A Tribute To David Ignatow

    David Ignatow, the prolific author of nearly 30 books of lucid verse about everyday life, who died last November at 83, was recently eulogized by a contingent of well-known poets and writers at the National Arts Club in New York. The evening was organized by the Poetry Society of America, of which he served as president from 1980 to 1984. Each speaker read selections from his poetry and talked warmly of his friendship.

     Mr. Ignatow, who lived in Springs, was part of the great outpouring of Jewish talent that came of age during the Great Depression. A child of Russian immigrants, he knew poverty and had worked with his hands, and with his pen crafted an unmistakable voice marked by clarity of expression.

A Complex Mix

     His poetry was "part city speech, part Yiddish, part argument, and part pure yearning lyricism," noted Harvey Shapiro, a poet and editor at The New York Times Magazine, who opened the evening. "He wrote out of a troubled spirit and gradually healed himself through his verse," said Mr. Shapiro, who became friends with Mr. Ignatow in 1952.

     Grace Schulman, the poetry editor of The Nation, said she first read Mr. Ignatow's work in a 1940s anthology she found in her parents' house. She found in his work a childlike wonder that could be sardonic, and noted that a number of his poems begin with awe, move toward irony, and end with praise.

     Colette Inez, another poet, recalled when they both read at a Bucknell literary festival in the 1970s. They drove that evening from Lewisburg, Pa., back to Manhattan in a chauffeured car that the college provided.

Colette Inez's Dream

     Ms. Inez recalled how Mr. Ignatow, ever curious about the natural world, asked the driver to name the rivers and mountains as they drove. Ms. Inez later taught one of the sections of Mr. Ignatow's popular class at Columbia University in the early 1980s. It fell to her, she recalled, to console "the dozen or so who signed up for him and wound up with me."

     Ms. Inez remarked that in 1981 she had a dream in which she went to a therapist, who turned out to be Mr. Ignatow. "How much are your rates?" she asked in the dream. "Two thousand dollars for 10 hours," he replied. She said she interpreted this to mean that David Ignatow was priceless.

Many Jobs

     Milton Kessler recalled Mr. Ignatow's working class background. Indeed, Mr. Ignatow had worked, in his younger years, as a shoe salesman at Wanamaker's Department Store, a newspaper reporter on the Works Progress Administration newspaper project, a machinist at his father's commercial bindery, a night clerk in the New York Sanitation Department, an apprentice handyman in the lathe shop at the Kearny Shipyards in New Jersey, a night shipping clerk in a wholesale fruit and vegetable market, a public relations consultant for the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, a paper salesman to book publishers, a weekend auto messenger for Western Union, and weekend admitting clerk in a Brooklyn hospital.

     Mr. Kessler said that Mr. Ignatow "knew failure and hard times, and was neither a patrician nor a manifesto man." He went on to illustrate just how prolific the poet was: When Mr. Kessler co-edited Choice, Mr. Ignatow would often send 20 poems at a time for consideration.

A Monument

     Stanley Kunitz, 94, who like Mr. Ignatow won the prestigious Bollingen Prize in Poetry, said Mr. Ignatow had built a monument out of ordinary stones. He spoke of his abiding fascination with daily existence. In his later poems, Mr. Kunitz said that Mr. Ignatow found living, loving, and dying "simultaneous and interactive."

     Gerald Stern, a poet who won the 1998 National Book Award, recalled "the pleasure of eating tuna fish sandwiches with David, and one time he even made me a tuna fish sandwich." He compared Mr. Ignatow's work to a doorkeeper between life and death.

     Michael Heller, a poet, teacher, and critic, said that Mr. Ignatow's parable-like poems have been enjoyed by everyone from third-graders to graduate students in creative writing classes. Young kids, he noted, could relate easily to many of Ignatow's plainspoken poems.

Williams And Whitman

     Finally, Virginia Terris, Mr. Ignatow's close friend, spoke of David Ignatow's sense of humor, and said his work formed an enormous whole.

     And what a whole that was! Born David Ignatowsky on Feb. 7, 1914, in Brooklyn, he lived most of his life in New York. He graduated from New Utrecht High School and attended Brooklyn College for part of 1932.

     After Mr. Ignatow's father helped publish his first book, "Poems," in 1948, his keen ear for conversational rhythm began to capture the attention of the public in ever wider circles. He eventually published 27 books of poetry and three prose collections, as well as editing books of verse by William Carlos Williams and Walt Whitman, who were among his major influences.

     He later earned honors and wide recognition for his work, including the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award in 1997, two Guggenheim fellowships, the Wallace Foundation fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts award. The National Institute of Arts and Letter honored him "for a lifetime of creative effort." He married Rose Graubart in 1937. Their daughter Yaedi, a poet and playwright, participated in the evening tribute to her father.

     Since Mr. Ignatow is not part of any "school" of poetry, his work defies easy classification. The hallmark of his writing may be that it is above all accessible, in an age when so much poetry is academic and arcane. Mr. Ignatow wrote of "the necessity to make sense of the world before we die."

     Through his clear writing, he has for years helped readers do just that.

     Gary Shapiro is an attorney who has spent summers in East Hampton and Amagansett. His work appears in The Forward and other publications.