I lived from 1914-1972.
I was from the United States, and am in the Americas category.
Born in the town of Evansville, Indiana in 1914, US Jean Garrigue was a distinguished American poet. She spent her formative years in Indianapolis before leaving to attend University in Chicago followed by a period of post-graduate study in Iowa. She spent a considerable period of time traveling in Europe in 1953-54, 1957-58, and 1962-63 and this influenced much of her later writing.
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After University Carrigue eventually settled in New England and it was there she wrote The Ego and the Centaur (1947) which was her first full-length publication. Carrigue received positive notices from critics such as the poet Stanley Kunitz. She became a professor at Queens College, and Smith College.
In 1961 she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and was nominated for a National Book Award for Country Without Maps. The critic and poet Stanley Kunitz, called Garrigue "a wildly gifted poet…whose art took the road of excess that leads to the palace of wisdom."
Nowadays Carrigue is often overlooked by both scholars and readers but she is undoubtedly one of the finest female American poets of the twentieth century. She is said to have a strong, yielding voice and her poetry is full of vibrant imagery is vibrant occasionally reflecting her Indiana origin. Garrigue is also remembered for her romantic involvment with Josephine Herbst.
Quotes on Carrigue.
"Her way with language was Mozartian, breathtaking in its ability to ring change after change on a theme, Mozartian bursts of language, never leaving the subject, enabling the eye to see clearly, while delighting the ear with sound." --Harvey Shapiro
"A brilliant poet. Her idiom is modern, yet has a kind of Book of Hours simplicity." -- Robert Lowell
"Jean Garrigue must have heard of the Philistines, might have spoken to one. If so, no imprint of any such meeting has been left on her." -- Marianne Moore
Bibliography
Thirty-six Poems and a Few Songs in Five Young American Poets (1944)
The Ego and the Centaur (1947)
The Monument Rose (1953)
A Water Walk by Villa d’Este (1959)
Country Without Maps (1964)
Marianne Moore (1965)
The Animal Hotel (1966)
New and Selected Poems (1967)
Chartres & Prose Poems (1970)
Studies for an actress and other poems (1973)
Selected Poems (1992)
Links of interest include
http://www.bsu.edu/ourlandourlit/Literature/Authors/garriguej.html, http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/57cxy9rx9780252018596.html
My poetry
O beautiful, my relic bone,
Whitening like the foreign moon,
24 lines, 1 comment
My cat peed in the coalbin, why?
Well, God himself asks many things
28 lines
And I would have you clad like dominoes
In every stripe and lozenge you would dare,
22 lines
Wrought by the odd desire for permanence
I'd hammer down that barn's boards one by one
41 lines, 1 comment
A settlement of love
Is what I'd risk if you would.
78 lines
The thing to do is try for that sweet skin
One gets by staying deep inside a thing.
17 lines
There is the star bloom of the moss
And the hairy chunks of light between the conifers;
34 lines
Now upon this piteous year
I sit in Denmark beside the quai
42 lines
We are large with pity, slow and awkward
In the false country of the zoo.
80 lines
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