[This obituary comes from Peter Gale Nelson. Listen to Keith Waldrop on PennSound, including my Close Listening conversation with him., & read some poems at his EPC page.]
Awede Press (Brita Bergland), Windsor, Vermont, 1989. Used with permission of Estate of Anne-Marie Albiach, Keith Waldrop, and Claude Royet-Journoud. French poem published by Mercure de France, 1971; republished 1988.
“It’s / true enough that we’ve fallen between / two generations — one drunk, the other / stoned,”[1] Keith Waldrop writes in an early poem addressed to his wife, poet and translator Rosmarie Waldrop. It’s easy to imagine that Waldrop, born in 1932, is thinking of the “liquor and analysis” (43) that marked the lives of some of his lionized predecessors, such as Berryman and Lowell, and of the intoxicating, telling wit that can mark their work.
Keith Waldrop reads at the Kelly Writers House, 2009.
Editorial note: The following has been adapted from a Close Listening conversation recorded November 5, 2009, at the Kelly Writers House for PennSound and Art International Radio. Keith Waldrop was born in Kansas and attended a fundamentalist high school in South Carolina. His pre-med studies were interrupted when he was drafted to be an army engineer.
Amaris Cuchanski introduces the newest PennSound podcast in the series, now numbering 23 episodes. Nick DeFina created this 20-minute audio selection from the five-volume set of recordings made at Brown University at the May 2001 celebration of (then) forty years of Burning Deck Press publishing of books, chapbooks and pamphlets, by, of course, Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop.
Keith Waldrop (1932-2023)
[This obituary comes from Peter Gale Nelson. Listen to Keith Waldrop on PennSound, including my Close Listening conversation with him., & read some poems at his EPC page.]