[Deathwatch] Mona Van Duyn, first female poet laureate, 83

[Deathwatch Central]

Former poet laureate Mona Van Duyn dies at 83
Friday, December 3, 2004 Posted: 10:14 AM EST (1514 GMT)

http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/books/12/03/obit.vanduyn.ap/index.html

UNIVERSITY CITY, Missouri (AP) -- Mona Van Duyn, the nation's first
female poet laureate and a Pulitzer Prize winner, died Thursday morning
at her home from bone cancer, her husband said. She was 83.

A writer of poetry since age 5, Van Duyn published nine volumes of
poetry and won a Pulitzer for "Near Changes" in 1991. The following
year she became the sixth poet and the first woman named U.S. poet
laureate, an eight-month position appointed by the Librarian of
Congress since 1986.

"I know the Library of Congress has been embarrassed for not having a
woman," Van Duyn said at the time. "I think if I could convince them I
was really a man, they would say, 'Don't come."'

After Van Duyn won the Pulitzer, Cynthia Zarin wrote in The New
Republic: "Since 1959 Mona Van Duyn has been writing poetry notable for
its formal accomplishment and for its thematic ambition. The searching
intelligence of the persona we have learned to know in her poems,
combined with the humor, technical ease, and the blend of the abstract
and the quotidian that the poet has made her own have resulted in that
rare good thing: a strong, clear voice, original without eccentricity."


Van Duyn's literary talents were quickly apparent to Jarvis Thurston,
who married her months after they met in a writing class in 1943.

"When I asked to see some of her poems, I loved them immediately,"
Thurston said Thursday, recalling how his wife joked with him about it.
"She said, 'You didn't offer to marry me until you'd seen my poems."'

Van Duyn won a National Book Award for her book of poems "To See, To
Take" in 1971. The year before, she was awarded the Bollingen Prize
from Yale University, one of many honors for her poetry.

Her other works include "Firefall" (1994), "Merciful Disguises" (1973)
and "Bedtime Stories" (1972). Her first book of poetry, "Valentines to
the Wide World," was published in 1959.

In her poem "Endings," frustration when a mistimed VCR recording cuts
off the end of a movie becomes a way of expressing why people need
stories:

"For what is story if not relief from the pain/of the inconclusive,
from dread of the meaningless?"

Van Duyn was born in Waterloo, Iowa. She studied at the University of
Northern Iowa and received a master's degree from the University of
Iowa in 1943.

Van Duyn was a member of the faculty at Washington University in St.
Louis for decades, developing a reputation for strong instruction of
young writers. Her husband is a former chairman of the English
department.

Thurston, 90, said his wife stopped writing about eight years ago. He
said she had a nervous breakdown in 1949 and struggled with psychiatric
problems throughout her life, though he said she would go years at a
time in good mental health. He said medication she was on made it
difficult for her to continue with her work.

Van Duyn is survived by her husband, who said memorial arrangements
were pending.