Jean Garrigue

Jean Garrigue
Born	Gertrude Louise Garrigus December 8, 1912 Evansville, Indiana
Died	December 27, 1972 Boston, Massachusetts
Pen name	Jean Garrigue
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Universities of Chicago & Iowa
Genre	Poetry/Fiction/Non-fiction

Jean Garrigue (December 8, 1912, Evansville, Indiana – December 27, 1972, Boston, Massachusetts) was a poet from the United States.

Life

Jean Garrigue was born Gertrude Louise Garrigus in Evansville, Indiana, to Allan Colfax and Gertrude (Heath) Garrigus. Her birth year is 1912, but she eventually used 1914 instead. She had one sister, Marjorie, and one brother, Ross. Garrigue lived in Indianapolis for much of her early life. Her sister described her as “an impatient and fretful little child”, who was once expelled from school for bad behavior. Garrigue graduated from Shortridge High School in 1931. She attended Butler University and graduated with a BA from the University of Chicago, where her roommate was novelist Marguerite Young. She received her MA from the University of Iowa in 1943.

She changed her name to Jean Garrigue in 1940 to acknowledge her French roots, and to have a more gender-ambiguous first name. Garrigue moved to New York City and spent the majority of her life in Manhattan aside from her teaching engagements and many travels throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia.

“I’ve lived and traveled in Europe during three consecutive periods—1953-54, 1957-58, and 1962-63.” – Jean Garrigue

In 1971, Garrigue was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease. When asked about her life and career she said, “I lived for certain grandeurs that fade fast - me.”

She passed away at the Massachusetts General Hospital on December 27, 1972 and her funeral service was held at the Appleton chapel of Memorial Church at Harvard University.

Influences and Notable Relationships

Garrigue claimed Chopin, Keats, and Proust, as early influences (“So were mountains and water”) and the English poets she liked included Wyatt, Coleridge, William Blake, Yeats, and Marsell.

Josephine Herbst was one of Garrigue’s closest relationships, the two exchanged thousands of letters over the years, and Garrigue frequently stayed at Herbst’s farm in Erwinna, Pennsylvania. Garrigue also exchanged letters with Marianne Moore and Delmore Schwartz.

Works

Garrigue was first published in 1941 by the The Kenyon Review. To supplement her income she worked for Collier's as a researcher, edited a U.S.O. publication during World War II, and served as an assistant editor of an aeronautical magazine The Flying Cadet.

In 1944, James Laughlin, poet and publisher, included her collection Thirty-six Poems and a Few Songs in the third series of his New Directions collection, Five Young American Poets, along with breakout poets like John Frederick Nims and Tennessee Williams. In 1947, The Ego and the Centaur was published.

Garrigue began teaching poetry and creative writing courses in the 1950s and continued writing poetry, publishing The Monument Rose in 1953 and A Walk by Villa d'Este in 1959. Garrigue published poetry in the 1960s as well, Country Without Maps in 1964 and New and Selected Poems in 1967.

Garrigue's poems have been published posthumously with Studies for an Actress and Other Poems in 1973, which includes her poem "The Grand Canyon".

She published a critical study Marianne Moore in 1965 and a prose publication, Essays and Prose Poems, was published in 1970. She also contributed to several publications throughout her life including the New Leader, the New Republic, Saturday Review of Literature, Kenyon Review, Tomorrow, Botteghe Oscure, Poetry, Commentary, Arts magazine, and the New York Herald Tribune.

Garrigue received awards for her works; The Kenyon Review awarded her two of their first prizes, one for a 1944 short story and the other for 1966 novella The Animal Hotel, which was written about people she met at Hurst’s farm. She was also awarded and honored by the Rockefeller Foundation, Guggenheim, National Academy of Arts and Letters, Hudson Review, and Radcliffe Institute fellowships. She won a Union League Civic and Arts Foundation prize, a Longview award, an Emily Clark Balch first prize, and a Melville Cane award, as well as being nominated for a National Book award for Country Without Maps.

Garrigue was a teacher of English, creative writing, and poetry at several different universities, including the University of Iowa, Bard College, Queen’s College, the New School, the University of Colorado, Smith College, and the University of Washington. She also taught at the University of Connecticut and the University of California at Riverside. Along with teaching, Garrigue was poet-in-residence for several institutions. In the Spring of 1972, she was poet-in-residence for the University of California at Riverside, and until her health declined in the Fall of 1972 for Rhode Island College

Garrigue held a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, which allowed her to travel to Paris in 1954, and in 1960, she was a member of the Guggenheim Fellowship.

Reception

Garrigue’s works were well-received and praised by her contemporaries, her work has not received the same notoriety after her death, Alfred Kazin called it one of the most significant literary mysteries of the Twentieth Century.

Of the intensity and challenging nature of her poems, Jarrell said that her work had "the guaranteeing and personal queerness of a diary," and many others have remarked on its uniqueness and strangeness. Her poems often describe a process of seeing, and present a tide of images and ideas associated with the object seen. Lee Upton, the author of the only critical study of Garrigue's work, remarked on her "restless eye": "the eye is as the self pouring over surfaces and in effect 'reading' them," and many critics have observed the extravagance of her imagery.

Stanley Kunitz described her as one "whose art took the road of excess that leads to the palace of wisdom. She was our one lyric poet who made ecstasy her home." Garrigue's poems dazzled her fellow poets but puzzled readers, Bonne August said, "Garrigue is a 'difficult' poet, difficult in the formal demands she makes on the reader; difficult, too, in the demands she makes on her poetry: to take her past easy formulations, comfortable insights, or glib prescriptions, to the truth of thing." Jane Mayhall noted her drive to the "dangerously deep levels of self."

Garrigue did not belong to a poetic school or movement, Theodore Roethke said that she trusted her own poetic instincts more than any poet he knew. Laurence Lieberman has said, "There are rewards to be secured in reading her best poems of a kind that can be found in no other body of work." Harvey Shapiro wrote, "Her way with language was Mozartean, breathtaking in its ability to ring change after change on a theme, Mozartean bursts of language, never leaving the subject, enabling the eye to see, clearly and more clearly, while delighting the ear with sound."

In 1992, Selected Poems was published, and the Acknowledgements include, Dr. Lola Szladits, who was the curator of the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library and whose interest led to the establishment of Garrigue’s manuscript archive there; Bonne August, who cataloged the archive and collected Garrigue's unpublished poetry; and Lee Upton, who published Jean Garrigue: A Poetics of Plenitude about her work in 1991.

Bibliography

• (Contributor) Five Young American Poets, third series, New Directions, 1944.
• The Ego and the Centaur (poems), New Directions, 1947, reprinted, Greenwood Press, 1972.
• (Contributor) Edwin Weaver, editor, Cross-Sections, L. B. Fischer, 1947.
• (Contributor) New World Writing, New American Library, 1952.
• The Monument Rose (poems), Noonday Press, 1953.
• A Water Walk by Villa d'Este (poems), St. Martins, 1959.
• Country without Maps (poems), Macmillan, 1964.
• Marianne Moore, University of Minnesota Press, 1965.
• The Animal Hotel (novella), Eakins, 1966.
• New and Selected Poems, Macmillan, 1967.
• (Editor) Translations by American Poets, Ohio University Press, 1970.
• Studies for an Actress and Other Poems, Macmillan, 1973.
• (Compiler) Love's Aspects: The World's Great Love Poems, Doubleday, 1975.
• Selected Poems, University of Illinois, 1992. (reference is for all titles)