Talking Together
Letters of David Ignatow, 1946-1990
By David Ignatow; Edited by Gary Pacernick
University of Alabama Press
In his letters, David Ignatow finds company and shares the news with them and now, with us, his new company of readers
The letters of David Ignatow reveal the poet in “company” with a community of writers as he shares with them the details and nuances of his everyday existence: the key acts of friendship and enmity, of good news and bad, of struggle, work, success, and failure that comprise a life devoted to making art. The letters also serve as a vehicle for Ignatow to express his views on a whole range of issues from writing, teaching, and editing poetry, to his visions of the self, death and the cosmos. But the key is “company”—the support system that helps sustain the poet and that enables him to help others.
One of the many things we may learn from the letters of David Ignatow is the power of the individual to affect another’s life, to help sustain and even change it.
The letters of David Ignatow reveal the poet in “company” with a community of writers as he shares with them the details and nuances of his everyday existence: the key acts of friendship and enmity, of good news and bad, of struggle, work, success, and failure that comprise a life devoted to making art. The letters also serve as a vehicle for Ignatow to express his views on a whole range of issues from writing, teaching, and editing poetry, to his visions of the self, death and the cosmos. But the key is “company”—the support system that helps sustain the poet and that enables him to help others.
One of the many things we may learn from the letters of David Ignatow is the power of the individual to affect another’s life, to help sustain and even change it.
This valuable collection tells us a great deal about the life and work of David Ignatow. . . . These letters reveal Ignatow converting his dreams and sorrows into poetry and his life into a much broader condition.’
—Small Press
[Offers] a wealth of new and often significant information. . . . An important addition to the body of Ignatow’s work, one that reveals a poet devoted to his fellow writers and to an art that must have seemed to him an obscure, futile desire at times. Ultimately the measure of a collection lie this is whether or not it sends its readers back to the poetry. Time and time again Talking Together does just this.’
—South Atlantic Quarterly
The U.S. Postal Service should issue a stamp to commemorate Ignatow, for no man, whether poet or politician, has used the mail with such diligence and dedication. . . . Talking Together is candid, revealing, opinionated, and sensitive.’
—Ohioama Quarterly
David Ignatow (1914–1997) is remembered as a poet who wrote popular verse about the common man and the issues encountered in daily life. In all, he wrote or edited more than 25 books and was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize and Robert Frost Medal, the Bollingen Prize, and the John Steinbeck Award.
Gary Pacernickis Professor Emeritus of English, Wright State University, and the author of Memory and Fire: Ten American Jewish Poet; Sing a New Song: American Jewish Poetry since the Holocaust; and The Jewish Poems.
Gary Pacernickis Professor Emeritus of English, Wright State University, and the author of Memory and Fire: Ten American Jewish Poet; Sing a New Song: American Jewish Poetry since the Holocaust; and The Jewish Poems.
