Remembering Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Last Thursday, I found out that Brigit, my mentor, friend, and one of my favorite poets, had passed away a few weeks prior. A friend sent me a text with the news while I was in one of my many student-led conferences for the day, and during the 15 minute break between sessions, I walked outside to the balcony where a pecan tree stretches over the railing, littering the place with its fruit this time of year. I thought of the dark feelings I expected to come, but they didn’t come. My breathing barely shifted into overdrive, but otherwise I was physiologically intact. I figured that if any place was going to drive me to the proper grief state for Brigit, it would be underneath a tree, a central image for so many of her poems, and if I couldn’t get there it was my failing. Tree of breath, she called the Rose of Sharon. The small wind in the branches making a sound / Like the knocking of a thousand wooden bells, she’d written elsewhere. The next student-led conference started, and I had to return to the classroom to discuss goals for year ahead, fears of IB coursework, a class centered around a game titled YOLO.

Afterwards I drove home to find out more info. What did Facebook and Twitter know about the poet who’d spent her life opting out of any of the spotlight she deserved? As she would have it, not much. The official statement on her death from the University of Illinois specified little and asked for privacy. But there were my classmates and friends online posting about her and reading their messages of remembrance broke me. I knelt next to my bed, and, crying, drove my fists into the mattress as though the face of death could be beaten by the likes of me, as though that face would be this soft. Then I sat in silent anger at myself because Brigit was restrained and kind and thoughtful and this melodramatic reaction didn’t seem fitting.

This was obviously on display in workshops. I remember she would let everyone speak their piece, then at the end she’d take you on a walk though your own poem, from start to finish. She sometimes gave the characters back-stories you hadn’t conceived prior but believed in and then traveled with them, stanza by stanza. Not unlike in her own poems where you’re led into a forest or garden so insistently that you forget flowers can’t burn you nor can goat hearts call out to their missing heads. I got the sense that poems to her were pilgrimages, and this respect for their sacred intensity may have been what led her to the secrecy that was so essential to her work, the holy of holies. She told me Yale had protested multiple times because she refused to allow them the right to reprint her first book, selected by James Merrill for the Yale Younger Series, To the Place of Trumpets. Anyone who’s read the poem “The Leaving” knows that book should be in the world, if only for that one poem alone.

Once she sat in on a workshop led by a visiting professor who asked us to write a poem with our left hands. I immediately scoffed at this. Prompts in general chafe against some core belief of mine that I answer to my melancholic muse alone, but this one also reminded me of my jock friends who’d recommended masturbating with your left hand for a stranger effect. As a result of this line of thinking, my poem was mediocre. Brigit also chafed against the prompt, but in a more productive fashion. She decided that instead of writing anything with her non-dominant hand, she would sketch something with it, and the result, on her large white pad of paper, was a vibrating bird of prey (a hawk if my memory isn’t failing me?). I remember the lines were doubling back on themselves, connecting the contours of the bird while leaving the initial observation intact. The effect was so like that of her poems, which rely on repetition to create a pulse through the narrative or to foreground the contours of the poem or to overlay sight with the insight of metaphor upon metaphor. If you haven’t read her work, this passage from “The Leaving” is illustrative, on a smaller scale, of what I mean:

I put the peaches in the pond’s cold water,

all night up the ladder and down, all night my hands

twisting fruit as if I were entering a thousand doors,

all night my back a straight road to the sky.

Her humbleness extended also to the performance of her work. She insisted, when she was forced to read, on going first, even if everyone in the room knew she was the headliner. Once she agreed to read (perhaps only because the event was at a wildflower center, a place like home) on this condition, and afterwards while the room was still run through with awe, Dean Young, himself a reluctant impresario, said that he would never want to follow a performance like that before introducing a younger poet who had the unfortunate task of following a performance like that. The final year she visited the Michener Center, she only agreed to come if she wasn’t required, as is normal for visiting writers, to read at the end of the semester.

This same respect for her poetry was granted to her students’ work as well. Whenever you came to her with a piece of writing, she would insist on you reading it out loud while she listened with her eyes closed, reading glasses dangling around her neck. With other professors, this might have appeared entirely cheesy / kooky nonsense, but I never felt that once in her presence. I got the sense that she retreated from the room we were in to the architecture of my poems, and often I didn’t realize how slanted my floors were or how garish the chandeliers until I had to read it to someone listening that intently. It was like someone turned on all the lights of your writing for you.

Now that she’s gone, I regret not visiting her place in Central Illinois, about a four-hour ride north from where my family lives in Southern Illinois. Two of my friends and classmates went for a visit after we graduated and she took them around her property. At one point on their trek she showed them a sculpture of a dog and described the time a swarm of bees emerged from its mouth. After hearing this story, I told her it changed the way I read her work. These fables no longer seemed evenly split into mythology and truth, tenor and vehicle. Had two swarms of bees really carried a snake as in her poem “The Dragon”? It seemed likely.

I remember my last year of Michener, I grew incredibly anxious about my identity as “poet”. I wrote very little and focused on editing and compiling all the work I’d written before. So, I met with Brigit, my thesis advisor, not to talk about my thesis, but to talk about my anxiety. I’d started to feel like the MFA was a racket that conferred nothing but lost time, that in any other era I would not have been a poet, that I was confusing destiny with the leisure the times had afforded me. We met in the back room of a now closed down café, JP’s Java, a place that served an array of mediocre coffees from all over the world but was conveniently close to us both. I told her all of my fears plainly, trying my best not to relate them pityingly, then asked her an impossible question, “Am I only a poet because of the MFA times we live in?” She took a moment, inhaled, exhaled, then said, “I don’t think that’s true.” I believed her because of how measured she was, even if it was an impossible thing to believe. Wouldn’t I have been a coal miner like my grandfathers and father before me if I’d even been born one or two generations ago? She reminded me that it’s important to remember “poet” is not an occupation, it’s important to respect your work even when you’re worried about it, you could of course be published at ****** press but your poems demand better. What to make of my circuitous route to poetry though, that I’d wanted to be an architect my whole childhood and into college? Was I committed? She’d started off in visual arts and had at first avoided pursuing poetry, which was something her father read to her growing up as though it were an impenetrable wall separating the canonical past from the present. Even if this wall was something she eventually overcame, she’d snagged some part of herself leaping it and still believed that the aim of poetry was to write one “masterpiece” that lasts. In an era where so many poems are dashed off on the ferry over to the reading (which is great if you’re inventing a new telephone-call form like O’hara), I’d been looking for someone to assuage my fears that my perfectionist tendencies were out of fashion.

Although the style of our poetry isn’t similar, I feel a deep sense of kinship between our aims, and I didn’t realize how often I’d turned towards this kinship in my depressive states until I heard the news of her passing. Who’s going to turn on the lights now? I sent her an e-mail a few months ago, asking how she’d been, telling her I’d recommended her books to a photographer I’d met, and attached a poem of my own while asking for a poem of hers. She was usually good at responding to e-mails about letters of recommendation, but e-mails of less urgency took longer. Now that I know I’ll never be getting a response to this one, I selfishly wish I would’ve asked her for something pressing. I’ve looked over the e-mail a few times and am of course saddened by the quotidianness of the thing, saddened by the closing “Hope you’ve been well.” There’s no way to go back and change it even if in my head I keep revising it. I wish I could send her one now and know it would get to her, something urgent, though perhaps nothing is urgent to the dead. Still, Dearest Brigit, could I get a letter of rec from William Blake? Could it include an engraving of Paradiso now that he’s gotten as good a look as Dante? Love, Corey.