing that are startling and funny.' And Harper's reviewer Hayden Carruth believes that Goedicke's poems 'have a hard truthful ring, like parables of survival.'"

Recognition

Her awards and honors include the Rockefeller Foundation Residency at its Villa Serbelloni; a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship; a Pushcart Prize; the William Carlos Williams Prize; the 1987 Carolyn Kizer Prize; the Hohenberg Award, and the 1992 Edward Stanley Award from Prairie Schooner.

The Tongues We Speak was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1990. Her last book was recognized as one of the top 10 poetry books of 2000 by the American Library Association.

Publications

Poetry

• Between Oceans. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1968.
• For the Four Corners. Ithaca, NY: Ithaca House, 1976.
• The Trail That Turns on Itself. Ithaca, NY: Ithaca House, 1978.
• The Dog That Was Barking Yesterday. Amherst, MA: Lynx, 1980.
• Crossing the Same River. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980.
• The Wind of Our Going. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1985.
• Listen, Love. Daleville, IN: Barnwood, 1986.
• The Tongues We Speak: New and selected poems. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 1989.
• Paul Bunyan's Bearskin. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 1992.
• Invisible Horses. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 1996.
• As Earth Begins to End: New poems. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2000.
• The Baseball Field at Night. Sandpoint, ID: Lost Horse Press, 2008.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

Goedicke reads This Music Has Holes in It.3gp

See also

• List of U.S. poets

References

• Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2001. PEN (Permanent Entry Number): 0000037403

External links

Poems

• Patricia Goedicke profile & poem ("The Reading Club") at the Academy of American Poets
• Patricia Goedicke 1931-2006 at the Poetry Foundation

Audio / video

• Patricia Goedicke at YouTube

Books

• Patricia Goedicke at Amazon.com

About

• "On The Baseball Field at Night: Last Poems" at Seawall